One for your conscience
Why are we all so weak for morally grey men?
Is it because the guy will burn the world for you and only you? Not for justice. Not for glory. But because he fucking can, for you?
Is it because he’s the cranky, arrogant fuck boy to all but soft for one? Like he could kill without blinking but flinches when you’ve got a teeny-tiny-weeny cut? Or hungry?
The can command a whole team with scary precision but kisses like you’re the only reason he’s still breathing?
Sign me up.
Is it because one might believe he’s layered like a sexy, broody onion?
But layered.
Because there’s more under the cold, heartless exterior? They’re cold because of trauma. They’re quiet because that’s strategy.
Sexy.
He’s not toxic. He’s toxically romantic. He doesn’t gaslight you, he’s giving the I’ll-burn-down-empires-if-you-cry energy.
Is he emotionally unstable? Maybe.
Is he concealing things from you? Maybe.
But he’s also the most loyal, protective, secretly-tender for one.
That’s endgame baby. Yes. Yes. Yes. He’s the one.
I put the phone face down on my chest.
Somewhere in the last six hundred words I have accidentally built an entire theory around a guy who is currently asleep eleven feet away and who I am not speaking to.
He’s not morally grey. Not particularly grey or moral, frankly. Is he?
Never mind.
All I know is that I did this for Lizzie too. Four days, last spring, lying in a different bed, building the version where my sister was being careful instead of complicit until the version fit well enough to live in. I got there in the end.
I always get there in the end.
It's my worst quality and it is going to be somebody's whole personality about me one day.
I pick the phone back up and delete all of it.
Then I retype the last line, because it's still true.
In all honesty, I’m not not talking to Will because I want to punish him. For real. I am not withholding myself from Will Mercer as some sort of pricing strategy. I have no interest in making him suffer, and even if I did, he is doing an excellent job of that without any input from me.
It's that the second I open my mouth, he gets to answer.
And there is a version of his answer where he says something reasonable and calm and slightly disappointed that confirms what I already suspect: that he looked at me, calculated, and filed me under cannot be told things.
And once he says it out loud I have to live in a world where he said it.
So I don't ask. And he stays theoretically innocent, and I stay theoretically fine, and we both walk around this house being unbearably polite about the fridge.
By 10:18, I corner Leon outside the training facility. Because Leon is on my roster, which means I have his schedule saved and he has a professional obligation to be found by me.
“I want to see the chat.”
“Good morning to you too.”
“Leon.”
“I left it.” He shoulders his bag higher, entirely unhurried, chewing something. “Coach made us all leave it. There's nothing to show you.”
“Then tell me what's in it.”
“Why?" He actually stops walking. “Seriously, why? People talk shit about you constantly. There was a rumour last month you got a tattoo of a horse. I've never once seen you correct anything.”
“Fine.” I plant myself in front of him. “I want to know what Will said about me.”
“He said nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
“He said don't use your name. Which Rory took as a creative challenge, so then it was nicknames.”
“I don’t give a fuck about what Rory called me. I've been called everything.”
“Exactly.” Leon looks at me like I'm being deliberately slow. “Will said nothing except telling us to stop. Which is why I spent two weeks cleaning a locker room and puking through suicides, by the way, because your lovely captain boyfriend took the chat to Coach.”
The pavement does something.
“He did what now?” My jaw drops open.
“Mercer reported it.” Leon shrugs and starts walking again, like this is old news and mildly funny.
“All four of us in disciplinary meetings. I checked with Mason and Rory and the juniors and nobody went to Coach, so.” He tips his head.
“Traitor. We made him run ten laps for it and he ran them, so we're square.”
“You’re square.”
“Yeah. He cleaned the room with us.” Leon fishes his keys out. “Congratulations on your relationship. Genuinely. He’s insufferable.”
He walks off before I can arrange my face.
I don’t think Leon’s lying. He doesn’t have a single reason to be. It takes me some minutes on that pavement to reorganise around it.
Will reported it. At his own cost.
He let his juniors bully him in laps and cleaning duty and calling him a traitor, and then came home and made me dinner and put my name on it.
Fine. Good. Excellent. Ten points to the captain.
Doesn’t mean I’m not fucking furious that Will used his captain card on me and tried to manage me like I’m one of his teammates.
Doesn’t change the fact that he kept that information from me while we kissed, kissed again, fucked, fucked again and walked around campus holding hands like two fucking lovebirds.
Honestly, I’m just tired of always being managed like the next mistake.
My phone buzzes inside my palm and pulls me immediately back into the ground I’m standing on.
It’s a message from the juice bar client.
“Hi Maddy! So sorry to push our meeting. Quick admin thing before we lock the next round. Can you confirm what compensation arrangements are in place with the athletes? Just want to make sure we've got everything documented properly on our end. Thanks so much!!”
Two exclamation marks. Three, if you count the Thanks so much.
I read it seven times.
Here is the thing. We do have written agreements. I built the template in November, ran it past Collins' friend who is actually a lawyer, and every single athlete has signed one.
I could answer this in ninety seconds.
What has me staring at the tree in front of me, is that a woman who sells cold-pressed juice on Nassau Street has heard something, and is now asking me, politely, with punctuation, to confirm that the athletes in my campaigns are not being paid in sex.
I’m sorry. Correction. In oral sex!
I answer in forty seconds with a link to the standard agreement.
Then I get angry, which is a relief, because anger has somewhere to go.
Maddy: ok new direction
Maddy: we're going after the women's teams. all of them
Maddy: rowing, soccer, volleyball, track, all of it
Jenny: ok. why now
Maddy: because nobody has ever asked a women's rowing crew what they got in exchange for a photoshoot
Maddy: and because they're better talent and nobody's promoting them
Maddy: and because I want to
Jenny: that's 3 reasons n 1 of them is real
Maddy: pick whichever one you like
Jenny: I like the 3rd
Jenny: send me the list. I'll do the outreach
I make the list in four hours, between lectures and from a library table.
Fifty-one athletes across five sports.
I know which ones photograph like the camera is a threat and which ones need music playing and which one has a 5:40 practice and will therefore agree to absolutely anything by four in the afternoon.
I also set two of them up on dates they still text me about, know who to call when somebody needs a job or a last-minute dinner table, and hand out tiny favours like Halloween candy.
That is the thing about my job that no screenshot can take from me.
I know these people. Nobody handed me that.
————
The café is my choice, which means it is a good one. I am not sitting through this and drinking bad coffee.
Leila is already at a table by the window, and she looks exactly as I remember her.
Well, fuck.
It hasn't been that long, has it. Nine months. She has done something to her hair that is objectively better than that bang she had in school. And she is wearing the Tiffany & Co. gold hoops I gave her for her seventeenth birthday.
Leila is holding her cup with both hands the way she always did, like every drink she has ever ordered was slightly too hot.
“You came,” she waves me to the table, a small smile tugged on her lips.
“You said two.” I don’t smile back.
“You didn't come on Saturday,” Leila tells me as soon as I finish ordering my matcha with the waiter.
“No.”
“I waited an hour and ten minutes.”
Right.
That is longer than I would have waited. I don’t know if I want to believe her. Anything out of Leila's mouth now requires corroboration from at least two world-class lawyers before I'll believe half of it.
“Why didn't you come?” She asks in her soft, slightly high-pitched voice.
“Busy.” I shrug.
Then I realise how that sounds, given the reason I didn't show is that I ghosted everybody alive, so I add, “Life.”
She looks at me for a second, and I watch her decide not to push it, which she has always done, which is a thing I used to think was kindness.
Here is what I am not going to say. That I feel bad that she rearranged her Saturday around a girl who spent it lying face down in a hotel bed with her phone off.
I didn't forget. I was not able, which is a different thing, and I am not handing that to Leila.
“Okay,” she nods in understanding.
She takes a breath like she's been rehearsing this in a mirror, and probably has. Honestly, respect. I would have.
“I’m sorry.”
“Okay.”
“No, I need to—” She stops. Starts again. “I've had a whole thing written for nine months and now, I can't remember any of it, so I'm just going to say it badly.”
“Sure. You always did.”
It comes out warm. Automatic. Four years of a particular voice I used only in one kitchen, and it arrives before I have made any decision about it at all.
“I wrote it, I deleted it, I rewrote it, I read it out loud in the shower like a lunatic.” She pulls a face at herself. “Nine months, Maddy. I could have learned Mandarin.”
And then I laugh. Out loud. Properly.
Oh, this was a terrible idea.
This was never going to be hard because I hate her. That was never the problem.
“I know.” Her mouth does something that is nearly a smile and then stops. “He kissed me first. At the thing at Dana's, in April, and I know that doesn't matter but I need you to know I didn't go looking for it.”