Chapter 11
Leesa
When the first of my reels hit a new client record, I had to admit there were some advantages to my reluctant return to the cycling world.
Morgan had been sceptical when I’d shown them the footage I’d taken.
If I hadn’t been entirely certain the target audience would soak it up, I wouldn’t have pushed to release it.
But if there is a truth universally acknowledged among cyclists, it’s that tech is like a religion.
I’d flagged Colin down in the car park with the quaint hotel and the mountain landscape in the background and asked him to show me his bike after a training ride.
The result was a striking video of a sweaty and rumpled Colin pointing out the different gears and cassettes with his oil-stained hands, all while saying words like ‘derailleur’ and ‘electronic drivetrain’ in his lazy, deep voice and casually swearing.
At the end, he’d looked right into the camera and said, ‘I can’t tell you the exact gear set-up for each stage of the Tour or I’d have to kill you.
’ Then he’d winked and held a finger to his lips and I could still hear the swooning over the internet – especially from the bike tech nerds – as the clip garnered more and more views.
I’d edited out the part at the end where he’d accused me of drooling over the sleek aero bike with all the latest gear.
While it was unfortunately true that I still remembered the feeling of the gear shifters under my fingertips, the ultimate cooperation between engineering, physics and biology, that hadn’t been the reason for my open-mouthed staring.
Because no matter how much like an overgrown child he behaved – pulling stunts like walking off with my tablet and coming up with flimsy excuses not to give it back – I couldn’t pretend that Colin Gallagher wasn’t utterly compelling in just about every situation.
Even after I’d overheard him criticising my boobs, he’d still made my skin tingle moments later, when he’d looked into my eyes and spoken in his soft drawl.
The clips from the lab with the stationary bike had felt incriminating when I’d finally uploaded them, even though I’d spent an hour editing out the worst parts.
I was nervous about what Morgan would say.
But riding high on the unequivocal success of my first reel – and the butt prank Colin had swallowed whole – I was in a positive mood as I reported back to my supervisor.
‘I think the combination of content for the bike nerds and things with wider appeal is going to have the best outcomes for the client,’ I was saying into my laptop.
I was perched cross-legged on the chair in my tiny room, Morgan’s face on the screen.
On my top half, I wore a nice pale green blouse, but off-screen were my favourite nasty old shorts.
The enthusiasm I’d expected from my colleague wasn’t forthcoming and the silence stretched for long enough to tease out the prickles at my hairline.
‘He’s good on camera, at least,’ Morgan commented. ‘Gallagher doesn’t have the best name recognition, according to the latest reports. We have to keep things punchy.’
‘He’s got form. His name is being mentioned in connection with a top-five spot and I saw his stats—’
Morgan’s eyes glazed over and I shook myself inwardly. We were talking about sports marketing, not actual sport.
‘To be honest, I think PowerFuel got lucky.’
I wanted to reel those words back in when Morgan’s gaze flickered to mine with a hint of curiosity.
‘They’re a manufacturer of energy gels. Only people who are super into sport will buy them,’ I continued defensively. Your average punter wouldn’t want to hit themselves with a meal’s worth of calories in the form of congealed, cat-piss-flavoured carbohydrates.
‘What about runners?’ Morgan countered. ‘They won’t care about the biking side of things. We need wider appeal.’
‘I’ve been thinking of doing some coffee-related stuff,’ I rushed to say. Coffee was the other religion cyclists subscribed to.
‘That’s great, but we need to get more personal. Sit him down for an interview. We can use sound bites and then release it as a whole on the YouTube channel at a later stage. You’ve got some great action shots, but there’s no story, is there?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Like, does he have a girlfriend or a boyfriend?’ Morgan asked.
‘No,’ I answered reflexively, but I choked on my reaction. I assumed he didn’t have a girlfriend. Wil wouldn’t have said that stuff to me on the first day if he did, right? He hadn’t had a girlfriend in September.
At least, I thought not. I hadn’t actually asked.
‘Then why not?’ Morgan asked. It took me far too long to realise it was a rhetorical question. ‘What drives him to the edge of endurance? Is he really friends with the guys in his team, or are they rivals? We want the Netflix documentary and not the real sport.’
Morgan was right. Remembering Colin strapped to the equipment, the sad dragon on his back, I wanted to know what was under his skin too. I just wasn’t certain he would share that stuff – not without extracting a price from me.
‘Sports marketing is all about the narrative,’ Morgan reminded me.
Green graduate me had not shut up about building narratives for the entirety of my internship, even as my responsibilities never got me within striking range of forming one.
But making a narrative about Colin sounded dangerous.
Either I took him at face value and presented him to the world as a prankster – in some magical, sympathetic way – or I dug deeper and asked why he welcomed new members of the team with ribbing and reverted to superficial flirting with me.
‘Good idea,’ I grated out, pulling myself together. ‘I’ll stick to him like glue.’
In a non-literal way. Not like the thoughts that had swum in my head as I’d filmed that tech video.
‘Just…’ Morgan’s hesitation spoke volumes, ‘Leesa, I’m the last person to give you a lecture about this.’
Morgan was marrying Maria from Legal in a few weeks, so I guessed what was coming.
‘I realise that your… rapport with Colin is the reason this content is so engaging, but this is your first assignment. Don’t get so caught up in the story you lose your own priorities.’
‘I know him from before,’ I admitted. ‘Maybe I should have said something, but…’ I hadn’t realised we’d have so much ‘rapport’, since our previous acquaintance had mainly consisted of teasing and one disastrous proposition in the hospital.
‘I can see how well you know him,’ Morgan said with a dry smile. ‘But under no circumstances can you become the narrative. You’ve got your own bright future ahead of you.’
Morgan was right. This wasn’t about me, even if Colin wanted to make it so. My future was not on a bike; that had to be my past.
After ending the call, I sat back in my chair, my thoughts buzzing with the many things that could go wrong.
Getting personal with Colin was not a good idea, especially when I was a quitter and he had to be a winner but, as I tapped my nails nervously on the desk, I had to admit that part of me wanted answers.
I just didn’t know what I would do if it turned out he wasn’t the complete jerk I’d always assumed him to be.
A knock at the door forced me to shake myself out of it.
Expecting Wil – or maybe Tony – I pulled it open with a smile that immediately died when I caught sight of the figure on the threshold.
His hair was still dripping from a shower, he had the beginnings of sunburn and he looked ready to collapse.
‘Are you okay?’
He just gave me a tired shrug and shoved my tablet into my hands. He paused, his gaze fixed on the device held between us, and then his thumb brushed mine, the lightest whisper of a touch, but unmistakably intentional.
I only wished I knew what his intentions were with me, this enigmatic star who sometimes seemed to be showing me cracks. In that moment, he reminded me of the skinny 19-year-old with a questionable vocabulary who’d put googly eyes on my croissant on the third day of his first training camp.
He let go of the tablet all of a sudden, making me fumble for it, and he used my distraction to slip past me into the room without being invited.
He threw himself onto my bed and lay still for a moment, staring at the wooden slats in the ceiling, one hand resting on his chest and his T-shirt riding up a few inches I should not have taken any notice of.
Unsure what else to do, I closed the door to my room and dropped into the chair by the desk, letting my itchy hands hang between my thighs instead of patting him on the knee or running my fingers through his hair.
‘I’m not sure you should be here,’ I began, when he remained silent.
‘I definitely shouldn’t.’
Then he rolled over and went to sleep.
Colin
Rosemary. That was the herb. Who would have known that the combination of berries and rosemary could be so intoxicating? I was breathing it in from her pillow – finally. Maybe I could just sleep here for the rest of training camp.
‘You smell so much better than Nellie,’ I mumbled, coming awake a little more and appreciating the stupidity of what I’d just said. Lifting my head, I unstuck my eyes and squinted around the room, hoping I might be lucky and she wasn’t there.
But I found her at the desk, working on her laptop.
‘Good evening, Sleeping Beauty. Welcome back to the land of the living.’
She was peeved. I suppose she had a right.
Snuggling back down into the pillow, I let my arm hang over the side of the bed as I rummaged for the dregs of consciousness. ‘What time is it?’
‘You could have set an alarm.’
‘If that’s the worst you can do, I mustn’t be in too much trouble.’
‘It’s not getting in trouble with me that you have to worry about. What if someone had come looking for you?’ she continued.
‘They wouldn’t look for me here.’
‘Well, what if someone had come looking for me? I can’t exactly hide a whole doofus in this tiny room.’
I didn’t mind her calling me a doofus, as long as I was her doofus.
But then she went for the jugular. Spinning in the chair, she eyeballed me. ‘Colin, is something wrong?’
‘Nah,’ I replied immediately, throwing my arm over my face.
‘Because… I’m serious. We could get into trouble for this.’
With a sigh, I hauled myself upright, blinking back a few stars behind my eyes. The endurance ride today had wiped me, which was concerning in itself. My body’s limits felt close enough to touch – or were those limits in my head?
No matter how good it had felt to wake up in her bed, I shouldn’t have come here.
It wouldn’t make it any easier to take Dad’s barbed comments that only made me angry these days.
I had conked out so completely on her pillow I was still groggy, maybe the best I’d slept in days.
Dad would approve of the rest, but not if he discovered how much I’d been struggling in my own bed.
But she wasn’t here for me – not in that way. She didn’t owe me anything and I shouldn’t have barged into her room and monopolised her bed.
I forced myself to my feet with a groan that made her leap up in alarm. A faint smile tugged on my lips as she grasped my arm as though she would catch me if I keeled over.
‘It’s nice you’re so worried about me.’
She dropped my arm. ‘Maybe I still have some loyalty to Tony and the team.’
My smile faded. The stupid wish that she’d have some loyalty to me made me just as irritated as the mention of my dad. ‘Lucky for the team, I’m all right. I just need to eat something.’ And stop wanting to sleep in Leesa Kubicka’s bed when she obviously didn’t want me.
I should have got the message back in September. Only a stubborn idiot like me would still be dreaming.