11. Chapter 11
Claire
My lips are still warm.
I sit on the edge of my hotel bed in Charlotte at midnight, staring at the wall where Darius just was, notebook closed for the first time all week.
The room is quiet.
Too quiet.
I press my fingers to my mouth once — just once — then get up before I can do it again to look at the Charlotte skyline instead.
Buildings lit against black sky. Traffic still moving, twelve floors below, because the city doesn't know or care what just happened in Room 614.
That kiss was not in the contract.
I repeat it like a rule. Like if I say it enough times, it becomes a wall instead of a sentence.
It wasn't planned. It wasn't staged. And I cannot let it become a variable I can't control, because every variable I can't control right now is a liability.
I stand at the window for a long time.
***
The lobby the next morning is the usual pre-game controlled chaos — staff with clipboards, coaches on phones, players moving in clusters.
I’m still thinking about the kiss. Not because it happened — but because I enjoyed it more than I should have. Because I broke the one rule I never break: don’t get close to the client.
I’m so busy not thinking about it that I miss a deadline by ten minutes and have to resend the media schedule twice. My brain keeps replaying the moment anyway.
I’m mid-spiral when Jaylen Cross appears beside me.
“Morning,” he says, too easy, too casual.
I try to play it cool. I fail.
He raises an eyebrow. “You good?”
My face warms before I can stop it. “I… might’ve made a mistake last night.”
Jaylen doesn’t say anything. He just waits, curious, like he already knows I’m about to crack.
I exhale. “I kissed him.”
“Yeah,” Jaylen says quietly. “I figured.”
I blink. “How?”
“He ran routes alone this morning. Six a.m. Nobody asked him to.”
I stare at him.
Jaylen shrugs, softer now. “He only does that when something’s got him.”
Something. Not someone. But I hear it anyway.
I nod once and go find my seat on the bus, and I think about it the whole way to the stadium.
***
The final whistle goes and the Stallions win and the locker room corridor floods fast — players, staff, cameras, noise.
I handle the post-game press availability on autopilot. Smile in the right places. Redirect twice. Get Darius through his two required minutes in front of the microphones without incident.
It's another forty-five minutes before the crowd thins enough to breathe.
He finds me near the exit, out of pads now, bag over one shoulder, the game-day energy still coming off him but quieter. He waits until the last few stragglers push through the doors ahead of us.
Then he holds out his phone.
I read it once.
I know the engagement is fake. Do what I say, or I'll expose you. — Camille
My stomach drops.
"She sent this when?" I ask.
"Last night. Right after I left your room."
What I can't figure out is how. Darius and I signed an NDA. The arrangement involved four people in a conference room. None of them had any reason to talk.
"How would she even know it's fake?" I say, mostly to myself.
"She knows everybody," Darius says. "She's been in this league longer than I have."
Camille Pierce spent years in professional communications.
She knows everyone worth knowing — GMs, agents, journalists, other publicists.
If she saw the ring-shopping photo and recognized my face from a Stallions team directory, it wouldn't take her long.
A few calls. A favor pulled. Someone who knows someone who heard something.
That's a different problem than a bluff. That's someone who did her homework.
I hand him back his phone.
"A hunch isn't enough. She can suspect all she wants but without the contract, without the NDA, without anything in writing — it's just a story she's telling. Nobody prints that."
I hand him back his phone.
"The question is whether she's fishing or whether someone actually talked."
He frowns. "Who would talk? Evan's not going to blow up his own commission. Hartwell wants this deal more than anyone. Jaylen doesn't even know the details." He shakes his head. "Nobody on our side has anything to gain from this falling apart."
"I know," I say. "Which means she's probably fishing."
"Probably."
We both sit with that word for a second.
The corridor is empty now. Just the two of us and the stadium lights still humming overhead.
He looks at me.
"She's ruthless," he says. "She'll stop at nothing to expose me, I know how she operates." He pauses. "And if she blows this open, the only thing that saves us is whether the world believes you actually fell for me."
He says it like the word costs him something.
"The genuine article. Not a performance."
The weight of that lands heavily in the corridor.
He looks at me for a long moment. Quiet in a way Darius Webb almost never is.
"Do you actually like me?"
I blink.
"Not for the cameras," he says. "Not for the plan. Not professionally."
A beat.
"Me. Darius. The actual person who showed up at your apartment at eleven-thirty with two coffees."
His voice shifts — lower, less performance, more something else.
"Because if you don't — if there's nothing real to work with — then Camille doesn't even have to try hard. She just has to wait for us to fall apart."
I think about the window last night. The skyline. My fingers pressed to my mouth.
I think about his name in the margin of my notebook.
Twice.
And I think about what I actually know to be true, which is the only thing that has ever gotten me through hard conversations.
"You're talented," I say. "Obviously. Anyone with eyes can see that."
I keep my voice gentle. This isn't a takedown; it's the truth, and he deserves the truth more than he deserves a performance.
"And you're — you're not what I expected. I'll give you that."
He waits.
I look at him for a second longer than I need to.
I don't want to say this. But I'm not built for the alternative.
"Your attitude," I say carefully. "The version of you that walks into a room like the whole thing was built for you to arrive in. The version that snapped at that jeweler and didn't even notice he'd done it."
I shake my head, just slightly.
"That's not someone I'd normally go for. And until that changes — really changes, not just for the cameras — I don't think I'm the right person to answer that question."
Something moves across his face. Not anger. Not the usual deflection. Something quieter than that, and harder to look at.
He nods once.
"Okay," he says.
Just that.
He pockets his phone and walks ahead of me through the exit, and I stand there with my notebook pressed to my chest and the stadium lights still humming at my back.
I think: that was the honest answer.
I think: that was the right thing to say.
I think: was it?