Chapter Twenty-Three
By the next morning, the clip of Georgia losing it was everywhere. She’d made the front page of the BBC website, as her mum had so helpfully pointed out, and the back page of several trashy red-top newspapers.
Georgia groaned and flopped onto her stomach, scanning down her list of messages. Her phone had not stopped buzzing all night with notifications, group chats, DM requests, and missed calls. She’d barely looked at it, trying to avoid getting sucked down a never-ending spiral.
You might be taller. You might be faster. You might have a podcast…
Riley, who apparently thrived on drama, had uploaded a lipsync video within minutes of the broadcast airing. Georgia had rolled her eyes, swiped on past. How had she even got the audio that quickly?
She let her head fall back onto the pillow and stared at the ceiling.
Shit.
She’d managed to avoid everyone for the rest of the day yesterday. She'd ducked out of post-segment coffees, dodged people in corridors, and driven home in silence, Rachel vibrating with adrenaline in the driver’s side next to her.
Today there was a full day of team training ahead.
Weight room. On-pitch skills. Leadership debrief. All of it.
How could she face them?
It wasn’t just that Matt had said it. It was that he’d believed it. That after everything – after the games, the wins, the captaincy – he still sat there, loud and proud in the middle of the pub, a TikTok comment section come to life.
And what did that make her? What did it say about her judgement? Matt's comments came as a surprise, and they probably shouldn’t have. When she thought back, over their dates, their nights together, hadn’t the signs been there?
After all, he wasn’t the first man to like the idea of her. Tough, fit, capable. But only as long as it stayed cute. Palatable. Only as long as it didn’t make him feel small.
She could ignore the media, pundits, some poison pen journos with an axe to grind. But her teammates, who she had to see every day, who she had to lead, were also going to have opinions.
Georgia pressed the heel of her hand to eye and breathed through her nose. She would not cry again. She swung her legs out of bed and pulled her training kit on. She needed to run it out and get some miles in her legs before she faced the others.
She laced her shoes with practiced hands, taking the stairs from the flat to the front door and out onto the street two at a time. The cold hit her the second she opened the door, sharp and briny, tinged with the sea wind. She pulled the sleeves of her top down over her hands and started moving.
The streets were quiet, in the way that Westcliffe always was in the mornings out of season, before the cafés opened and the dog walkers took over.
She jogged down the hill towards the seafront, letting her body move without conscious thought.
She turned left, the sea at low tide to her right, dragging its way down the shingle beach, the promenade curving away in front of her.
She kept it steady, feet pounding their well-worn rhythm.
She focused on her breath, two in and one out, in time with her feet, with the beat of the music in her ears.
She’d always found it impossible to think about anything when she was running, except for the motion of one foot in front of the other.
She passed the shuttered front of the arcades, the empty picnic benches in front of the ice cream shops. The city flag snapped in the wind, the rope pinging against the flagpole.
Her chest felt tight, but with every step something in her loosened.
She could still hear Tommy’s words, Matt’s dismissal. Still feel the heat of Vix’s glare boring into the side of her face. Those social media comments still buzzed through her brain.
And there was Erin. She’d kissed her. And then she’d run away, without a backwards glance, without a goodbye, leaving her there with Rachel.
What a dick move.
Her watch beeped as she passed five kilometres.
Usually, that was her sign to turn around, head back along the seafront, and stop at the coffee shop at the corner of her street on the way home.
Today, she slowed to a stop by a set of stone steps down to the beach, turning past the rusted railings to sit on the steps.
The sea sucked at the pebbles further down the beach, and a single seagull picked its way away across the stones, stopping occasionally to peck at some piece of debris or other.
Georgia’s heartbeat was still pounding from the run, sweat cooling at the back of her neck. She pulled her phone from the pocket of her tracksuit bottoms and hesitated. Maybe, in the cold light of day, with Georgia’s face and voice plastered all over the internet, Erin wouldn’t answer.
Georgia might not answer the call, if it were the other way round. Yet Erin's last message stared up her, unchanging. The seagull took off in the distance, wheeling up and away out to sea.
Georgia hit call.
In the second it took to ring twice, Georgia second-guessed herself more than once. It was too early to call. Erin would still be asleep, would be getting ready for work, would be busy, her mind on the day ahead.
“Good morning,” Erin said, warm and low down the line. “Hi.”
“I’m not interrupting, am I?” Georgia’s voice was shakier than she wanted, breathless and unsure.
“I thought I said to call when you’d caught your breath. Doesn’t sound to me like you have.”
Georgia let out a breath that twisted into a laugh. “I guess I haven’t.”
“Let me guess,” Erin said, the whistle of a boiling kettle in the background. “You tried to outrun the internet, and instead bolted headlong into a minor existential crisis on the seafront?”
Georgia leaned her elbows on her knees and smiled. “Something like that.” A cyclist zipped past behind her on the promenade. “I mean, wouldn’t you be a little spiral-y right now?”
“Probably.”
“Apparently Tommy’s furious.” She wasn’t really talking about Tommy.
“Tommy’s a dick,” Erin shot back. Georgia had a feeling she wasn’t actually talking about him, either. “He can do one.”
Along with everyone else who had messaged, Georgia had left Matt on read. He’d called her twice, left a long voicemail she hadn’t listened to. Why bother? None of his messages had been an apology.
There was a dog tearing joyfully down the beach in front of her, galloping through the surf, its owner miles away. Georgia watched it for a moment, turning her head to follow it along the shingle until it disappeared behind a groyne.
Georgia could hear Erin muttering in the background, as she clanked about making breakfast.
Erin carried on: “Talk shit, get hit, you know?”
Georgia snorted, surprised. “Wow. Remind me not to get on your bad side.”
“Yeah, well.” There was a pause, a sound to suggest Erin was shifting the phone from one ear to the other. “You doing alright?”
“I’m upright,” Georgia said, only half-joking. “I haven’t faked my death and moved to Peru yet.”
“It’s only… seven thirty. There’s still time.
” Erin sounded warm with humour, the edges in her voice softening each syllable.
Georgia could picture her, getting ready for work, shirt sleeves rolled up her forearms, mug in hand.
She’d be smirking up at the clock on her wall, maybe at the big square smartwatch on her wrist.
“I’ll pencil my escape for after breakfast.”
“Good idea,” Erin said. “Faking your death on an empty stomach is such a chore. Take it from me.”
“Personal experience?”
“We all make mistakes in our twenties.”
Georgia could hear the shrug, the little twitch of her shoulder. The sound of Erin’s mug clinking down onto the counter carried through the line.
Georgia leant back against the stone steps. The wind had tugged a few strands of hair out from under her headband, and she pushed them back behind her ear.
“This feels like a pretty big one,” she admitted. “I’m suddenly either a hero or some crazy feminazi. My face is literally everywhere.”
“That must be difficult,” Erin said after a pause. “Come round later. I spent yesterday afternoon making way too much pasta.”
Georgia blinked. “Is that code for something?”
“It’s code for pasta,” Erin said, deadpan. “Code maybe for my undying devotion to over-ambitious recipes. If you want it to also be a code for anything else… we can talk about it.”
Georgia laughed. “Alright. Pasta first.”
“Pasta first. It’s a deal.”
Georgia hung up and pushed the phone back into her pocket. The seafront behind her was opening up, shopkeepers rolling back their metal shutters, dog walkers and other runners streaming down the promenade.
There was a twisting feeling in her stomach that had nothing to do with yesterday’s fiasco. She could put it down to stress and two bad nights’ sleep in a row, but, as her legs found their momentum again, it felt suspiciously like butterflies.
***
The gym was full, players from both the women and men’s teams filling the machines, working their way through their sets.
Georgia adjusted her headphones and stepped through the wide double doors, holding them briefly to let Rachel through behind her.
Rachel – training again despite the match ban – had driven her down, turning the radio off as soon the DJ chatter had replaced the back-to-back pop bangers.
Keeping her eyes on her gym bag as she pretended to rifle through it, Georgia felt, rather than saw, every head turn in her direction. It wasn’t hostile, exactly. But it certainly wasn’t business as usual either.
The space was loud as always with the clank of weights being racked and unracked, the sharp hiss of the stationary bikes and the whir of the rowing machines.
The moment she crossed the threshold, all that became background noise to a throbbing sense of awareness.
That heavy, sticky sense of being watched.
She walked in like she always did, but her pulse was tripping over itself, palms already sweating.
Her team were clustered by the free weights, Riley and Jess mid-set, the rest rotating through their lifts. Mac, the team’s strength and conditioning coach, was with them, recording reps and times on his tablet.
A few of the men’s squad were scattered across the room, doing mobility, chatting near the squat racks, pretending not to glance over.
One of them, one of the academy boys, nudged his mate and whispered something under his breath.
She couldn’t hear what he said, but she didn’t need to.
There she is. That’s her.
Brick Whitehouse, the men's captain, passed her, towel around his neck. He took one earbud out as he passed her.
“Maybe keep it for down the pub next time, right? And off the BBC?”
She would have said something, but he’d put his earbud back in and passed her before she could think of something biting to say.
Jess was the first to break the tension, lowering the barbell back onto the rack and sitting up. “Oi, Gertrude Stein. You here to workout, or just take a flamethrower to the patriarchy?”
Georgia blew out a breath and dropped her bag next to everyone else’s. “Depends. Anyone else need a boyfriend dumping extremely publicly?”
Laughter broke the stillness like a crack in the ice.
Riley chipped in without missing a beat. “No, but now I might get one just to have a need for your future services.”
Georgia rolled her eyes, and one of the others backhanded Riley in the shoulder. Everyone knew there were two barriers standing in the way of Riley finding a boyfriend: both her disdain for anything male, and her crippling allergy to commitment.
A couple of players nodded at Georgia as she started her warm-up. Jess and Kamsi both clapped her on the shoulder in silent support. From one of the treadmills, a junior from the U20s squad offered a shy thumbs-up and then looked like she wanted to melt through the floor.
It wasn’t all warmth. A few players - mostly men who hadn’t said more than ten words to her last season - shot unimpressed glares in her direction. But that was fine. She wasn’t here for them.
She joined Rachel at the weights, shook out her arms, and grabbed the chalk bucket.
“Any more press waiting in the car park?” Rachel asked, passing her a towel.
“Not yet,” Georgia muttered. “But it’s still early.”
Rachel gave her a crooked grin. “Good. I was hoping for a slow news week. It’s been so kind of you to take the heat off me.”
Georgia winced. She’d almost forgotten about Rachel’s red card. “You alright?”
“Yeah,” Rachel said, focusing on racking the plates. There was a long pause. “I mean, no. But what you gonna do?” She stood upright, pulled her shoulders back, and gave Georgia a sharp look. “I cocked up. Properly. Got sent off, told I was an embarrassment to the club. That was fun.”
Georgia frowned. “No one thinks that.”
Rachel snorted. “Please. The only reason Maggie isn’t still frothing from every orifice is because you went full feminist fury on national TV and gave them something else to worry about.” She took a step back, shaking her head. “Honestly, thank you for being a bigger disaster than me, for once.”
Georgia sketched a shallow, playful bow. “Glad to be of service.”