Chapter Thirty-Six
The hospitality lounge in the stadium smelled like coffee and new carpet and nerves. Unlike match days it was quiet. Beyond the glass, the pitch was an impossible green, groundsmen in black T-shirts and shorts crossing it in purposeful diagonals.
“Georgia!” Caroline’s voice cut through the chatter. “Thank you for making it up here, finally.” There was a hint of reproach in her voice, buried under layers of practiced good manners and bonhomie.
“Here I am,” Georgia said, voice cracking. Her throat felt dry, like she’d said nothing for days. She barely had. I need space. “Who do you need me to talk to?”
“Just a meet and greet,” Caroline said. She was breezy in a way that likely meant this mattered a lot. “And hear a concept.”
She pulled Georgia by the arm, fingers light against her wrist, dragging her towards a pair sat by the window.
“Tasha, Martin,” Caroline said. “As promised, I’d love you to meet Georgia, our fantastic captain of the ladies’ side.”
The pair rose as one. Martin was greying, with a hairstyle that said ex-army, and a green suit over a black band T-shirt that said something else entirely.
Tasha was even more casual, her natural hair curly and free, the cutoff sleeves of her top deliberately frayed.
They both wore white trainers so clean they had apparently never been worn outside.
They did not look like any of the sponsors Caroline had paraded her in front of so far.
“Georgia,” Tasha said, reaching out to shake Georgia’s hand.
Her grip was light but sure. Something about her pinged Georgia’s gaydar.
Not the painted nails, which were the same luminous yellow as the big plastic moons hanging from her ears.
Maybe the directness of her gaze, the confidence of her handshake. “Huge fans.”
“Thanks.” Georgia tried to arrange her face into something that qualified as charming. The room spun a half-degree. Not enough to talk to the medics, to stop her playing, but just enough to remind herself that she hadn’t slept properly in days.
They all sat. There was a pile of Westcliffe marketing material on the low table in front of them, brochures laying out the benefits of sponsorship.
Private hospitality boxes, personal meet and greets with the players, photoshoots, use of the stadium for events.
A whole host of ways for the club to wiggle in between companies and their cash.
“So,” Martin began, leaning forward, hands on his knees. “You had a moment this season.”
And there it was.
She had a speech she’d written in her head. A version of the same spiel she’d been giving for the last four months. The speech where she promised to be a good girl, keep her voice soft, where she apologised for calling out sexist questions, for saying too much.
From across the low table, Caroline glared daggers at her. Georgia got the message loud and clear.
Play nice, Hotch.
Don’t rock the boat.
Rocking boats sink, and sinking boats drown people.
“My moment,” she echoed.
“Yeah,” Tasha said, quick to agree. “The interview.” She held both hands up like she was framing a headline. “That viral moment.”
Georgia felt the hot flicker of shame. She hadn’t planned any of it. The pounding in her head, Vix’s thin smile, the endless questions afterwards about whether she might be scaring away families who just wanted to bring their kids to a match.
“Right,” Georgia said flatly, because somebody had to fill the silence and she couldn’t bear to let Caroline do it. “Look, that was just…”
“We want to build a campaign around that,” Tasha cut in, spreading her fingers wide as though demonstrating a card trick. “Female rage. Unapologetic, Powerful. You at the centre.”
Both Georgia and Caroline gawped at her, blinking uncertainly. Female rage. Not passion, not energy. Not hysteria. Rage had an edge. It was honest, blunt.
“You want me,” Georgia said carefully, chancing a glance at Caroline, “to be angry. On purpose.”
“Not angry as in destructive,” Martin said.
He pulled a tablet out of a messenger satchel at his side and tapped it awake.
The screen bloomed into life: slow-motion shots of athletes yelling, dirt streaked across a cheekbone like war paint.
“Rage as in refusal. As in, I’m not making myself smaller to make you feel comfortable. ”
Tasha joined in, quoting Georgia’s interview word for word. “You might be taller, heavier. You might be faster. You might have a podcast…”
Georgia stared. She had the last game of the season in two days, and they had just given her the worst mental whiplash. “Are you… sure?”
“Look,” Martin said, “at Breakline, we want to be disruptors, innovators, shake things up. Which is kinda ironic, given that our parent company is a beast, wall to wall corporate suits, you know? But they let us steer the ship. We do the stuff they won’t, take the risks they can’t.
We want to put women’s sport on fifteen-storey buildings and not in a ‘girl power!’ way that looks like bubblegum. Real. Mouth open. Teeth showing.”
“And you want that from me? Not, like, someone more…” Georgia struggled for the word. “Someone cooler, more urban. Like, Riley Carter, for example.”
“We know Riley,” Tasha said, waving the suggestion away. “We want you.”
“I don’t know that I can,” Georgia said, looking to Caroline for support. “I’m the captain, and captains are supposed to be neutral.”
Caroline’s eyebrows, neatly arched, had twitched almost imperceptibly at female rage. Now, they were settling again, calculating, assessing. She looked at Georgia, then to Tasha, Martin, then back again.
“I think,” Caroline said slowly, diplomatic, testing the ice under each foot, “there’s a real appetite for authenticity.
Especially now. Our fans responded to Georgia speaking her mind, to that raw passion.
” She quirked her lips in a wry smile. “Yes, it was controversial, but the numbers were undeniable.”
Georgia blinked. Caroline hadn’t mentioned the numbers before. At least not in a positive way. Numbers were a thing you could drown in.
Georgia had turned off notifications, turned her phone face-down, turned her own face away from the mirror. If she looked too long, she could see the hollowing out.
“Exactly,” Tasha said, emphasising her words with a casual tap to Caroline’s forearm.
“We don’t want to sandpaper you. We want to amplify what’s already there, tap into that feeling, from you and from other athletes like you worldwide.
We want the speech that’s going to make dads at Saturday morning games stop and realise they’ve been teaching their daughters to be polite instead of brilliant. ”
Georgia snorted, surprised. “That’s quite a brief.”
“Big things are easier to sell than small ones,” Martin said. “Anyway, we saw your interview everywhere. The way we see it, you can either spend the next year apologising for it…”
“Or,” chipped in Tasha, a rehearsed double act, “we can pay you, and the club, to own it.”
The carpet in the hospitality suite had the kind of pattern that made your eyes cross if you stared at it too long.
Georgia followed the looping with her eyes, tracing its path across the room, because if she looked at Tasha and Martin directly she might believe them.
That would be dangerous. Believing things had consequences.
Believing Matt had respected her as a rugby player had led her right here.
Believing she could have career and a second chance with Erin had sent her into a tailspin for half the season.
Erin. Georgia had been careful not to think about her.
Keep her thoughts on the pitch, in the gym, focus on the eighty match minutes where her brain couldn’t spin.
She thought of Erin on the end of the phone the morning after the interview. Call me when you’ve caught your breath. A private softness not many people saw.
“We’ll iron out the details with Caroline,” Martin said. “But we’re here because you said something and people recognised themselves in it. That’s the whole game.”
“Please,” Caroline interjected, “call me Caro.”
Georgia didn’t hear the rest of the conversation, the next few minutes passing in a blur of concept boards and advertising mock ups.
Georgia’s watch beeped a reminder, and she made her excuses.
Call-me-Caro followed Georgia to the door of the hospitality suite.
They paused at the threshold, Caroline leaning in. “Are you alright?”
Georgia had been lying to that question for months. It was muscle memory at this point. Instead, she surprised herself. “Maybe.”
Caroline regarded her for a second, then nodded. “Good.” She reached out and tweaked the collar of Georgia’s training top, straightening a shoulder seam that didn’t need to be straightened. “Go be you.”
Georgia jogged down the corridor and swiped through the doors leading to the back stairs. Her chest was tight, but in a different way than it had been that morning. It was coiled in a way she knew how to unravel. Outside the locker room, she paused.
She thought of Erin again. Deliberately this time.
A line from Erin's journal floated in front of her eyes: Don’t let the worst moment decide the rest of you.
Rage, the campaign said. But rage wasn’t just a rant.
Her mouth went dry. Courage and nausea were cousins.
Georgia took a deep breath.
Fine. She could keep company with both.
In the changing room, the heat hit her, humid with Deep Heat, the low chatter of her teammates doing their pre-training rituals.
Jess had plaited her hair into a crown, and Kamsi was lying on her back with her calves up the wall.
Someone had a speaker on low, bass threading under the hum.
Rachel caught Georgia’s eye and lifted her chin in a question. You good? it said.
Maybe, Georgia thought again.