Page 8 of Making the Save

“Me?”

My publicist, Tyler, thought this golf tournament would be a good idea. Get out of my element. Mix and mingle with some clean-cut athletes.

I didn’t play golf, but I was told all I had to do was ride around in the cart, swing a club every once in a while and look like I was having a blast.

After all, it was about the pictures.

I’d been skeptical. All it would take was for me to lean in too close to some golfer and…

BAM!

Sydney Malloy Seduces Pro-Athlete.

I had been matched up with a recently retired NFL quarterback who proceeded to get shit-faced drunk at nine in the morning.

I didn’t mind the burping. Or the farting. Or the beer guzzling. I plastered on a fake smile and told myself to deal with it. People were watching. Phones were filming. The only bright side was, there was no chance any picture of me with this guy would create rumors of us falling in love.

It was when he started to get handsy that the morning took a turn for the worse. A few pinches here, a poke to my ribs there. I kept smiling through all of it. Determined that one of us would be a professional.

Things went off the rails at Hole 6 when I was bending over to put the ball on the tee and he came up behind me and grabbed my ass.

But then it happened.

He.Happened.

“You saved me,” I said to Wyatt.

“I think I saved him. You were winding up with that golf club like you were going to line drive his head.”

Wyatt had been playing in the group in front of us. He must have seen the football player grab me, because he left his teammate, got in the cart, drove back up to the tee box and proceeded to manhandle the football player into a nearby Port-a-Potty.

“What did you do to him in that Port-a-Potty?” I asked.

“Gave him a little lesson in manners.”

There’d been some shouting and the whole blue box shook a couple of times. Then the football player came out, looking rumpled and sweaty, and told everyone he was too sick to keep playing. He got in his golf cart and raced out of there.

Leaving me standing there like a forgotten bag at the airport.

Wyatt invited me to hop on his golf cart and said I could play with him and his partner for the rest of the day.

And I did.

It had been…

“So fun,” I whispered. Like real fun. Like the kind of fun you have when you’re a kid and no one is watching. The kind of fun that felt…pure. Rare.

“We had a blast,” he said with a nod.

“Richie plays on your sports team,” I said, remembering his gigantic teammate hanging off the back of the golf cart.

“Hockey. He’s the captain of my team,” he said. When I clearly didn’t remember, he laughed and said, “The Peaks.”

“You were racing the golf cart?”

“That was your idea,” he said. “You challenged Jimmy Fallon and Glen Powell to a drag race.”

“That doesn’t sound like me.” I was too cautious for that kind of stuff. Celebrity had burned the fun out of me years ago.

---