Page 78 of The Thing About My Rival

“What didI do?” I straighten and draw a halo over my head with a finger. “Absolutely nothing. Why assumeI’mthe one in the wrong? Why not assume she’s being unreasonable?”

He slides his beer bottle to the side, rests his elbows on the table, and clasps his hands under his chin like a wise old judge. “Is she?”

“Fuck yes. I helped her out and she got angry.”

“Ah.” He leans back and nods, like I’ve given him the answer to a question he hadn’t asked.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Byhelping outdo you by any chance mean barging in, shoving her out of the way, and taking over?” He picks his bottle back up and takes what he clearly believes is a victory drink.

“Fuck no. She benched one of the players. Without discussing it with me, by the way. And he got all up in her face yelling at her. I heard it from the hallway, so I told himto show her some respect and not talk to her like that. Ihelped. I sorted it. I saved her.”

Tom snort-chokes on his beer. He coughs as he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Yousavedher?”

“Yup. And I don’t see what’s so funny about that.”

“Well, maybe it wasn’t the shocking display of chivalry you thought it was. Maybe it was exactly what I just guessed it was.”

“Oh, I’m so glad you showed up out of the blue. Good of you to stop by.” I fold my arms and gaze at the orange and sky-blue chairs in the stand opposite. “No, that’s not what I did. I marched into the office, stood between them, and told that kid in no uncertain terms to shut the fu?—”

It’s like that moment when you’ve been staring at one of those pictures where some people see a vase and some people see two women’s profiles. For hours all you’re getting is the vase. But then, all of a sudden, you can see the faces too.

My shoulders sag. All of me sags. I suddenly feel like a hundred-and-seventy-four-pound sack of potatoes. Or probably now more like a hundred-and-seventy-six-pound one, due to the recently discovered joy of the local clam chowder.

“Oooh.” The word falls out of me as part of a long sigh.

Tom points the neck of his bottle at me. “And that, my friend, is the sound of the penny dropping.”

I’m caught. Red-handed. By the man who knows me best.

Am I really that awful, though? “Do I do that? Is that a thing I do?”

“Yup.”

“And it pisses people off?”

He shrugs. “Some more than others. And I imagine theleague’s first female head coach being told how to handle an angry player by a brash Englishman with zero coaching experience would likely fall into thesomecategory.”

“I hate you.”

“But you’ve learned this lesson before.” He shakes his head like he’s telling a kid for the hundredth time not to stick his finger in a socket. “Remember the pub trivia night when you upset Asif because you kept taking over all the sports questions and wouldn’t let him talk? And how you showed up to your brother’s house when he was moving and started ordering the movers about and he ended up telling you to go home. And?—”

“Okay, okay.” I hold up my hands to push back the tide of Hugo-barging-in-and-taking-over anecdotes.

And I’m not convinced they’re entirely just. “In my defense, Asif was dithering about, fumbling for the answers. He would have taken ages to get there, and I knew them immediately. So I was saving us time and making sure the answer was right. Plus, we really needed to beat that bunch of arseholes in suits who’d thrashed us the month before.”

My turn to point my bottle at him. “And those movers were idiots. They would have scraped the dining table if I hadn’t virtually thrown myself across it. So I washelpingmy brother protect his stuff.” I take a slug of beer. “I mean, it was bought with my money, of course, but it was still his table.”

I put my drink back down with a satisfying thunk, like a judge striking a gavel. Case closed.

At the same time, a hissing noise erupts out on the pitch. We turn to see the sprinklers have kicked into action.

“Wellll,” Tom says, with the calmness and patiencebefitting a man who once had to talk a band around when they refused to go on stage at Madison Square Garden because the candles in the dressing room were vanilla, not vanilla rose.

“Asif might have got the right answer in the end,” he continues, “if he’d had a chance to participate in the quiz and enjoy himself. Which he obviously didn’t because he never came again. And we could have really used his bizarrely specific knowledge of 1950s country music the next month.”

I always thought that guy looked more like a computer nerd who talked about gigabytes and algorithms, not someone who could list every number one bluegrass album since the chart began.

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