Page 90 of The Thing About My Rival

Winding her up is the hottest foreplay imaginable.

“Told you I understand you. I mean, what better first date could you wish for than to find someone who could be the future of the Commoners? You’re always talking about the sustainability of the team. Nurturing players. Planning for the future. Starting an academy.”

“Hold on.” She wipes a mustard-ketchup combo smear from the side of her achingly delicious mouth. “Thisis a date? A firstdate?”

“Gotta say, Wilcox, that hurts a little.” I mime knifing myself in the chest. “Is thatnotwhat this is?”

“You don’t strike me as the dating type.”

“I’m not. At least I wasn’t. But?—”

“See that cross?” She jumps to her feet. “From Jordan? That kid’s a star in the making.”

Watching her watch the game is mesmerizing. Her eyes are everywhere, her mind ticking over a mile a minute. I’m witnessing her thought processes and ideas happening in real time, and it’s a beautiful thing.

She finally takes her eyes off the kids and discovers me silently staring up at her.

She smiles and sits back down. “You brought me here because you thought he’d be a good recruit if I can get an academy off the ground, right?”

“Of course.”

“Very thoughtful.” She taps my knee. “Anyway, Iinterrupted. Sorry. Continue with the dating thing. That boy’s a dynamo, though.”

No one single person has ever made me smile as much as Wilcox does. “I love that you love footy this much.”

“I was reared on it. Just like you were.”

“Yeah. But in a different way.”

“Whatisyour story?” she asks. “I mean, I’ve read your PR stuff, but what’s the real story? You know about my shitty family now, so what’s the deal with yours?” She takes another bite of hot dog.

“Football’s always been the most important thing in my life. That’s it.” Telling her the whole thing would only make her think badly of me and right now that’s the last thing I want.

“Oh, come on.” She nudges me and swallows her mouthful of food. “You can’t do that. When I said my dad didn’t want me and that was it, you got me to tell you the rest. So now it’s your turn.”

She’s right. Why is she always so irritatingly, sexily right? It’s not fair to expect openness from her and give her none in return.

“Okay.” I wipe my greasy mouth with the back of my hand and keep my eyes on the game. It’ll be easier to tell her if I’m not looking at her.

“I’m from a not-well-off part of east London. But as long as some kid on my street had a ball we could play a game. It cost nothing. Then when I got a taste for it and wanted to practice on my own, I found an old chewed-up tennis ball abandoned by a dog and kicked it for hours against the side of our house. We had a council house—public housing, you’d call it.”

I can still hear the sound of that dirty ball hitting the wall and bouncing onto the cracked concrete. “I didn’tknow anything about training, but I figured if I could control a small ball coming at me quickly, I could control a bigger ball coming at me slower even better.”

“Natural instincts,” Wilcox says. “Few kids are born with that.”

“Yeah, well, my parents and two brothers always mocked me for never wanting to do anything but kick a ball. And I almost stopped playing because I was tired of the teasing.”

She turns her head to look at me. “That’s terrible.”

Her brow is furrowed over worried eyes. Such a small thing, but to see her concern for little-kid me sends me skittering toward the brink of emotional. No one needs that, least of all me, so I refocus my attention on the remainder of my food.

“Maybe, but I always knew the football thing was my only chance of getting away from that life.”

“Then at some point you got spotted by a Man U scout?”

“Yeah, when I was playing for a local youth team. And when they picked me up and I started getting paychecks bigger than anyone in my family could ever have dreamed of, their attitude flipped on a dime. Except it wasn’t me they were interested in. It wasn’t me that they were proud of. It was the money.”

Jordan shouts at a teammate for an atrocious pass. He reminds me of myself at that age. Actually, at all ages. “For a while there, I was the idiot who thought he could buy his parents’ affection. I gave them everything they wanted, spent every penny on them and my brothers. But it was never enough. They thought I was a bottomless pit of cash, a slot machine that they could keep pulling the lever on and money would keep falling out.”

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