Page 115 of The Thing About My Rival

“I’ll even help you out with this.” There’s a ripping sound as she snatches up the line of tape I stuck on the floor.

Although it was only two months ago, it feels like a different lifetime. Like I was a whole other person, someone with no idea what life had in store for them. No idea that the woman currently crouching her way across the center of the room, yanking up the tape, would change my life forever—changemeforever.

“Yup.” She reaches the other side and peels off the strip up the wall. “Your very own office.” Then off the windowsill. “It’s all yours.”

The tape on the window makes a particularly horrendous noise as she rips it off.

She turns to face me, scrunching it all into a ball with both hands. “All. Fucking. Yours.”

“Oh, come on. We’re an amazing team. We complementeach other brilliantly. But you know the guys wouldn’t take you as seriously in training sessions as they take me. You know they?—”

“Seriously?” Her whole face and neck flash red, her eyes wide and spikey. “You’re saying exactly what my father said to me when I was a kid and told him I wanted to work in the game. I always knew you were cut from the same cloth. That was my gut instinct. But I let myself get swayed with all the charm and the sex and the it’s-different-with-yous. But it was all bullshit. You’re just like him. And I should have gone with my gut.”

“Fuck, Wilcox. I didn’t mean it like that. It came out wrong. Just clumsy word choice. I’m panicking here.”

She throws the scrunched-up ball of tape at my chest. “I don’t ever want to see you again, speak to you again, or hear from you again.”

I unstick the tape ball from my T-shirt and crush it in my fist.

No. This can’t be the end. It can’t be.

Tears fall from her shining eyes now, tearing at my heart, tugging at my smashed spirit. “And you can go run the Orlando game yourself.”

“What? You’re not coming?” She can’t possibly mean that. “No. That’s not you. You wouldn’t walk away from the team. Of course you’re coming.”

The horn of the bus sounds in the car park.

She stomps to her desk and swings her bag off the floor and onto her chair.

“How can I? Look at me!” She gestures to her red, tear-stained face. “I can’t be around them looking like this. I’d be a distraction. They’d wonder what the hell is wrong with me. And I can’t tell them the truth because thatwould put them off even more. They need to focus on tomorrow’s game and nothing else.”

She snatches a drawer open. “And right now, my attitude is not exactly aligned with the positive, winning mental energy they need to maintain.” She grabs one thing after another from the drawer and stuffs them into the bag. “What I want to do doesn’t matter. It’s better for the team if I don’t go. So I’m not.”

And there she is, the Wilcox I know and love. Putting the team first, even though I know for absolute fucking certain it will break her heart not to be at that game.

I have no clue how to fix something as monumental as this. And there sure as hell isn’t time for me to even start trying to figure it out right now. But I do know we all want her to come with us.

“I would never mean to hurt you. I’m so sorry. I know you’re upset. But the guys need you.” She bites into her lip, fighting to control her tears as she shoves a fistful of orange and blue pens into her bag. “Fuck, Wilcox,Ineed you.”

I toss the tape ball into the wastebasket. “We need to hype up these guys into goal-scoring machines. We need to do it together. They need to win.”

“Pfft,” she scoffs as she scrunches some papers into the bag. “You meanyouneed to win. This isyourteam now, remember? It has nothing to do with me.”

“Don’t say that.” I can’t help but move toward her again.

She’s always a magnet to me, even now when it’s clear she’d prefer me to be in another room, another city, or on another planet. “Wegot this far. Together. This team is more yours than it will ever be mine. You can’t not come.”

At least this time she doesn’t back off. “Of course I cannot go. Not only is it best for the team, I’m also not standing side by side with a man who has no higher opinion of me than my father. I have to put up with him because he’s my only family. But I do not have to put up withyou.” The final word comes out in a strained, heartbreaking croak.

And it crushes me. Like a giant hand just reached down from the sky, yanked my soul from my body and tightened into a fist around it.

Christ, all I want to do is scoop her up and make it better. To make her understand she has it all wrong. To love her.

“So just go win the game. That’s the only thing you care about. Winning.” She swipes her face with the back of her hand. “Oh, and the press liking you again. You succeeded with that too. Mission accomplished on all fronts.”

The bus horn honks again.

I cough to eradicate the spiky lump in my throat. “Please come.” I take one last chance and rest my hand on her arm, desperate for the contact and desperate to encourage her. “You’ll regret not coming. I know you will.”

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