Page 79 of Triplets for the Pucking Playboys
Administrative leave. Like I’m a liability. Like I did something wrong by staying upright long enough to fall.
Below that, buried in the PR, the words that confirm the rest.
All internal personnel connected to the incident have been issued confidentiality mandates. No interviews. No commentary. No statements.
Finn. Grey. Beau. Silenced.
I drop the phone to the bed and stare at the wall, every inch of me hot with something that isn’t pain. What hurts most of all is that Iwantedto tell them.
I wanted to tell them.
29
BEAU
The chairs in the GM’s office are designed for discomfort. They make you feel like a child on trial, your feet never quite touching the floor, your knees wide and exposed. I sit in one with my hands balled into fists around the armrests, watching the slow, methodical way the Storm’s crisis response team sets up for slaughter.
The GM paces behind his desk, which is so clean and empty it looks like the office belongs to a dead man. On the credenza, three bottles of hand sanitizer and an unopened tin of Storm-branded shortbread cookies. His shoes squeak in an endless figure eight, polished so aggressively they catch the fluorescents in strobe. The head of PR—formerly in TV—spreads printouts across the conference table. Each sheet is a log of disaster: headlines, aggregated tweets, a time-stamped rumor mill stretching back to the hour someone slipped Sage’s name to the league.
There are two other men here, both with the look of recent MBA, their faces scrubbed and anxious. One wears a Storm windbreaker zipped all the way up, the other a purple dress shirt and an expression of near-religious anticipation. They whisperto each other every few seconds, keeping their eyes on the stack of phones at the center of the table.
The GM clears his throat. The room stops moving.
“Let’s get this started,” he says, as if we haven’t all been here for half an hour, marinating in the silence.
I keep my eyes fixed on a scratch in the tabletop, a clean gouge from some previous session of doom. I measure my breaths, keep them slow, keep my chest from rising and falling in any way that might betray anxiety. The rest of the table seems to be playing the same game.
The PR lady leans forward, steepling her hands. “Beau, thanks for coming. We know this is…sensitive.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s a party.”
She gives a twitch of a smile, the kind that never touches the eyes. “We’re here to make sure everyone’s on the same page, and that we get ahead of the narrative before the league does.”
The GM stops pacing just behind my left shoulder. I can feel the heat of his frustration radiating in waves. “The short version,” he says, “is we’re fucked.”
MBA in purple shirt coughs, recovers, and tries to look like he belongs here. PR ignores him.
“We have it on good authority,” she continues, “that certain facts about your medical staff are going public. Very public. There’s already a leak to league HR. It’s going to be a story, with or without our input. So the question is, how do we want to play it?”
I look up at her, then at the GM, then at the two suits. Nobody blinks. “What exactly did they leak?” I ask, not because I don’t know, but because I want to hear how they’ll say it.
GM gestures at the printouts. “We’re told that Sage is pregnant. Possibly by a member of the team. That she concealed it from HR. And that it’s already reached the league’s compliance office. They’ll do a review. Standard procedure, butwith the way theFrontis shooting this year, it’ll be more like a fucking episode of Law and Order.”
There’s a pause, as if everyone’s waiting to see if I’ll explode or laugh. I do neither.
“So who’s the source?” I say.
Purple Shirt shifts in his seat. “That’s not clear. There’s a good chance it’s internal. League HR is saying it came to them through ‘concerned parties.’” He fingers a binder, nervous. “Could be a player, could be someone on the ops staff. Could be a anyone, really.”
I let that one hang for a beat. “It wasn’t a player.”
The GM says, “We know that. But optics don’t care about the truth.” He’s chewing on the inside of his cheek. “We have to assume the league will treat this as a worst-case scenario.”
The PR lady takes over again, voice pitched for reassurance. “That’s why we want to get you ready. If anyone asks, you didn’t know, and you had no reason to suspect anything. You answer only what’s asked. Don’t speculate, don’t editorialize. We’ll get you a statement to memorize by tonight. The narrative is ‘professional boundaries.’ We’re dealing with a culture issue, not a specific incident. Do not personalize the story. Do not refer to Sage by name if you can avoid it.”
My knuckles are white. The arms of the chair dig into my thighs. I can feel the sweat pooling under my knees, a cold patch that’s only going to get worse as this drags on.
“And what’s the actual story?” I say.
