He stormed past her, towards the door. "You won't say anything," he ordered, turning and stabbing a finger back at her. "Because right now, you're still just the new hire - and you can easily vanish if you fuck this up."
He saw her eyes widen, and a little spike stabbed through Chase's heart at the pain he knew he was causing her. But this was about more than just his feelings for her, and he forged on. "Keep quiet, or else you'll regret speaking out," he growled.
On Katy's face, he saw the verbal blade cut deeply into her.
Chase wheeled around, grabbing the door and stomping out of the room. He pulled the door shut behind him so powerfully that he heard it splinter in the frame, but he didn't stop to look back.
His head pounded with his headache and worry, fear, indecisiveness, all of it blending together and gnawing at him. Chase knew only one remedy for this cocktail of emotion brewing inside of his head.
Right now, more than ever before in his life, he needed a goddamn drink.
Chapter Twenty-One
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Fortunately, there was already a cab waiting outside of the hotel, its light turned on, or else Chase likely would have just picked a random direction and started stumbling off. Instead, he grabbed the back door and tumbled into the cab's backseat.
"Strip club," he told the cabbie before the man had a chance to get a word out.
The cabbie paused for a moment, looking as though he wanted to say something, but he caught some whiff of Chase's black mood and thought better of it. He instead put the car into gear and pulled away from the curb.
Fifteen minutes later, the cabbie deposited Chase outside of a large building, illuminated with neon signs advertising "GIRLS" and "BOOZE". The place looked dirty, rundown, and disgusting.
In other words, it looked exactly like what Chase needed at the moment.
He made his way up to the front entrance, where a bouncer took one look at him and then gestured him inside with a cocked thumb. Chase didn't bother saying thank you, but shouldered his way inside with his head down.
The inside of the club was dim, with hints of stale beer and cigarette smoke lingering in the air. The ground felt slightly sticky under Chase's shoes as he headed over to an empty table, collapsing down heavily into the chair. He felt the chair creak under his weight, but didn't care much if it held or not.
A waitress - or at least he assumed that she was a waitress; she held an empty drinks tray, although her outfit's total square footage amounted to only a couple inches of fabric - stopped by his table. "Hi there, honey, what can I get you?"
"Whiskey." Chase didn't care that the woman didn't recognize him, that the dim light inside the club couldn't completely hide her exposed stretch marks, the lines in her face and the slight crow's feet around her eyes. She didn't bother flirting with him, and he didn't look back at her.
She turned away, silently moving off to bring him his drink.
Chase looked around the club, still sunk in the depths of his black mood. All of his angry thoughts kept on returning back to Katy.
Damn her, why did she have to meddle like this? Her job wasn't to investigate whether the Hawks were cheating; she was just supposed to post cutesy Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram posts! She was supposed to help bury conflicts and scandals, not bring new ones to light!
Of course, a little part of his mind pointed out to him as he gulped down the first glass of whiskey, signaling to the waitress for another, in the end all of the blame came back to him. Even though she wasn't supposed to go digging around, he had cheated, and they both knew it.
Somehow, that made everything else feel even worse.
The club wasn't especially full, but he sat and drank in silence for about five minutes before one of the dancers sidled over to him. "Well there, you certainly aren't who I expected to see wander into a club like this," she commented, smiling down at him. "Might want to keep a low profile - a lot of guys around here might be itching to kick your ass after your performance today!"
So she recognized him. Chase just looked flatly back at her. "Let's see them try," he growled. It might do him good to slug a couple assholes in the face, help him physically work off some of his anger.
The dancer didn't react to his invitation. Her eyes remained locked on him, however; she knew how much money he was worth, Chase sourly guessed. "How about I help distract you from whatever's on your mind?" she purred, moving forward so that his face was only inches from her cleavage.
Chase shrugged, and the dancer took that as a tacit yes. "I'm Annabelle," she commented to him, as she turned around and rubbed her nearly bare behind across his lap. "And honey, if there's anything that you need, anything at all, you just let me know and I'll make it happen."
He heard the not-so-subtle invitation in those words, but ignored it. "Just keep my glass topped off," he said, settling back as she worked her ass across his lap and thighs.
Anabelle's smile didn't waver for a minute. A drunk patron was a well tipping patron, she knew. "You got it," she promised, turning around and pressing his face into her cleavage for a moment, ruffling her fingers through his hair.
In his gut, Chase felt the first couple glasses of whiskey starting to settle in, sending out a warm glow that pervaded his insides. The feeling was familiar.
This time, however, that glow didn't seem to really make him feel any better. He frowned a little. Normally, the first hit of alcohol took the edge off, but it didn't seem to be having that usual effect tonight.
Maybe he needed more. He tossed back the rest of his second glass, and the waitress darted forward to retrieve it from him and bring him another.
On his lap, meanwhile, Annabelle had noticed that she wasn't getting much of a physical reaction from the man. "Looks like someone's a little tired from his performance this afternoon," she commented, turning and running her hands down over his chest and abs as she straddled him. "Need a little help getting it up?"
"I don't have any problems with that," Chase snapped, his cheeks warming. He most certainly didn't have any issues getting hard! Even when blackout drunk, his equipment never failed to perform.
Tonight, however, it didn't seem to be functioning properly. Despite the stripper practically humping him through his jeans, he didn't feel the slightest hint of arousal. He looked at Annabelle, trying to see her as a lusty and sexual being, but the image just flopped in his head.
Not like Katy. Even now, hating how she'd gone digging and uncovered secrets that she should have left alone, he could still imagine her body, all curves and waves and seductive smile, teasing him as she led him on and pushed him away at the last second, leaving him panting and wanting more. Why did that damn woman have to keep on creeping back into his head! He cursed, and the glass in his hand exploded into shards as he squeezed it furiously.
"Oh!" Annabelle leapt up off his lap in surprise as Chase re-opened his hand, dropping the remaining fragments down onto the dirty floor.
The stripper's expression, however, quickly shifted from true surprise to calculated sympathy. "Here, let's get you someplace where I can take care of you, so you don't hurt yourself," she cooed, standing up and pulling his hand. "We can go up to one of the rooms in the back, just you and me."
Chase saw through the transparent invitation, knowing that Annabelle just wanted to milk him of his money, but he didn't care enough to protest. "Whatever," he said, letting her tow him away from the broken bits of glass.
In the Champagne Room, Annabelle didn't waste any time in attacking him, her hands flying right to his pants and tugging them down to his thighs as she pushed him back onto the couch. He landed heavily, and she was on him a second later, her hands now sliding directly over his soft length, stroking him.
Even this lusty attention, however, didn't accomplish much for him physically. Annabelle dropped her mouth down, sucking him off, but when her efforts still didn't provoke any hardening of his long member, she finally raised her head and glared at him. She wasn't hid
ing her irritation with him any longer, Chase noted with a sardonic note of humor.
"What the hell's wrong with you?" she burst out.
"No more simpering, flirty attitude?" Chase replied, raising an eyebrow. He wished that he had another glass of whiskey, although the last few glasses hadn't done much for him so far.
"Not when you don't respond to it at all," she snapped back. "Jesus, I never thought that a big shot quarterback like you would suffer from whiskey dick!"
"Trust me, it's not the booze," Chase told her.
"Yeah? Then what the hell's wrong with you? You only get off to some sort of kinky shit?" She grinned mirthlessly at him when Chase again raised his eyebrows. "I've read all the shit about you in the tabloids. You don't give a fuck about anything but getting your rocks off, so tell me whatever twisted crap gets you off, and I'll do it. Wanna fuck me in the ass? Get another girl in here? Need someone rimming you while I'm riding you? Just tell me, so I can give you what you want?"
As the stripper ranted, Chase's look of surprise had shifted into one of thinly veiled disgust. "That's not what I want," he said.
"Then what the hell DO you want? What the fuck do you need to make you happy?"
The question made him pause, opening his mouth but not speaking. With a shock, Chase realized that he truly didn't have an answer.
He'd thought that this, being out in a club with plenty of money to burn, hot girls going down on him, and more booze than he could ever drink, was what he wanted. That was why he'd come out here, trying to forget about all of his problems.
But instead, all of this just reminded him of how much more he'd enjoyed the last few weeks, staying in with Katy. Katy understood him, laughed at his jokes, saw him as a deeper person than any picture of him that this stripper might imagine. She didn't see past his muscles and his money, but Katy knew all the stories of him as an awkward teenager, of how he'd been before he hit it big.
Suddenly, amazingly, Chase felt a pang of loneliness pierce through his mind. He didn't want any of this. He wanted to be splayed out on a bed next to Katy, listening to her tell him about some story from her past, laughing as she described a terrible previous date or some especially silly comment from a fan.
"Not this," he announced, standing up and gently pushing Annabelle off of his lap. He bent down and grabbed his pants, pulling them back up around his waist and refastening his belt.
Annabelle stared at him, shocked and unable to speak, so Chase reached into his pocket and pulled out the wad of money he'd been planning on spending to forget his troubles. He peeled off a couple twenties to pay for his cab back to the hotel, and then tossed the rest down at the stripper.
"Have a good night," Chase told her, and then headed out of the strip club. It took him a couple of minutes to recall his hotel's name for the cabbie, but as the vehicle speeded away from the club, he felt his heart lighten. It was tempered by the sobering knowledge of what he now had to do next, but at least he had a plan.
"I know what I want," he murmured to himself in the backseat of the cab.
Chapter Twenty-Two
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The next morning, I woke up to find three new emails:
The first one contained my flight information. Now that we'd played our game out in California, we were all being packed back into another plane and shuttled back across the country to the East Coast, where training for the next game would continue.
The second email made me much more worried. It came from Jed Benson the Third himself, the owner of the Hawks. "When you get back," the email's headline said, "see me IMMEDIATLY." Typo included, nothing else in the body of the email.
As soon as I read that email's title, I started to worry, but then I moved onto the third email, and my breath caught in my throat for a moment.
This third email came directly from Seth Chase. "I'm sorry," the title read.
I clicked on it to open it up.
"Don't worry," I read from the body of the email. "I'm going to keep you out of trouble. I declare it."
I lingered on those last three words. I'd told Chase about my various declarations, of course, although he immediately laughed at how quickly I ended up violating most of them. I tried pressing him to make a declaration of his own, and he declared, "firstly and lastly, I will never make a declaration."
It seemed, now, he'd broken his only vow.
I considered the three emails as I packed up my stuff. I had to squish most of my clothes into one side of my suitcase in order to make room for the game ball, but I couldn't leave it behind. I'd already posted about auctioning it off, created the online auction listing, and bids were streaming in from fans around the country.
My phone starting ringing as I rode the elevator down to the lobby. I quickly scrambled to answer it.
"So? What happened?" Miranda asked eagerly, as soon as I answered.
"Um, hi-"
"No, don't give me that," she demanded. "What did you do? Did you take my advice and confront Chase about the whole deflated football deal? I've been reading more about this, and I think that this could be a really big scandal!"
"Not so loud!" I hissed, distinctly aware that I would very shortly be climbing onto first a bus, and then an airplane, filled with football players who would have a very good reason to want this secret suppressed. "But yes, I did tell him that I knew."
"And? What did he do?"
"He... he exploded," I said shortly, thinking back to the last interaction I'd had with Chase before he stormed off. "I had to ask him flat-out if he was cheating, and he just shouted and stormed out."
"And then what? Did you hear from him again?"
"Nothing-"
"So you haven't seen the papers yet?"
Oh god. "Is he in the papers?" I burst out, no longer caring about the curious looks I attracted from the other men and women in the elevator. "What did he do? Oh god, what sort of damage do I have to fix now?"
"Um..."
That was odd. Miranda never said 'um.' For as long as I'd known her, she always cut straight to the point. It made her sometimes feel a bit cold and calculating, but it also made her a good friend when I needed her.
"Um what?"
"Maybe you ought to see for yourself," Miranda said, and hung up.
The elevator dinged at the lobby level. I hurried out of the metal box and up to the front desk, grabbing a paper off of the stack on the counter. I flipped through the sections, searching for Chase's name.
"Please, not the Entertainment section," I prayed aloud.
But his name wasn't in a headline on the arts and entertainment section. Neither was he in the sports section. What was Miranda talking about?
Finally, I spotted the announcement, down at the bottom of the front section on the Sports page. "Hawks QB Seth Chase announces new information to be released," said the short little blurb. "More information to follow."
I frowned. What in the world was Chase up to?
I hoped to spot him on the bus or on the plane, but I was out of luck. He'd apparently caught an earlier flight back, DeShaun told me when I cornered the wide receiver and asked where the quarterback had disappeared off to. "Had to talk to the coaches about something, I guess," he added before heading through security.
This just made me feel even more confused. Clearly, Chase was planning to do something big. But what would it be? Was he going to come clean about the cheating, or was this all part of a ploy to get rid of me?
I didn't have any answers. All I had was his email, telling me not to worry. Those words didn't do a good job of bringing about their intended effect on me.
I sat through the airplane ride back, staring at my open laptop screen in front of me and trying to think of anything else to distract me. After spending a good forty minutes trying to write a single tweet, however, I gave up on the effort as useless and shut the computer. Clearly, work wasn't enough to distract me.
Instead, leaning back in my airplane seat and trying to ignore how
my knees bumped up against the seat in front of me, I let my thoughts wander. I needed something else, a more interesting and happy train of thought.
Unexpectedly, I found myself thinking of Chase.
I didn't think of my last encounter with him, however, when he'd yelled at me and stormed off, his eyes blazing. Instead, I thought of him earlier, of all the nights we'd spent together over the last couple of weeks, how we'd stayed up late, talking and laughing and sharing all the little details of our lives.
I'd never told some of those details to anyone else, I now realized. Even Miranda didn't know some of the secrets I'd shared with Chase.
And although I couldn't say for certain, I suspected that the feeling went both ways. he'd told me private things about his high school and college days, about how crazy he found the abrupt transition from high school football to being a college star. Would he have shared those with anyone else?
I didn't think so.
But everything he'd told me so far painted a picture of a man who cared about the game, about succeeding, about doing the right thing. Sure, Chase was unrepentant about his skirt-chasing and heavily drinking nature, especially when he went out to party, but he insisted to me, over and over, that none of that bled into his game. "I might be a douchebag off the field," he'd told me at one point, "but on the field, I'm all business, playing to win."
Did that match with my newer picture of him - my mental idea of him as a cheater?
Somehow, the two pictures didn't line up. That made me more worried. One of those two pictures had to be a lie - but which one?
I didn't have any more answers when the plane touched down, back on the East Coast. I collected my bags, stupid toilet seat shaped airplane pillow, and headed out to catch a cab to the Hawks stadium, where Jed Benson the Third had his office.
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