by Avery Wilde
Up a winding staircase we traveled, exchanging pleasantries— ‘Are you new here?’ ‘What did you think of such-and-such or so-in-so?’—until we arrived at the media lounge, a large, comfortable room high above the stadium, which provided a birds-eye view of the pitch. The sound of the fans outside was muted by the thick glass to a dull hum, and the air of excitement, so palpable outside, was lost to bland professionalism. Against one wall, a bank of TV monitors guaranteed that not a moment of action would be missed. That was nice, although I couldn’t help thinking that if I’d wanted to watch the match on a screen then I could’ve just stayed at the hotel.
I was just settling down to watch the game when one reporter amongst the crowd caught my eye. The woman in question was hard to miss; brilliant honey-blonde hair topping a tall, willowy frame, and stunning green eyes. She seemed to pass easily through the crush of journalists like a hot knife through butter, even in the five-inch heels she was wearing. Her name was Lauren Bilson, and my boss Granger would’ve immediately identified her as the stick-thin blonde who knew about football for whom he’d been searching—before going on to add some flattering comments about the length of her legs and pertness of her ass, of course.
Lauren spotted me, and her beautiful face lit up with a smile. That only served to make her look even more stunningly beautiful, and I felt a little drab in comparison, although I knew I wasn’t exactly some sort of hideous swamp creature.
“Ally!”
Lauren strode towards me, and I gave her a tentative smile. “Hi, Lauren. How’s it going?”
It wasn’t that I disliked Lauren—she was a surprisingly hard woman to dislike—but actually liking her could be a bit difficult too. We’d attended college together, and when I’d first seen her and heard her trilling, high-pitched voice, my first thought had been ‘dumb blonde’, as awful as that was. I regretted thinking in such a bitchy way now, but I still remembered exactly why I’d thought it. People as stunning as Lauren Bilson were rarely ambitious because they never had any need to be; they simply sailed through life, relying on their good looks and allowing men to do everything for them without the slightest idea that this was unusual. I’d assumed Lauren was just like that.
That initial impression had been, at least partly, erroneous. Lauren did sail through life, relying on her good looks and allowing men to do everything for her without the slightest idea that this was unusual, but she was also fiercely intelligent and good at her job.
She was arrogant at times, but I knew she had the goods to back it up. She could talk sport with the best of them, she argued with respected coaches over tactics, she explained to players why they were in a slump, and she’d once denied a sports psychologist an extremely lucrative new client when she suggested that he didn’t need therapy as much as he needed a slightly different grip on his upswing. I’d almost peed my pants laughing when I heard about that.
To many people, Lauren could seem like one of the most irritating women in the world, not because of anything that she said or did, but because she made almost everyone feel inadequate. She was beautiful, smart and generally pleasant to be around, aside from the aforementioned arrogance. It was probably easy to be pleasant when you were both beautiful and smart (why on earth would you be anything else since the world had already done you so many favors?) and yet I’d found that so many women who were beautiful and smart were also the definition of ‘mean girls’. Sometimes I wished that Lauren fell into that category—she would’ve been easier to be around if she was a bitch. Instead, she wasn’t, and it often made me feel slightly inferior, because she was so damn perfect.
That was my own silly insecurities talking, though—she hadn’t done anything bad to me, and I doubted she ever would.
“I didn’t know you were in England!” she said as she reached the spot where I was standing. She was beaming a smile that would’ve made Reese Witherspoon green with envy.
“I just got in yesterday,” I replied. “You?”
“Oh, I live here now,” said Lauren, waving off the question with as much modesty as someone like her could manage. “You know how it goes: BBC scout sees one of your demo reels, six figure offer, blah, blah, blah.”
“Sure,” I replied. I actually had no idea how that might ‘go’, but I was keen to find out.
“I take it you’re here for…” Her voice trailed off. There was no need to say the actual name.
I nodded. “Yeah. Him.”
It was hard not to notice the number of tall, blonde and willowy—which was the nice way of saying ‘stick-thin’—sports journalists in the press lounge today, though none were taller, blonder or willowier than Lauren. With my curvy frame and mess of dark curls, I was starting to feel decidedly out-gunned.
Lauren leaned closer and whispered conspiratorially. “Apparently Brian has already picked a shortlist,” she said.
I arched an eyebrow. “Really? Who told you that?”
Brian Thomas was Liam Croft’s manager, and to have his ear was to have Liam’s time. There were stories about media outlets sending their best-looking reporters to try and seduce Brian, but unlike his client, Brian Thomas was not swayed by a pretty face—only money talked.
“I keep my ear to the ground,” Lauren said with a devious smile.
I grinned back at her. “Well, may the best journalist win.”
Lauren nodded. “Sure. Anyway, I need to grab some water. I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. “By the way, let’s have a drink when all this is over. Seeing as I live here now, I can show you some of the best little watering holes.”
“Yeah, that sounds really nice.”
She headed towards the bar, and I turned my attention back to one of the big screens.
“Kick-off’s in fifteen minutes, ladies and gentlemen!” A harsh voice cut above the chatter of competitive reporters pretending to like each other, and all eyes turned to the squat man by the door from who it had issued.
It was Brian Thomas, Liam Croft’s aforementioned manager.
There was a running joke around the world of football that Brian carried around a piece of paper on which he’d written terms like ‘kick-off’, ‘half time’, ‘offside’ and so on, along with a brief reminder of what each one of them meant. When it came to football, Brian Thomas wasn’t just completely ignorant, he was willfully ignorant, which is to say that he had no interest in the sport whatsoever and no interest in learning about it.
In his view, a game in which the score-line might be exactly the same at the end as it had been at the beginning was two hours wasted—assuming a match was two hours…he probably wasn’t sure. Apparently, he preferred poker or even board games like Monopoly; games that could be played from a sitting position. If he was feeling particularly vigorous, then he might stand up for long enough to manage a round of darts.
But however much of a waste of time he considered the game, the sight of all those people flocking to it, the sight of all that merchandise on the shelves, the sight of column inches in papers and interviews on TV shows, and above all, the sight of the salaries that the players commanded—all this spoke to Brian in a language that he understood and which appealed to him instantly, and what it said was ‘ka-ching!’
If it hadn’t been for the money, then ‘sport’ probably would have been nothing to Brian beyond a five letter word beginning with ‘S’. But from everything I’d heard about him, his life was ruled by another five letter word beginning with ‘M’—Money. And while he was so ignorant of the game itself that he would likely need a couple of tries to guess how many teams played per match, there was no one who was better at making money from the game of football than him.
In fairness, there weren’t many things out there that Brian Thomas couldn’t make money from—if he’d run a non-profit charity then he would’ve run it at a profit (for himself, not the charity). But in football he’d found his natural home, for while people often waved placards and yelled abuse at CEOs and other businessmen for their exorbitant salaries
, the same people would watch a man earn a million a week for kicking a ball and think ‘yeah, that seems fair’.
Brian was adept at exploiting people’s inconsistencies for personal gain. He knew how to take that willingness to pour money into a sport that, when you came down to it, required little more than four sweaters for goalposts and an inflated leather sphere, and he was especially adept at milking the millions from it. Most importantly, Brian was good at doing this without seeming as if he was. Everything he did seemed to be in service to the sport, to the players, and to the fans, and somehow hardly anybody noticed how well he was doing out of it himself. He’d raised being self-serving to an art-form, and in a very specific way, he could be called a genius.
But maybe in this particular case, that wasn’t such a good thing.
As with my feelings towards Liam Croft, my feelings about Brian Thomas were strongly mixed. There was no doubt that he did a lot of good for the sport in publicizing it and winning deals for deserving players, but there was something about using sport as a means of financial gain, without any interest in the sport itself, that didn’t sit well with me. I liked people who had real passion for the industry, as wishfully deluded as that might sound.
On the other hand, however, if you were having an operation, would you rather a doctor who was passionate about surgery or good at it? Both would be nice of course, but given the option, talent trumped passion every time without fail, and I couldn’t deny that Brian was talented at his job, despite all the negative things I’d heard about him.
He approached and squinted at me with piercingly sharp blue eyes. “You’re Allison Flores, right?”
“Yes.” A fluttering started in my stomach—why was he talking to me? There was one obvious explanation, but it was one that seemed almost too good to be true.
“Don’t go far.”
“Sure, I’ll be right here,” I said.
“Have you seen Lauren Bilson?”
I nodded. “Yes, she’s just at the bar getting a drink.”
Brian nodded and looked over at the bar. “Of course she is. How could I miss her, eh?”
How indeed? I wondered. Men seldom missed Lauren; she was the first thing they noticed when they walked into a room, and I watched as Brian took her to one side for a whispered word. Well, at least he’d spoken to me as well. He had asked me not to go far, which had to mean something, so perhaps I was worrying over nothing.
Brian finally walked back towards me with Lauren behind him. She easily kept up with the short man’s quick steps with long graceful ones of her own.
“Come with me,” said Brian as he reached me, not stopping or even slowing but continuing straight past me and out the door.
I fell in alongside Lauren. I shot her a questioning glance a second later, but she shrugged and pulled a face of bafflement. Well, at least I wasn’t the only one who had absolutely no idea what was going on.
Out in the corridor, Brian turned back to face us and checked to make sure we were not being eavesdropped on.
“The Croft interview is going to one of you two,” he said. He was not a man who wasted time beating about the bush when there was money to be made.
“Wow, that’s great,” Lauren replied in a gushing voice with a flutter of her heavily-mascaraed eyelashes.
“One of us?” I said, stressing what I felt was the salient point in the sentence.
Brian nodded. “Wouldn’t be an exclusive if I gave it to both of you, would it? That would be an inclusive, and no one gives a crap about that.”
“Which one of us, then?” Lauren asked. “And why are you telling both of us?”
“I’d think it was obvious,” said Brian, “that I’m telling both of you because I haven’t made up my mind about which one of you will get it.”
“Ah,” I said.
“Nor am I about to,” Brian continued.
“Ah,” Lauren said, echoing me.
“You both have much to recommend you,” Brian explained. “You’re both young up-and-comers and that’s the flavor this article needs—I give it to one of the old-timers and they’ll spend all their time asking which footballers of the past Liam admires, and who gives a rotten crap about that? You’re both women and that’s a demographic Liam plays well in. You both know your stuff and you write with flair. You both work for organizations we’d like to look favorably on Liam for the future.”
He paused to cough for a second, then continued. “Lauren, the BBC represents Britain; it’s where Liam’s from, it’s where football matters, it’s where the fans come from and there’s definitely something to be said for loyalty when it comes to who covers his first interview. On the other hand, Allison, your magazine has done more than any other publication to raise the sport’s profile in the US, and we take that seriously. It’s read all over the world, and while the Beeb does football all the time, Liam would be the first Premiership footballer to give an exclusive to you. Frankly, there’s little to choose between you in practical terms—you both present an attractive package.”
Another man might have said that leeringly, but Brian Thomas obviously didn’t care about being a sleazebag when there was business to discuss.
“That’s why I’m passing the buck on to someone with a less practical outlook,” he added.
“Who?” I asked, since he seemed to be waiting for someone to ask.
“Liam Croft.”
Having delivered this surprising news, Brian took a step back and allowed it to sink in.
Lauren was the first to speak. “Liam Croft is going to choose between us?”
“Yes,” Brian said. “Seems to make sense. After all, this will be a bare-all, up close and personal, no holds barred type of piece, and doing that with someone he doesn’t like wouldn’t really work, would it? So why not give him the final say? Qualifications-wise you two are equals—Liam will make his decision based on something a little less tangible.” He turned to leave. “Enjoy the game, ladies. I’ll see you afterwards.”
Lauren and I exchanged glances. We’d already been in competition, of course, but now that competition had heated up in no uncertain terms. ‘May the best journalist win’ no longer seemed appropriate.
We headed back into the media lounge as the players took to the pitch. Normally I would’ve been agog at this point; keen to enjoy my first Premiership match. But not now. I’d said nothing after Brian dropped his unexpected bombshell. What was there to say, really? I’d seen the pictures of Liam out on the town—the whole world had seen them. When it came to girls, he had a very distinct type, and if you were trying to find the number one example of that type, then you couldn’t do much better than Lauren Bilson.
I looked over at her again. As I watched her flash a dazzling white smile to a bartender who immediately flushed bright red, my mind flashed back to my editor’s words, and I began to wonder if my supposed assets were going to be enough to get me through this and make Liam pick me.
Probably not.
Dammit.
Chapter 4
Liam
Is arrogance still arrogant when it’s true?
That was one of the questions that constantly buzzed around me from the media—along with ‘Is he single?’ and ‘How many of those stories do you think are true? Really?’ Press conferences like the one I’d given prior to today’s match were the norm for me—rank disregard for my opponents coupled with a cast iron assumption of victory that went well beyond mere self-confidence.
Of course, a lot of it was a show for the journalists—my manager Brian wanted me to come across in a certain overly self-confident way to build up a striking, memorable public image of me—but I would’ve still gladly admitted that I was as arrogant a man as had ever lived. But then there was that question again: was it really arrogance if it was true? I was currently the best at what I did, and there never really seemed to be any doubt that my team would win.
So was it actually egotistical to say it? Or would it have been stupidly over-modest to deny som
ething that everyone knew? Most people would have to agree that I wasn’t exactly wrong in my self-confidence, but I guess that didn’t make it any more pleasant a trait.
The one thing that made the trait bearable to people (other than the fact that I kept winning matches) was that I was damn passionate about what I did. It wasn’t always obvious in my press conferences, because I was so blasé about winning without even having to try, but I truly loved what I did. I was never happier than when I was out on a football pitch, and for all the ‘I don’t need to try’ acts I put on for the media, I never gave less than one-hundred percent. Somehow that enthusiasm negated—or at least mitigated—my inflated ego.
It was, therefore, no great surprise that when the match ended that afternoon it was with a resounding victory for my team. I’d scored twice and assisted in another two goals—I might’ve been arrogant but I was still a team player—and was carried out of the stadium on the shoulders of my teammates to the ecstatic roars of a delighted crowd, chanting my name. Their latest chant was Liam Croft, never soft.
Ha! Never soft, indeed.
Just ask the ladies.
All kidding aside, when this sort of thing represented your average day at work, surely a man could be forgiven for getting a bit of a swollen head. I’d played out of my mind and got the result that I knew I deserved—so why did it sound so wrong to actually say that I deserved it?
Grabbed by a roving TV camera crew for an immediate post-match reaction to yet another victory, I put on my best ‘media smile’ and prepared to live up to the reputation I’d worked so hard to forge.
“Liam, are you surprised by today’s victory?”
I nodded. “I really am.”
The reporter’s eyes widened. “Oh?”
“Yes. I thought we’d beat them by a much bigger margin than that. Maybe all the drinking is actually starting to affect me.”
