What the hell was I going to do?
I needed to talk to someone else about this. For a moment, I thought of going straight to Chase, but no - I needed an unbiased opinion, someone who wasn't directly involved in this.
I pulled out my phone and called Miranda.
"Katy? What's up?"
"Listen, Miranda, are you free? Can I ask you some questions? I really need to talk to you about something." A glance at the clock revealed that it was around 4 PM right now, which meant it was close to seven in the evening back on the East Coast.
"Um, I was about to head out to dinner, but I can talk for a few minutes." Miranda sounded a little distracted, but she didn't turn me down. "What's up?"
"It's about Chase-"
"Did you sleep with him yet??" she exclaimed, cutting me off.
"What? No, why would you even ask that?"
"Oh, come on, it's obvious that you're crazy about him," she insisted. "I've just been waiting for the excited call when you tell me that you jumped his bones."
"Well, now, I don't think that it's going to happen," I revealed. "Listen, Miranda, I think that Chase..." I shuddered for a moment, but I had to tell someone, "...might be cheating at football."
For a moment, Miranda didn't say anything. "Hello?" I called out. "Are you there?"
"I just pushed back my plans for tonight," she answered. "Now, tell me everything."
I sat back down on my bed, flopped backwards onto the sheets, and told Miranda all that I'd found out so far - the deflated balls, how Chase angrily brushed off the question, my suspicions, how I stole the game ball and tested it to verify that my guess actually was correct. Miranda listened for the whole time, barely speaking except to ask me to repeat a detail here or there.
"So, that's everything i've found out so far," I finished. "Now, what do I do?"
She thought for a moment. "You need to confront him," she finally said.
"Really? But I don't want to!"
"Katy, Ben Franklin said that three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead," Miranda replied. "And if this cheating thing is true, more than three people know the secret - and that means it's going to get out, sooner or later. Better for you to be the one proven right in your accusations than to be the one caught in the scandal."
She was right, of course. "Thanks," I said, although the words sounded a little sour.
"Trust me. It's the right thing to do." She ended the call.
I tossed the phone aside, once again just staring up at the ceiling. Miranda was right, of course. I knew that she was right.
But still, I wanted to ignore the whole thing and pretend it hadn't happened.
What would Chase say?
Chapter twenty
Chase rode the elevator down a few floors, a note of disquiet clouding his thoughts. He knew that he should be feeling jubilant about the most recent victory, but something just didn't sit quite right in his mind.
It was something to do with Katy, he thought to himself. His interaction with her on the field seemed fine - she appeared as her normal, bubbly, excited self - but now, looking back at it, he felt like something about it had been off.
And now, she wasn't returning his texts.
He reached her floor, heading over to her room and knocking on the door. He heard her footsteps on the other side of the door, but she paused for a moment before opening it, and he saw a shadow flit across the other side of the peephole.
Was she intending to not even speak with him in person? What had suddenly changed, what had he done wrong?
After another second, however, the door opened, and he saw Katy standing there. "Hey," he greeted her, a smile blooming on his face - although inside his head, the little alarm going off jumped up a few octaves.
Her face looked drawn, unsure of something, but definitely on edge. Something was most definitely wrong, even though she made an attempt to smile back at him.
Chase stepped into her room. "What's going on? You haven't returned my texts. We won the game, remember?"
"I saw," Katy replied. Chase reached out to pull her into his arms for a kiss, but she stepped back and evaded his grasp. She turned and padded over to her bed, sitting down and looking back at him. On the ground, Chase saw the football that he'd signed rocking back and forth, near her leg.
He walked over and sat down on the bed beside her. He thought about trying to reach out for her again, but Katy's posture made it clear that she wasn't interested in any physical romance at the moment. "What's wrong?"
She didn't speak for a second, but he waited, letting the silence build. Finally, Katy leaned forward and picked up the ball from the ground, setting it on her lap and holding it with both hands as she looked back at him.
"Listen, Chase, I need to ask you something," she began, her eyes staring into the ball.
"Shoot."
"A couple of weeks ago," she began hesitantly, still not meeting his eyes, "I asked you about how I noticed that some of the footballs in the locker room felt soft, and wondered if they might be deflated. You acted kind of strange, and dodged the question."
Chase carefully didn't let any emotion show on his face, but he felt his spine stiffen a little, and the prickling in his head increased. He didn't like where this line of questioning seemed to be headed. "What about it?"
"Well, I've done some more reading, and that observation kept on rising back up in my head," Katy continued. "I know that if a ball isn't fully inflated, it could offer an advantage to the team using it - easier to catch, easier to hold and throw."
The chill in his spine kept on intensifying. "Katy, what are you saying?"
She didn't respond for a minute, just holding onto the ball in her lap. "This ball that you signed," she said, looking down at it. "I didn't mention it before, but this was one of the balls from the game."
"I know that. I can see the stamp on it, showing that the referees checked it."
"Well, they might have checked it, but either they didn't do it properly, or they did it in someplace else," Katy answered. "Because I took my own pressure readings of it, and it's definitely deflated."
He reached over and picked it up with one hand from her lap, giving it a squeeze. "Are you sure? It feels fine to me."
"Well, yeah, in here it does," Katy answered him impatiently, her eyes finally flashing up to look back at him, maybe for the first time since he'd entered her room. "But that's because it's warm in here. If you take it outside, into the cold air, it deflates - and the game isn't in a nice warm room like this one! It's outside, where the balls are deflated!"
Shit. She'd caught onto that fact. In the back of his mind, Chase felt the steadily building pounding of a headache. If she knew about this, she had to have put the rest together. But how much was she certain about?
"Sometimes the balls are checked before the game inside the stadium, and they can undergo changes in pressure," he answered, trying to keep his voice sounding reasonable. "But the officials and equipment managers check the balls before they go out onto the field-"
Her eyes widened as she looked back at him. Shit. She knew he wasn't telling her the truth.
"They don't," she replied slowly, staring at him. "You're not telling me the truth!"
"Katy, calm down and be reasonable-"
She jumped up from the bed, still holding the ball in her hands as she stared at him. "Do you know which ball this is?" she said, her voice trembling slightly.
He shrugged. "I thought you just grabbed one of the extras from the equipment manager on the field-"
"You scored a touchdown with this ball," she cut him off. "This was one of the balls that you used, in the game. You handled this one, threw it on the field. There's no way that you didn't know that it was softer, that it felt different in your hands."
"Katy-"
"Don't lie to me!" she screamed out, and Chase's jaw snapped shut. He could feel a vein in his neck throbbing with anger, his head pounding as he glared back at her. Behind that glare, his brain raced furiou
sly, trying to decide how to handle this situation.
Katy's eyes burned back at him, and then she shook her head. Strands of hair bounced around her face, and a little part of Chase wanted to just reach up and sweep those back, push them aside and kiss her and pretend that this conversation wasn't happening.
He ruthlessly squashed that part of his mind, gagging its voice.
"Chase, please." The anger had leached out of Katy's voice, and she sounded more like the girl he knew. A pleading note replaced the rage. "Just tell me the truth. Answer this one question for me."
He waited, knowing what the question would be. He felt his own anger simmering, made even worse by its impotence. What could he do? What could he say?
"Chase, are you cheating?"
His mouth opened slightly, but no sound came out.
What the hell was he supposed to say? Should he come clean about everything, tell her how he'd discovered before the season started that partially deflated balls felt a bit more comfortable in his hands, how he told his coaches and they decided to use the information to their advantage without telling him? Could he convince her that the blame didn't lie with him?
Chase didn't think so. Partially, he pointed out in his mind, because he didn't believe it himself.
He might not have made the call to use the deflated balls in the games, to actually make the swap for the Hawks' advantage, but he'd been one of the conspirators. Just as Katy pointed out to him, he'd known about the deception. He knew that he was cheating, and he didn't say anything about it. In the end, an equal share of the blame lay at his feet.
Previously, when the secret seemed safe, Chase had felt okay with this level of blame. But now, with Katy staring imploringly back at him, waiting for an answer, the knowledge burned a hole in his stomach.
Maybe he could deny everything. He could tell her that she was crazy, that the ball in her hands must have been the only one to slip through without being detected as being partially under-inflated. He didn't know if she would believe him, but he could make an attempt at convincing her.
Would it work?
Somehow, looking at her face now, Chase didn't think so. He guessed that, from the stress lines on her face, she'd been pondering this question for hours, if not days. How had she kept it secret from him, not telling him during the evenings that they spent together? How long had she held onto her suspicion, letting it grow in the privacy of her mind? Had she kissed him, explored his body, while thinking in the back of her mind that he was a cheater?
She still looked at him, waiting for an answer. Chase still didn't know what to say.
"You can't go public with this." The words slipped out of him, escaping while his mind tried to think of a better response.
They were the wrong words to say. He saw it immediately, saw the darkening expression on Katy's face. "Chase, you think that I was about to-" she started, but he cut her off, not letting her even finish the sentence.
"Don't talk to anyone," he warned her, standing up to face her. He towered over her, and only now did he realize how threatening that could make him appear.
Her face grew a shade paler, but she didn't back down, angrily facing him. "If you think that you can tell me what to do-"
"I know that I can," he cut her off. Now, he could feel his own anger bubbling up, rising to a rapid, explosive boil inside of him. She presumed to just come in here and demand that he come clean about everything to her? Didn't she know the pressures he was under, that this wasn't his decision any longer?
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
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 da
ncer 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.
SACK: A Football Bad Boy Romance Page 12
