A Step In The Wrong Direction
1051 Words
Dominic
I stared at the article for a long time.
"Sources close to Hale describe the marriage as troubled, with Morretti exhibiting increasingly erratic behavior in the months before the split."
Sources close to Hale? I'd seen athletes do the same thing when they wanted to trash a coach without putting their name on it. It was cowardly and effective and it made me want to put my fist through my kitchen counter.
I took a deep breath because I had promised her I wouldn't react and I meant it even though every part of me wanted to call Nina and have her burn this story to the ground.
Even though I had lawyers who could make this journalist's career very uncomfortable with a single letter. Even though I knew where Marcus Hale's office was because I'd looked it up at two in the morning.
“I need something to distract me before I make a scene,” I told myself as I got dressed and went to practice.
Something was off in the locker room the second I walked in. I knew before I sat down that they had been having a conversation about me.
The silence when I walked in said it loud enough.
Everyone was doing what they normally did. Taping sticks, lacing skates, talking about nothing. Except they weren't really talking about nothing. I sat down at my locker, got dressed, without uttering a single word.
Just before I head out to the ice, Javi dropped onto the bench next to me
.
"So I read something this morning."
"Don't start, Javi."
"Too late cause I already read it." He pulled his jersey over his head. "For what it's worth, I didn't believe a single word."
"Because it's not true."
"Obviously. I've been in this league long enough to know planted stories when I see them." He leaned over and lowered his voice. "How's she holding up?"
"I don't know."
"You haven't talked to her?"
"I talked to her last night before the story dropped."
"And?"
"She told me not to react."
Javi looked at me for a moment. "And you're actually listening to her?"
"I'm trying."
"That's new for you." He slapped my shoulder pad and stood up. "Must be serious."
"It's not serious. It's a contract."
"Right." He said it in a way that made it clear he didn't believe a single word. "A contract that has you checking tabloid articles at six in the morning and showing up to practice looking like you want to kill someone. Totally normal contract behavior."
I didn't respond because he wasn't wrong and I didn't want to think about what that meant.
Practice was brutal but I made it worse. I hit harder than I needed to during the scrimmage. Took shots from angles that didn't make sense. Got into a pushing match with one of our own defensemen after a clean check that I decided wasn't clean enough.
Coach pulled me aside after the second period drill.
“What's going on?”
“It's nothing coach, just some personal issue.”
"Well, whatever this is, fix it before the next game. You're no good to me when your head is somewhere else. I need my captain on the ice, not whatever this is."
I finished practice without another word. The anger didn't leave, it just stopped being useful so I packed it away for later. In the parking garage afterward I checked my phone to see that Nina had sent four messages.
I scrolled through them one by one. The article link. The share count was already at two hundred thousand. The media requests. Then the last one which was a screenshot of Vanessa's i********: story.
So I called her.
"Please tell me you're calling to let me do my job." She replied immediately the call went through.
"What are the options?"
"I've got three outlets requesting comments by the end of the day. If we get ahead of this now, I can shape the response."
"No."
"Dominic."
"I said No!."
"Are you serious right now?” She scoffed. “Silence looks like guilt. You know that better than anyone right now."
"Sienna said if we react it becomes real so we're just going to ignore it."
The line went quiet for a second. When she spoke again her voice had an edge I hadn't heard before.
"Since when do you take media strategy from a physiotherapist?"
"Since she made more sense than anyone else in my life has in the last three weeks."
Another round of silence that lasted longer this time.
"You've never taken anyone's advice over mine before."
She said it lightly but something underneath it wasn't light at all.
"There's a first time for everything, Nina."
"Fine. I'll hold the line. No comment across the board. But if this blows up bigger by tomorrow I'm not going to sit on my hands because a woman you've known for two weeks told you to."
"Noted."
She hung up and I sat there turning the phone over in my hands. Something about that conversation felt different from every other conversation I'd had with Nina in six years but I couldn't pin down exactly what it was.
I let it go because I had bigger things to think about.
I couldn't call Sienna because I didn't know what to say. I couldn't fix the article because she told me not to. I couldn't go to her apartment because showing up twice in one night would cross a line that the contract had very specifically drawn.
But there was one thing I could do. I called a grocery service, gave them her address, and ordered a week's worth of food. Nothing fancy, then added hot sauce because I remembered her mentioning that her mother sent her care packages.
“Sir, are you sure about the no note thing?”
“Yes, I am. If she asks, tell her it's a surprise.”
If Javi ever found out that I just spent twenty minutes on the phone debating rice options for a woman I'd known for twelve days, I would never hear the end of it.
I was about to eat dinner when my phone rang.
"Mr. Ashford? This is Marcus Hale. I think we should talk.”
- Writer
