Blitzed by the Brit: A Secret Baby Sports Romance (14 page)

The second I’m home, I get in my car and head to Charles’ place. I’m not sure if he’ll be there, but I don’t try to call him or text him first. I don’t want him to have time to prepare an excuse. Whatever he has to say, I want to hear it in the heat of the moment.

At least, I think I do.

I open the app on my phone and let myself into his house. I hear him in the kitchen, some British band blaring out of his stereo, and the sound of something fatty cooking in the frying pan.

He doesn’t notice me until I throw the paper down on the counter. A smile begins to spread across his face, but it quickly disappears when he looks up at me and sees the mood I am in.

“Becky? Are you okay?”

“Don’t you fucking dare. Read this and tell me if you think I’m okay.”

Charles frowns, but he picks up the paper and stares at the front page. “Holy shit. How did… why… I don’t understand. Did you print this?”

“Of course I didn’t print it. I submitted the article I’ve been working on for the past two weeks, but somehow this ended up on the front page instead.”

“How?”

“Only one person had access to this. You.”

“Becky, I swear I have no idea how this happened.”

“And what about this?” I show him the video on my phone. “You seem almost angry that anyone would dare suggest we were a couple.”

“This was recorded weeks ago. I remember some kid coming up and shoving a camera in my face. Of course I denied it. We were trying to keep it a secret back then. What do you expect me to say? ‘Yes, I just had my way with her in the newspaper office’?”

“I look like an idiot, and it’s all your fault.”

I usually know when I’m being irrational, but now I’m just not sure. Tears start streaming uncontrollably down my face, and I push Charles away when he tries to hug me. It is all his fault. He is the only person who has a copy of that poem.

“Becky, look at me.”

I do the opposite, hiding my face behind my hands and turning away from him. He grabs me by the shoulders and spins me around, before taking hold of my wrists and pulling them away from my face. I look down at the floor, determined not to meet his eye.

“Look at me,” he commands.

I do as he says, although my eyes are so full of tears I can barely see him standing a foot from me.

“We can fix this. There’s no need to be embarrassed about this. I will come out and tell everyone in the college—hell, I’ll tell the world—that I love you.”

My heart skips a beat and a lump gets stuck in my throat as I hear the words ‘I love you.’ Why did he have to say that now? Of all the times to tell me he loves me, he picks now.

I brush past it. Words are not going to fix this situation, no matter how powerful they might be.

“I have interviews, Charles. They’re going to look at my writing and this is what they will find. How do you think this makes me look?”

“I’ll get it sorted. I don’t know how, but I will fix this.”

“It’s too late,” I reply. I shake my head, and wipe the tears from my eyes. “The damage has been done. You’ve fucked up my life. You’re as bad as Brian. No, you know what, you’re worse. Brian never fucked up my career.”

I run out of the house and drive away without looking back. Charles doesn’t even bother to chase after me. I can’t blame him. After what I said, he probably hates me as much as he thinks I hate him.

Charles fucked up to let the poem get out there, but it’s not completely his fault. Now he’ll try to fix this mess. That’s how Charles works; he’ll spend the rest of the day yelling and screaming at people in the vain hope the situation will sort itself out. It won’t.

Charles might find out what happened, but it’s too late. My career is over before it’s even begun. My career…. There’s one person who stands to gain the most from my failure as a journalist. Peter.

The second I get home, I dig out the bottle of vodka I keep at the back of the cupboard, a remnant from my breakup with Brian. Even back then, I hadn’t resorted to drinking at lunchtime. I pour a large amount and add some orange juice, but not enough to take away the strong taste. I want to feel it burn in my throat and chest as the alcohol works through me.

I type out an angry email to Peter, but I never send it. What’s the point? It’s like blaming a wild animal for attacking a human. They can’t help it; they’re just acting on instinct. It’s what they are. Mind you, at least the wild animals often get put down afterwards. Peter is acting exactly as I expect Peter to act. He’s ruthless and used to getting his own way. He’ll do whatever it takes to beat me to the best jobs, even if it means humiliating me in the process.

I’m still holding my phone when it vibrates with an incoming call. It’s Professor Fenwick. God, in all the chaos, I haven’t even given him a second thought. I’ve let him down. Professor Fenwick is in charge of the paper and he’s going to get an earful for this.

The old me wouldn’t have answered the call, but avoiding confrontation only delays the problem.

“Hello Professor,” I say softly as I answer the phone.

“Hello Rebecca.” In just those two words, I hear his voice dripping with disappointment. It’s like when I misbehaved as a child and my parents said ‘we’re not angry we’re just disappointed.’ “I don’t really know what to say. I thought you were above all that.”

“I am,” I reply. “I don’t know what happened.”

“I’m just your professor; it’s none of my business what you do outside of school so long as it doesn’t reflect badly on you as a student of this college. I’m not going to say I approve of your relationship with Charles. I think you should have quit being his tutor when things developed between you, but that’s not really important now. What’s important is that you let your personal life interfere with your position on the newspaper.”

“I had nothing to do with the front page,” I insist.

“You didn’t write that poem?”

“I wrote the poem,” I admit. It’s a bit late to be embarrassed about that at this point. “But I never published it.”

“It’s your name on the byline.”

“I know, but that’s not what I submitted. You know I was working on an article. You even read a first draft.”

“Yes, and I was expecting to see it in today’s paper. Instead I saw… well, I don’t even want to think about it.”

“It has to be Peter,” I say desperately. I don’t like the idea of getting another student in trouble, however I think this qualifies as an extreme case. “Peter has access to the software we use for the layout of the newspaper. He must have gone in and changed it.”

“Peter has been out of town for the last couple of days, and still is. He couldn’t have done it. You’d have to use a VPN, and even then I’m not sure it’s that easy.”

He’s right. Peter is the go-to guy for computer issues with the college newspaper, but only because the rest of us are so inept. He’s not actually competent for much beyond making sure we can connect to the printers.

“This couldn’t have come at a worse time,” Professor Fenwick continues. “You’re about to start interviewing for jobs, and now the first article they see will be a love poem you wrote to a boyfriend.”

“I know. That’s how you can be certain I didn’t do this. Do you really think I’d be that stupid?”

“Love makes us do stupid things.” He pauses, and I hear him sigh loudly into the phone. “It doesn’t matter whether I believe you, Rebecca. I just don’t think there’s anything I can do to help you now. I’m sorry.”

He hangs up. The sound of the phone disconnecting confirms to me that it’s all over. I probably don’t even have a job on the college newspaper anymore, let alone a real job as a journalist.

That’s it. I’m done. My career is finished just because Charles couldn’t keep an email to himself. I should never have written it. I should never agreed to tutor Charles. I should never have agreed to do that stupid interview in the sauna.

I should never have fallen in love.

B
ecky leaves
my house in a foul mood. She’s angry, so I don’t chase after her. Becky always struck me as the type that wants to be left alone when she’s mad.

I don’t blame her for being pissed at me. Somehow the poem she sent me got onto the front page of the college newspaper, and when combined with that stupid video, she’s been left looking fairly stupid. She needs someone to blame, and right now that needs to be me.

Becky is the most intelligent and most sensible person I know. She’s reacting on emotion at the moment, but eventually she’ll realize I couldn’t have had anything to do with it. It doesn’t make any sense; why would I share that poem with the world? Why would I jeopardize her interviews and make her a laughingstock?

The whole thing is messed up. I pick up the paper and look at the poem. I remember reading it for the first time and feeling a combination of horny and soppy. Now the sweet thing she did for me is all over the campus for everyone to see. It’s my turn to be angry.

Whoever did this hates her. You can’t publish someone’s personal correspondence—especially when it’s explicit—and not expect them to be horrendously embarrassed. Even if somehow the culprit didn’t know she had job interviews lined up, it was still a shitty thing to do. So it’s someone who hates her, and someone who has access to the newspaper office.

Yeah, it doesn’t take a genius to work out who the culprit is.

Peter has no real reason to hate her, but he does anyway. From what Becky has told me, Peter won’t struggle to get a job because his parents have connections in the city. Becky isn’t a threat to him, but I’ve seen the petty jealousy and anger in his eyes.

Part of that is my fault. If I had never gone to the office that day and fooled around with Becky, Peter would never have caught us, and I would never have threatened him. He’d hated that. Men like him don’t like being reminded they are weak, and I’d shown him up. I made him feel small and pathetic, so now he’s taken his revenge.

The only question is how did he do it? I grab my phone and find the short clip of me angrily denying that Becky and I were an item. She can’t be mad at me for that. When the video was taken, we’d slept together, but nothing much else had developed. She sure as shit would have killed me if I’d declared that we were an item.

The video doesn’t fit. Not only was it filmed weeks ago, it was also uploaded weeks ago. I check out the profile of the guy who uploaded the video, and see that he’s just some gossip monger who uploads videos of F list celebrities like me in the vain hope of getting views. Most of his videos only have about twenty views, but the one of me has thousands. Most of those presumably happened in the last few hours.

The video is a red herring. It’s just an unfortunate coincidence that someone found this video right after the poem got published. Anyone with half a brain can see that, but unfortunately it’s much easier to assume the worst and humiliate someone than it is to apply basic common sense.

Peter probably has nothing to do with the video online, but his fingerprints are all over the poem being published in the paper. I check the email from Becky on my phone in case she accidentally copied in Peter or someone else at college. Nope. She sent the email to me, and only to me. No wonder she thinks I’m to blame.

I am to blame.

Fuck.

Peter got hold of my phone. That time I went to the newspaper office looking for Becky. I’d bumped into Peter on the way out, and left my phone in the office while I spoke to Professor Fenwick. Peter must have found it and read my email.

My phone is always protected by a fingerprint scanner and a pin code, but I think they’re only activated when the phone is left unused for five minutes. Did I use the phone before leaving the office? Yes, I remember trying to download Becky’s photo. If Peter had grabbed my phone straight away, he’d probably have found it still unlocked.

Christ, he could have the picture of Becky naked too. Well, not quite naked, but those stickies covering her nipples didn’t leave a lot to the imagination.

No, I shake my head aggressively for no one’s benefit but my own. Peter is a slimy, scumbag piece of shit. If he got hold of that picture of Becky it would be all over the college by now. He can’t risk printing something like that in the college newspaper, but there are one hundred other ways to get something like that into the public eye.

I let out a relieved laugh, and kiss my phone. For once I’m grateful that my shitty phone network hadn’t been able to download the message.

My smile quickly disappears as my head turns to revenge. He’s not going to get away with this. I don’t know how to solve the big problem of Becky’s job interviews being sabotaged, or the embarrassment she’s suffering at college, but I do know how to deal with bullies.

Peter is friends with a couple of guys on the team. Most of them are as insufferable as he is, but there’s one I trust. I send a quick message to Sean and ask if he knows where Peter lives. Sean’s not stupid; he knows why I’m asking and won’t give me the address.

I think he’s out of town this weekend anyway, so you won’t find him. Don’t do anything stupid!

Stupid might as well be my middle name. It’s all people expect of me anyway. Ever since I failed that exam the college made me sit before joining, I’ve been thought of by most people as a stupid jock. Might as well live up to my reputation.

I know people like Peter, and I know what they’re like. Lots of expensive vacations, and lots of photos. It takes me less than a minute to find his Facebook profile, and it’s predictably full of status updates and holiday pictures with weak privacy settings. Peter and his ilk don’t want to keep their affairs private. They want people to know just how much fun they’re having and just how much money they’re spending.

Brag away, Peter, I’m coming for you.

I only need one picture of Peter in ski gear on the slopes with a location tag to get a good idea where I can find him. A second photo of him posed in front of the ski lodge gives me the exact address.

It’s a five hour drive, but what the hell else am I going to do? If I stay here, I’ll drive myself mad, or end up going to see Becky. If I do the latter, we’ll end up getting into a fight, and who knows how that will end. I’m going to fix this mess the only way I know how.

Long drives in America can be quite relaxing. Especially compared to Britain, where the roads tend to be narrow and crowded. The journey to Peter’s ski lodge is quick and relatively painless, although every time I see even a hint of traffic or have to slow down for a stop sign, my fingers grip the wheel tightly until I’m able to speed up and make progress again.

I make it to the ski lodge in just over four hours instead of the five predicted by Google Maps. A good job too, because when I see Peter it looks like his evening is winding down. He’s sat with his family outside the lodge as they share a few bottles of wine while laughing and joking about whatever it is rich people laugh and joke about. Probably poor people.

I stand a hundred yards from the lodge where Peter can see me. I consider strolling up to him, but he’ll just go on the defensive if I confront him in front of his family. I want a confession, even if I’m the only one to hear it. Eventually he spots me and walks over nervously. I walk behind a small cabin that is functioning as a gift shop, and he follows.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asks.

I’m a little taken back. I expect him to say something like that, but I don’t expect the genuine anger and surprise in his voice. He’s not expecting to see me. If he is the one who printed that poem, he should be looking over his shoulder every second just waiting for me to appear.

“You know why I’m here.” I step forward and close the gap between us until I can feel his cold breath on my face. I don’t touch him. I want him to be afraid, wondering when I’m going to lay my hands on him. “Why did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Don’t play the fucking innocent with me. You printed that poem in today’s edition of the newspaper and now Becky’s career is over.”

“I’ve been here all day,” he replies. He’s shaking, even though it’s not that cold and he’s dressed in layers. I’m scaring him; he can see from the look in my eyes that I’m going to destroy him. “I haven’t even seen today’s edition.”

“Do you expect me to believe that? You live and die for that paper.”

Peter scoffs. “No, Becky lives and dies for the paper. I don’t give a shit about it. It’s a means to an end. Do you really think I’m reading the college newspaper while I’m on vacation? Look around you, I have better things to do.”

I shake my head. “It doesn’t matter whether you read it or not. The fact is you were the one who stole that poem from my phone and arranged for it to be on the front page of the paper.”

“How did I do that from here?”

“I don’t know. You signed in remotely.”

“The editing software is all off-line. I can’t access it just by signing on to the college intranet.”

He’s relaxing, picking up on the doubt spreading across my face. He has to have done it. He has to been the one to betray Becky. But… but something’s bothering me. Knowing someone like Peter, if he’d done this he would want to be around to see the outcome. He’d want to watch and revel in her misfortune.

“What happened?” Peter asks. “What made you drive all the way here to threaten me in front of my family?”

“You know what happened,” I snarl.

“Humor me.”

“Becky wrote a poem addressed to me and it somehow ended up on the front page of the paper. This conveniently happened just as she got some interviews lined up for jobs.”

“You’re kidding,” Peter exclaims. “Fuck, she is screwed.”

I nearly agree with him, but then I look up and see the smile on his face. He’s happy. He’s pleased that Becky won’t be getting a job post-graduation. Even though it has nothing to do with him, he’s taking pleasure in the misfortune of others.

That proves to me he isn’t responsible. He would be there. He would be at college to watch her downfall.

He didn’t do it.

I punch him anyway.

I
t’s all
I can do to stick to the speed limit. My foot desperately wants to push down on the accelerator, but I resist the urge and grip the steering wheel tighter instead. The knuckles on my right hand are scraped and a little bloody. They’re nothing compared to Peter’s face. I wonder how he’s going to explain that to his parents. Probably some bullshit about slipping on the ice.

My phone vibrates in its hands-free cradle. I ignore it. It’s not Becky. She hasn’t phoned, text, or emailed since she stormed out of my house. I’m beginning to think I should have chased after her. Maybe she just wants me to convince her of my innocence? No, I did the right thing. Becky will realize it wasn’t me who leaked the poem and then we can focus on fixing this mess.

The phone rings again, but this time I answer it. I need to keep the phone on for the GPS navigation, and I don’t want to be distracted by phone calls every thirty seconds.

“Hello?”

“Charles.” It’s Coach. I’m not used to hearing his normal speaking voice. He’s usually either shouting at us or giving words of encouragement. I feel certain I’m not going to get the latter tonight.

“What’s up, Coach?”

“Is it true? That you’re fooling around with your tutor.”

“I’m dating a fellow student who happens to be helping me with my English literature classes,” I reply. I wish everyone would stop making such a big deal out of her being my tutor. They make it sound sordid, when it’s not. It’s so far from that.

“Shit, Charles, you really know how to make life difficult.”

“Why does this make life difficult? I can’t be the only player with a girlfriend.”

“Don’t act naïve with me, son. You know it’s going to look suspicious. You show up at college with a general lack of education, and a bad test score, and suddenly you’re getting decent grades.”

“That just shows what a good tutor Becky is. And it proves she was tutoring me when the college was paying her to. It’s not like we were mucking around on company time, so to speak.”

“That’s not what I mean. The last test you took, you got a B+, am I right?”

“Yes,” I reply proudly. I’d been damn lucky with that exam, but I’m overjoyed to get such a decent grade. The questions weren’t based on material we’d studied, so I couldn’t prepare for it directly, but the skills Becky had taught me really came in use. I much prefer exams like that to ones where you just have to regurgitate information.

“Am I also correct in thinking it was a take-home exam?”

“I guess so. Although I did the exam in the library.” I don’t like doing exams at home; too many distractions there.

“So Becky could have helped you with the exam?”

Shit. So that’s what he’s getting at. As if Becky would ever help anyone cheat, even me. Especially me. She’d made me work my ass off to learn that stuff—cheating on the exam would be an insult to her.

Coach isn’t the only one coming to this conclusion. No one can prove anything—what with it not being true—but the rumor is damaging enough. Combine that with Becky having the poem published in the paper under her name, and she’s be pretty much untouchable by any employer. She really is screwed.