Sasha looked up, suspicion in her eyes. With her icy stare she looked scary but beautiful in a regal way. Tom held her gaze, allowing Sasha to read his face. Finally she relaxed and lowered her head with a smile, accepting the compliment.
“I’ll think about it,” she said quietly.
“Can you take a look at this list now?” Tom asked. He reached out his arm and handed Sasha the list. “Is there anybody on the list you’ve had a dispute with – or maybe a love affair that has ended?”
Sasha frowned and Tom started worrying that the straight-forward question might have angered the Czech again, but then Sasha began looking over the list.
“I don’t really socialize with any of them,” she finally revealed. “There is just one person I had an affair with but – ,” she hesitated, looking at Tom. “Love wasn’t involved.”
She grabbed a pen and circled a name, then checked her watch and got up.
“Please, excuse me now,” she said, shooing Tom from the couch. “I need to get ready for the players’ party.”
***
The party was already in full swing when Mint, Chili and Teresa stepped onto the rooftop veranda. A light breeze from the Biscayne Bay cooled the night air and ruffled the water in the large pool which spread over the garden rooftop and extended into an indoor spa area.
“Buenas noches, ladies!” Chili yelled over at Elise and Amanda who stood at the railing. Mint groaned at the sight of Elise but Teresa was already walking over to the couple. Chili grabbed Mint’s hand and pulled her around the pool to greet the couple.
“Have you stayed strong?” Chili asked Elise. “Or are all your coins gone?”
Elise laughed. “I haven’t touched them yet.”
Mint noticed the short glance Elise gave Amanda, and the Australian’ raised eyebrow.
“When will you be shooting the next task?” Teresa asked.
“I think at the French Open,” Chili said excitedly.
Mint sighed. Since Chili had been taking part in the Supersport Channel show she talked about nothing else. Also, she seemed to have forgotten to dislike Elise.
“I’ll get myself something to eat,” Mint informed Chili and with a little nod to Elise and Amanda she left the group and strolled through the crowd. She really didn’t need to listen to Chili’s constant babbling about the show. Did her friend believe she would become famous with a few TV appearances? The Spaniard was still ranked way below Mint. She was just lucky to have been chosen to participate in the video shoots.
Mint went past the buffet, grabbed a couple of canapés and retreated to a place on a little terrace from where she could overlook the rooftop. Down in the garden, the other players were kicking their heels. Standing in midst a group of male tennis players, Mint spotted Luella. Next to her was Rafael, dutifully carrying her handbag.
But then Mint paused. She also saw the other Galloway twin coming through the entrance. Gabriella smiled broadly, pranced down the steps and walked towards Elise, Amanda and Chili who greeted her enthusiastically. She wore a long slim-fitting red dress with very high heels. She looked stunning, Mint had to admit. Walking with so much verve, one could almost mistake her for Luella.
“Confusing,” Mint whispered to herself, only to laugh out loud. A familiar face appeared behind a palm trunk. Sasha! The Czech was observing Gabriella with the same look Mint had seen before in the photos she kept on her laptop – full of longing and adoration. But then the Czech paused and turned her head as Lulu’s bright laughter rang through the garden. Sasha looked from Lulu to Gabriella and then to Lulu again. Mint chuckled. Sasha was confused, too. And clearly she still had a thing for the Galloways.
Mint popped the last scampi into her mouth and decided to check the spa, as she hadn’t had time yet to pay it a visit. She went down to the pool and walked to the very end where the water disappeared inside a little grotto that connected the outside area with the pool inside. Using the narrow pathway by the wall, she crouched and stepped inside the grotto. From under the water, green and blue lights threw reflections onto the stone walls. It wouldn’t have surprised Mint if a mermaid passed by and splashed her with her tail.
She grinned at the thought but then held her breath. Underwater a silhouette sped by. Startled by the sudden appearance, Mint stepped back and pressed her body against the wall. What was that? She stared into the green and blue cave. Somebody was diving through the whole grotto basin. At the end of the pool the figure finally burst through the surface with a loud gasp for air.
It was Polly Duke. In the mysteriously glinting light, Polly’s hair resembled disheveled seaweed and her body seemed to have grown scales. She turned around, took a deep breath and dove under the surface again. With amazement Mint watched her swim by to the other end. Again, Polly turned around without noticing Mint, and dove into the green and blue waves once more. She was obviously testing how long and how often she could hold her breath while diving through the basin.
Polly was pretty cool, Mint thought. A tomboy with short, glistening seaweed hair. A merboy, not a mermaid. Mint smiled at the thought.
Quietly crouching against the wall, Mint followed the spectacle for a while until she felt awkward watching someone who obviously assumed she was unobserved.
When Polly went underwater again, she quickly slipped out of the grotto and back to the rooftop garden. But all of a sudden, the sound of chit-chat and giggles, and the rattling of cutlery and music felt wrong. It was too loud and too bright here. Why had she left the magic grotto with the beautiful merboy?
“There you are!” a voice called behind her. Hopping over a low flowering hedge, Chili came towards her. “Where have you been?”
“Just had a bite,” Mint said.
“You need to come with me,” Chili said with a grin. “We are invited to a private party with Michelle.”
Mint shook her head. “You forgot that I have an early match tomorrow. No party for me tonight.”
Chili looked at her with big eyes. “Are you kidding? It’s a private party. With Boom Boom.”
“I’m sure it will be great,” Mint said quietly. She needed to get out of the noisiness. Leaving her flabbergasted friend in the middle of the lawn, she made her way to the exit.
***
“Hurry up!” Tom said impatiently and gestured Ted to follow him. They rushed down the fire staircase and Tom explained what had happened.
“I saw Anastasia,” he panted, taking two steps at once. “I’m on the balcony to take a last look at the skyline when I see a movement down in the garden. A couple of girls are swimming in the pool and then vanish inside the spa cave, and suddenly I see Anastasia coming through the garden, walking straight towards the pool.”
“So?” Ted asked while running after Tom. “Perhaps she wanted to take a late-night swim, too?”
“No, she didn’t,” Tom retorted. “I bumped into her when she left the player party and thought it would be a good idea to engage her in a conversation and find out a little bit about her relationship with the girls, but she kept the chat very short, claiming she wanted to go to bed early.”
Ted sighed and Tom shot him an impatient glance. Anastasia was the only lead they had so far and even though it was hard to believe that she was a dangerous psychopath, who knew what was going on inside her head?
“And then I see her sneaking through the garden,” Tom continued. “She was clearly following the other players. She is stalking them, Ted.”
“Wait, a couple of weeks ago you said the same about Sasha. That she was stalking the Galloways,” Ted voiced his doubts but Tom didn’t listen. He pushed open the door to the rooftop veranda and hurried down to the pool.
“I’m sure she followed them inside the grotto,” Tom whispered.
He got down on his knees and elbows and began crawling along the basin into the dark cave with Ted close on his heels. Suddenly Tom stopped, causing Ted to bump into him. Anastasia was swimming through the basin towards the other girls who hung onto the pool’s e
dge and treaded water. In the blue and green darkness Tom could make out Michelle’s graceful black body and the heads of two younger players, Chili and Teresa. When Anastasia was halfway through the pool, they saw her and waved.
“Stalking, my ass!” Ted hissed behind him. “She was just late for the pool party.”
Michelle glided into the water and with a couple of strokes she swam towards Anastasia in the middle of the pool. Ted and Tom crouched behind a couple of fake rocks as Michelle came closer, but the Dutch player was only focused on the chair umpire.
“Oh,” Ted and Tom whispered in unison as Michelle and Anastasia kissed.
Tom turned to his boyfriend. “Michelle is a lezzer?”
Ted nodded. “Didn’t you know?”
Tom shook his head.
“She used to beard with Marc Lewinski, who worked as her hitting partner,” Ted explained. “I had a brief affair with him a couple of years back, but he’s not back on tour with her again as she’s only playing doubles this year.”
The two girls retreated into a small cave and Ted and Tom were only able to make out their moving bodies.
“I think they are having sex!”
“No, I don’t think so. I can see their hands,” Tom mumbled.
“Good point.” Ted chuckled. “Imagine a lesbian breaking both her hands. Poor girls. They really lack a little something.”
“They compensate for it with other talents,” Tom grinned and pointed to Michelle who slowly kissed Anastasia’s neck, working her way down until she vanished under the surface.
“Oh my god. She’s giving her an underwater blowjob.”
“I don’t think they call it a blowjob.”
“Oh, shut up Mister Smartass who knows everything about lezzie sex!” Ted hissed, then tugged Tom’s pants. “Let’s get out of here.”
“We can’t,” Tom said contritely. Chili and Teresa had begun to swim laps through the pool, coming dangerously close to the two hiding guys. They would have to wait for the girls to leave the grotto.
“I wish –,” Tom whispered. He wished he had his camera with him so he could take a few pictures. He would have loved the thrill of it. But then he remembered that this was how the trouble had started in the first place – with the pictures, 30 Love and the illusory idea that all the gay players should come out at the same time.
Lying there they decided that it was still more interesting to observe Michelle and Anastasia making out than Chili and Mint swimming laps, but after a while Ted couldn’t help but yawn.
“I can’t believe we are watching lesbians having sex. Who would do this?”
Tom grinned. “Straight guys. We are doing something totally straight.”
They looked at each other. “We can’t have that,” they both said and started kissing.
***
Sitting at the hotel room desk, Morgana Doré had been working intensively for two hours on her doctoral thesis, right now editing a chapter that was focusing on several Tennis Nurse characters and their counterparts in the real world. So far Morgana had successfully detected and outlined hints of who was who in the Tennis Nurse universe.
In the last few weeks Morgana had summoned dozens of articles from the archives of tennis magazines which had been popular in the 1990s. In the evenings she had found parallels between the playing style of the players, important matches and events off-court, and scenes in several old Tennis Nurse novels.
Monica Jordan’s character was the Swedish player, Jordana Munk. If you knew what you were looking for, the connections between some players and the characters were easy to make. As in Monica’s case, the names even resembled each other, but there was also an underlying, hidden reference to the real person behind the protagonist’s name.
Munk was Swedish for monk. Not only did the English word resemble Monica’s given name, it also was a very good description of the impression she had made, at least in the first years of her career. A very early piece had been written about Monica by tennis journalist Hardy Linz, who first had laid eyes on the promising player in mid-1996. Morgana had quoted the relevant text passages in her thesis.
“A designation of grim zealousness accompanies the young player [...] Unseen before in the all-white tennis landscape, Miss Jordan makes it a habit of taking the court in a shabby hooded sweater, earning her warnings from the referees, which she shrugs off, and giving herself the graceless aura of a mirthless monk. [...] She hardly ever smiles.”
When she had come across the article Morgana had almost screamed out loud. Mirthless monk. The connection was right there! The first Tennis Nurse novel was written a year after the article had been published and Monica Jordan had left her first marks on the tour. This could only mean – Morgana concluded – that the Tennis Nurse writer had read Hardy Linz’s article and had used the image to create the name for the character modeled after Monica.
But she didn’t want to jump to conclusions in her argumentation. All this work was merely a foundation. The centerpiece of her dissertation would be an interview with the author – if Morgana should ever find her. But why not? She was getting closer and closer to the core of the Tennis Nurse world and to everyone involved in it.
Too bad there was still so much work to do, Morgana thought leaning over the table. She was completing footnotes with page numbers and author names – a nuisance, but a necessary part of the process.
The knock on the door made her jump.
“Mon Dieu!”
Morgana pushed the laptop away from her a little and got up. These young kids and their Tennis Nurse obsession! She really could relate to the addiction but it was almost midnight. Morgana shook her head as she walked to the door. Who had complained about the Tennis Nurse trading dinner going too late? Why couldn’t they better foresee when they would finish their novel and need a new one? It wasn’t that hard to figure out how long a novel would last, was it?
Ripping the door open she was ready to give a lengthy lecture to whoever it was who dared to bother her this late at night. But all her anger subsided at the sight of her visitor. It was a player she had least expected. It was a player she had read about and, after researching, had identified as the Tennis Nurse character named Daytona Black.
“Bonsoir, Morgana,” Bernadette said with an enigmatic smile. “Je peux entrer?”
OUT IN THE BLUE
Madrid, Spain
“What do you mean, you can’t come?” Amanda shouted. “For the last four months I’ve been running around with a big boner in my pocket, and you are not coming. Why are you not coming?”
She tromped up the stairs that led from the main court to the players’ area in Madrid, struggling to keep her racquet bag on her shoulder while holding her cell phone to her ear.
“Not so loud,” Elise hissed. She ran after Amanda but the Australian didn’t seem to hear her. It was too late anyway. The people who passed them threw curious glances at Amanda and grinned widely.
In the players’ café, Amanda threw her racquet bag on a chair and sat down heavily.
“I knew it,” she moaned. “I knew this was a bad idea from the start.”
Elise sat down as well and patted Amanda’s hand.
“Natsumi’s not playing Madrid,” Amanda explained. “She pulled a muscle in Estoril and will skip Madrid and Rome. She’ll play Strasbourg. We’ll have to keep the woodpecker until the French Open.”
“Well, we will see her in Paris and give her the thing there,” Elise tried to console Amanda. “It’s probably better.”
“Why is that better?” Amanda retorted, looking Elise over suspiciously. “Don’t you want to get rid of it as soon as possible?”
“Of course,” Elise said quickly. Even though she wasn’t so sure about that. To her embarrassment she had to admit the mara fascinated her. Sometimes she took it out of the box, inspected it and examined the carvings when Amanda wasn’t around. By now she was pretty certain that it had not only been a ritual item in a shrine but that perhaps some hundreds of years
ago a person had actually used it. The little hole in the bottom suggested that the mara had been attached to something – or someone.
Elise looked up. Amanda was still eyeing her with a questioning look.
“Why is it better to give her the woodpecker in Paris?”
Amanda had begun to call it the ‘woodpecker’ as a code. The name didn’t help to get rid of the ideas that more than once had crept into Elise’s head. She gulped and quickly pushed the thought of the dildo to the back of her mind.
“Since I left the box in the fish tank it’s a bit damp and it smells moldy,” Elise admitted remorsefully. “It didn’t really have a chance to dry completely because I carried it in a plastic bag.”
“Oh dear,” Amanda said, burying her face in her hands. “Natsumi will kill us if this thing rots. Unless we kill her first. This really is no longer acceptable.”
She clenched her fists.
“What do you want to do?” Elise asked.
“How about a little journey to Strasbourg after Rome?” Amanda grinned. “We could rent a car and visit a few cities on the way to Paris. We’d still be in Paris early.”
Elise considered it. They had both decided not to play any tournament the week between Rome and the French Open, but instead arrive early in Paris and practice on the tournament courts. Unless one of them made the semifinal or final in Rome, they had three or four days for some quality time alone on a romantic road trip. Also, taking a car meant that they wouldn’t have to deal with airport security and the recurring panic whenever they witnessed the wooden box disappear into an x-ray machine.
“I’m in,” Elise said. “It’s a bit crazy but I love the idea. Let’s do it!”
They gave each other a high-five and Elise could see the relief in Amanda’s eyes. Soon the dildo would belong to Natsumi again.
Love Game - Season 2012 Page 14