Hate the Game

by Rose, Callie

  “I swear, that boy can’t help himself. Oh, not to say that he’ll sleep with anything that walks. Even when he was at his lowest, he at least kept a few standards. But he never fails to hit what he aims at, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I… kind of got that impression,” I said as we entered the kitchen.

  She waved me to a stool at the kitchen counter and began making coffee. She narrowed her eyes curiously in my direction. “How do you feel about that?”

  I shrugged a little self-consciously. “It wasn’t something I had intended to do. In fact, I had very much intended not to. But I’m not upset that it happened. Well… not personally, anyway.”

  “Professionally?” She sat down across from me and turned those piercing eyes into my soul.

  “I like him,” I admitted.

  “I would hope so, if you slept with him.”

  A blush crept over my face and I chuckled. “Well, yeah. But I’m worried about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m supposed to be writing the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This isn’t your average magazine article. If it were, I wouldn’t be living in his house. This is an in-depth expose on the notorious Sawyer Dawson, and if I’m inclined to protect his career or reputation for personal reasons, there’s a good chance I’m not doing my job properly.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t want to swing too far in the other direction either,” she said knowingly. “To defend your own reputation by painting him in an unfairly dark light.”

  “Exactly,” I said with a sigh. “It’s a conundrum. I was thinking this morning that it might be better to go back home and pass this job to someone else, but… ” I shrugged helplessly.

  “But you want to stay here because he’s fun, and you want to finish the article because it’ll be good for your career.” She nodded. “I understand that.”

  I smiled at her, relieved. I thought she actually did understand. “You’re surprisingly easy to talk to,” I admitted.

  She laughed. “Charisma runs in the family. Oh, coffee’s ready. How do you take yours?”

  “Cream and sugar, but I can get it. Thank you.”

  She dumped cream and sugar in her cup as well, at twice the amounts that I used. She caught me looking and laughed. “I’m making up for lost time,” she said. “Some boy in high school told me that only ‘real men’ can drink their coffee black, and that a girl’s taste buds would shrivel up and die if she tried. So I proved him wrong. I developed a taste for it after choking it down for a few years, but then one day a friend brought me coffee with cream and sugar and I just about died from pleasure.”

  I laughed. “I did something similar,” I said. “A boy I dated my freshman year of high school made some disparaging noises about how women all had to be lotioned up all the time, so I stopped using it until college. A Secret Santa gift changed my whole life.”

  “I like you,” she said with a grin. “You enjoy a challenge.”

  “Always have. I run on spite and competition.”

  She grinned. “Well, you’ll have all the challenge you can manage with Sawyer, personally and professionally.”

  “Let’s start with the latter and work our way back to the former. Why is he going to be a professional challenge?”

  She raised her brows over the rim of her mug as she sipped. “You haven’t found anything on him so far, have you?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing in either direction. He hasn’t given me any reason to discount the claims beyond a general impression, and he’s done nothing at all to confirm them.”

  “So the challenge here is that you’ll have to prove a negative. Or at least insinuate a negative.”

  I gave her a questioning look, and she waved an illustrative hand.

  “Okay, so let’s say that you can neither confirm nor deny that Sawyer is what everybody says he is. What do you do at that point? Well, you hand him over to the public jury. You write everything you witness, and let the public draw their own conclusions. The problem with that, though, is that it lacks sensationalism.”

  “I think his name alone is enough of a sensational draw at this point,” I said wryly. “How did your family feel about it when all of that started?”

  “Oh, gosh. My mother was absolutely mortified. My father was pissed. I… well, frankly, I wasn’t surprised. I met that girl he was dating, I knew she was going to wreck him. I tried to warn him, but you can imagine how well that went over.”

  “Poorly, I gather?”

  “It was absolutely terrible. He didn’t speak to me for six months, then when it all hit the fan he was too pissed off that I was right to reach out to me. We’re much better now, but it’s taken a lot of work.”

  “Has he done stuff like that before?”

  She froze for an instant, then relaxed into a poker-face smile. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the drinking, the partying, the girls… is that something he’s done before? You said you weren’t surprised. I think that behavior would surprise me, even if I did expect an emotional fallout.”

  She pursed her lips thoughtfully for a moment, then shook her head. “I think you’re going to have to ask him about that, honestly. I like you, but you’re still a reporter.”

  “I imagine after the tabloids got wind of Sawyer’s habits, your family learned not to trust reporters,” I said sympathetically.

  “Oh, it goes well beyond that. The town wanted to do a story on my dad once after he fished a kid out of the river, and he wouldn’t hear of it. He doesn’t trust the media. He’s an exceptionally private person already. Having Sawyer’s name dragged through the mud every week just about killed him, I think.”

  “That’s a shame,” I said. I thought for a while as I sipped my coffee. “What about when you were kids? It doesn’t make a lot of sense to write an expose if there’s nothing to expose. I could switch to a human interest story.”

  She raised a brow. “You think your magazine would go for that?”

  I nodded, then shrugged. “Perhaps. It depends how I go about it. My editor takes pride in printing the unvarnished truth, even when it isn’t sensational. We have a strong reader base because of it, and with the way things are going these days, that trend will likely continue. So yeah, I think she’ll go for it.”

  Amelia smiled. “I hope you’re right. Sawyer was a great kid, really. He took his brother role seriously. He was our protector, clown, shoulder to cry on… everything a brother should be, he was.”

  “That explains a few things,” I said thoughtfully.

  She cocked her head to one side, making her straight bangs draw a slanted line across her forehead. “Like what?”

  “Like how he knows how to dance and will defend his right to a bubble bath to his dying breath,” I said with a little chuckle. “And how he prioritizes his partners in all kinds of ways. Which brings me to the question, what was his dating life like before he started his whole… ” I waved my hands, searching for the right words. “Unraveling?”

  “Ah, see, there’s where the whole big brother attitude got him into trouble.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, he liked to protect and rescue and have deep conversations. So women… girls in high school… who were immature or manipulative or obsessive would just get stuck to him. All it would take is one sob story and he would move heaven and earth to make her happy. It made him an easy target for narcissists before he got famous, and narcissistic gold diggers afterward.”

  “And he’s fiercely loyal to them, I assume? If dating one caused a rift in your sibling relationship.”

  She nodded. “It’s sad, really. He’s got such a loving, supportive family. The first thing any of these women try to do is cut him off from his loved ones, family, friends, teammates… the last chick he was dating actually cornered one of his teammates and fed him a bunch of false information.”

  “Damian?”

  She nodded. “He’s still convinced?”

  �
��Yeah, but he’s doing a whole lot of mental gymnastics to stay that way.”

  She scoffed and shook her head. “He was already looking for reasons to hate Sawyer before then, just because Sawyer is better at the game than he is. He’s the kind of guy who needs to be the center of attention at all times.”

  “Does that affect the games?” I asked.

  “It used to, but Sawyer put a stop to it. He was still dating this girl when Damian lost a game for them by taking positions that weren’t assigned to him just so he could make the goals himself. Sawyer tore into him. Damian was benched for a while after that and has resented Sawyer ever since.”

  “Were you and Sawyer talking at the time?”

  She shook her head. “But I talk to Chase. He kept an eye on Sawyer for me throughout the relationship and… later. After everything went to hell.”

  “Are you friends with Chase outside of Sawyer?”

  She offered me a Mona Lisa smile. “Is this article about Sawyer or me?”

  “Sawyer,” I said quickly. “That question was purely my own curiosity.”

  “And I like you enough to want to satiate your curiosity,” Amelia said with a toss of her head. “But not today. Today, you’re a journalist.”

  “Fair enough,” I said with a little smile. “Fair enough.”

  20

  Sawyer

  My sister had been staying in my house for a week, and she and Addison had become thick as thieves during that time. I assumed they were mostly talking about me, but I’d walked in on them discussing the best methods of contouring makeup at one point. It made me ridiculously fucking happy. I couldn’t even remember the last time a girl I was interested in was also interested in my family and got along with my sister so well. I wasn’t entirely sure it had ever happened.

  Looking over at the stands before a game and seeing two of my favorite women cheering me on was like heaven. I was playing better, the team was working together better, everything was going wonderfully. Addison and I had managed to steal a few hours here and there, and I was learning her body with the same speed and accuracy that I learned the tricks of an opposing team. I loved every second I spent with her, clothes or no clothes.

  It was official as far as I was concerned. I was well in over my head and falling madly in love with the redheaded journalist. My imagination took me years into the future, beyond any reasonable expectations, and I found peace there. I wasn’t about to propose or anything, but I knew if things stayed exactly the way they were with her, I would be buying a ring by this time next year.

  Of course, I was hesitant. I might be a pushover for a pretty face, but I wasn’t a complete moron. I’d been in love before, and look where that had ended. I’d gotten burned badly enough that for a while, I’d been sure I was done with love. Done with commitment.

  But when I made the winning goal of the game and Addison’s joyous shriek stood out from the crowd, I knew it was time to at least discuss a future. I grinned at her as I skated past.

  Outside, after the team had got through celebrating and everybody was going their separate ways, I met up with the girls by my car. “Hey Addison. Feel like going out?”

  “Absolutely,” she said, beaming at me. “That was a great game!”

  I looked at her curiously. “Why Ms. Beyers, are you actually starting to like hockey?”

  She rolled her eyes, but she was grinning. “Maybe a little,” she admitted.

  I narrowed my eyes at her.

  “Okay, okay.” She laughed. “Maybe a lot. Where do you want to go?”

  “We’ve got options all over. Polish, Mexican, Italian, Chinese, Sushi… what are you in the mood for?”

  “I could go for a pizza,” Amelia interjected.

  I threw an arm around her shoulder and squeezed. “Great. I’ll order you one,” I said, giving her a meaningful look.

  “Oh! Oh, I see. Yeah, that’s cool, just abandon me in the mansion all alone so you can go butter up your lady friend.” She wriggled out from under my arm and poked me in the ribs.

  Addison looked concerned. “Would you rather come? She could come, couldn’t she?”

  “You’re sweet,” Amelia said. “See, Sawyer? Somebody cares about me. But no, I’d rather watch TV with a pizza all to myself anyway. You two have fun!”

  She started walking off, and I called her back with a laugh. “We drove together, remember?”

  “I’ll get a ride,” she said carelessly. “See you back at the house!”

  I wondered briefly who she would be getting a ride from, then dismissed it. She had always been more than capable of taking care of herself. When I turned my attention back to Addison, she was gazing curiously up at me.

  “What’s up?”

  “How much of that was playful banter?”

  “All of it,” I said with a grin. “We give each other crap, but I love her. And vice versa. So where are we going?”

  She cocked her head to one side as she thought, then her eyes lit up hungrily. “I could go for some sushi.”

  “Sushi it is.”

  I pressed a kiss to her lips, unable to resist her infectious grin. Then I ushered her toward my car, loving how easily we fell into step beside each other. Sometimes it was hard to believe I’d only known her for weeks, not months or years. Things felt so right between us. It was honestly a little hard to remember what my life had been like without her in it.

  “Amelia’s very protective of you,” Addison commented when we were on the road.

  “She is. We had a falling out a while ago, but that was really my fault.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  I sighed against the twinge of guilt in my chest. “I told you about my ex, Lucy, right?”

  “Briefly. Left you for a football player, sent you spiraling.”

  I nodded. “Well, the woman I dated before her was honestly no picnic either. Her name was Colleen, and she was… Well, Amelia met her one time, same sort of situation as now. Sis came to stay with me for a week. She saw some of the things Colleen was doing, the manipulative stuff that I was blind to, and talked to me about it. I told her she was crazy.”

  “That seems harsh.”

  I nodded. “It was. I’m not always the most rational person in the world. Far from it. When she started talking like that, I felt attacked. I blew her off. She stuck around anyway, but the very next day Colleen was doing something… I don’t even remember what it was… and my sister called her out on it directly. They got into a fight about me.”

  “That must’ve been intense.”

  “It was. It boiled over into a screaming match, and Colleen told me if I didn’t get my sister out of there, it meant I didn’t love her.”

  “Ew.”

  “Ew?”

  “Clumsy manipulation. Crude, yet effective. I don’t like it, it’s ugly.”

  “You prefer prettier forms of manipulation?” I was only half-teasing.

  She looked at me thoughtfully. “I prefer blatant manipulation. I dare you, I’ll make you a deal, that sort of thing. Where everybody knows the stakes, even if one person is playing on the other’s competitive nature.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “Acceptable,” I said. “Very masculine.”

  She shook her head. “Only socially. It’s not like subtle manipulation is hardwired into female DNA or anything.”

  That took me by surprise and I glanced at her.

  “What? You think it is?” she asked, arching a brow.

  “Well no, not really. My mother isn’t that way, and my sisters—sister isn’t either. I’ve just never met a woman outside of my family who didn’t subscribe to the idea that manipulation was her birthright.”

  Addison laughed. “Oh, Sawyer! You’ve been dating the wrong sorts of women.”

  “That’s what Amelia keeps saying,” I admitted with a sheepish grin.

  “And what does Amelia say about me?”

  “So far? Not a whole lot. She says she likes you, but she hasn’t said muc
h of anything else about you directly.”

  “Indirectly?”

  “She supported my decision to take you out tonight. That’s a huge mark in your favor. If she didn’t trust you at least a little bit she would’ve tried to keep us under her watchful eye the whole time she was here.”

  “That was supportive?”

  “Oh, yeah. Don’t you have siblings?”

  She shook her head. “Only child here. So I guess the subtleties of sibling interactions are kind of lost on me.”

  “Makes sense. Yeah, she’s completely okay with me taking you out tonight, which means she trusts you with me.”

  “You said sisters before. Do you have more than one?”

  The question still hurt, even after all this time. There was a reason I had never discussed my family with the press. As far as the tabloids were concerned, I had sprung fully formed out of the ice one winter morning, and that was the end of it. Addison was still press, but she was also the woman I was falling for. It was a situation I had never expected to find myself in, and I didn’t know how to navigate it. She watched me as I chewed on the problem.

  “It’s all right,” she said after a while. “You don’t have to say. I’ve been in the room next to yours, I can connect the dots. I’m sorry, Sawyer.”

  I smiled at her gratefully. She’d had dozens of opportunities to bring that up over the last few days and hadn’t. I couldn’t begin to imagine why; with her job, it seemed like the perfect topic. But if she could just bypass it and let it rest in peace, she was a better woman than even I had given her credit for. I reached over and squeezed her hand.

  “Alright, sushi time! You ready?”

  “So ready,” she said, pressing her free hand to her belly. “That game took forever.”

  “Happens sometimes,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah, I remember.”

  I looked at her curiously, but we had arrived at the restaurant and there were hostesses and waiters to deal with. While we were waiting on our food, I brought it up again.

  “You said you remember. I thought you didn’t watch hockey before you came out here?”