Team Player

by Julianna Keyes

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I beg your pardon?” she mimicked. “You know what? It’s been a long day. You’re not the only person who gets shit on at work. You’re just the only one who gets paid millions for it. Suck it up.”

  Now it was his turn to gape. “Are you kidding me right now?”

  “Not at all.” She jabbed the elevator button and ignored him. “Have a nice night without my horrible ‘conversation.’”

  He gestured to the garbage can. “Those women don’t want conversation. Maybe I’ll call them after all! They’re less of a fucking hassle than this!”

  She flipped him off and stalked into the elevator without looking back.

  TY WAS USED TO BEING looked at. Watched, followed, photographed, whispered about. But not by his teammates. It was almost as though his guilty conscience had jumped out of bed before him, run all the way to the field, and told everyone what he’d done last night. That he’d suggested to his girlfriend that he’d cheat on her because she was a “hassle,” even if they both knew he’d never do it. That he’d been a dickhead because he felt like it.

  The looks he got as he approached his locker and tossed his bag inside were puzzled, disapproving, and curious. And annoying.

  “What?” he finally demanded.

  Ibanez answered. “Who are you dating right now?”

  Ty flinched. “What? Nobody.”

  Girardi scoffed. “Right.”

  Ty looked at Escobar. The catcher was always smart, sane, and reliable. “What are they talking about?”

  Escobar kept his eyes on his locker. “Did you go online this morning?”

  A sick feeling spread through Ty’s stomach, amplifying the feeling that had lingered with him all night after the way he’d behaved with Gwen. He and Connor had gotten into it sometimes, sniping at each other, name calling, insults—but that was different. Connor was like his brother. In the morning they’d get to the field and throw the ball around and it would be like nothing had ever happened. But Gwen was not Connor, even if she had employed the same you’re-dead-to-me strategy and ignored all five of his apology texts this morning.

  “No,” Ty said, pulling his phone out of his pocket. He’d ignored every text and call that wasn’t Gwen. “What fresh hell is waiting for me?”

  He searched for his own name, and his heart dropped as he clicked on the first result. Thrashers’ PR assistant makes house call to troubled star, Tyler Ashe! With all the hot water the Thrashers players have found themselves in this summer, it should come as no surprise that the PR team is working around the clock to bail them out. But a late-night visit to Tyler Ashe’s posh penthouse by assistant, Gwen Scott, is probably more than the doctor—or management—ordered!

  He wanted to deny it, but the color photo of Gwen entering his building, the shot so close it had to have been taken by one of the “fans” waiting outside, coupled with a zoomed in picture of him holding the elevator for her, made it impossible. Paired with the implicating headline, it didn’t matter that she’d stormed out five minutes after arriving. The only thing that mattered was that she’d been there at all.

  “It’s not like that,” Ty said, when he realized the guys were waiting for a response. “She’s my—we’re—it’s not—”

  Escobar winced. “Damn, Ty. I was hoping you’d say it was Photoshopped.”

  Ibanez leaned against his locker. “Well, I knew all along.”

  Girardi tossed a sock at him. “No, you didn’t.”

  “I suspected something,” Reed chimed in.

  “What? How?”

  “The way you look at her.”

  “Yep, definitely,” someone else added.

  “Hundred percent,” came another voice.

  “You look at her the way Jorge looks at himself,” Escobar said.

  Ibanez beamed. “Now that’s true love.”

  Ty sighed. “It’s not. I fucked it up. She left about five minutes after those pictures were taken.”

  “Five minutes?” Blanche echoed. “Why—you couldn’t get it up?”

  “You know what? I’m not talking about this.”

  “On the contrary,” Strip said from the doorway. “We’re about to have a long conversation. Get your dumb ass out here.”

  Low whistles and murmurs of “good luck” and “nice knowing you” followed Ty to the door. It took everything he had to follow Strip down the hall instead of running headlong out to the field, leaping into the stands, and fleeing to the safety of anywhere else.

  But they didn’t go to Strip’s office like he’d expected, because it was ten o’clock in the morning and the day was going to get a lot worse before it was over. Instead they walked all the way to the elevators at the end, and Ty wished like hell he’d worn something more than sweats and a T-shirt to work. His palms were clammy and his stomach was roiling, but now it wasn’t just guilt making him nauseous—it was fear. Not for himself. Player-staff relationships were against the rules, but he’d never heard of one being discovered before, so he didn’t actually know the consequences. Still, it didn’t take a genius to know he was too important to the team to penalize with just ten games left in the season. No, Gwen had the most to lose, as she’d told him at the outset. It was her job, her reputation. He put the Ashe in Thrashers. She was expendable.

  The elevator took a million painful years to arrive. Strip stood next to him in stony silence until the doors opened, then jerked his chin to order Ty inside, like he could tell Ty was still considering making a run for it. Ty shuffled in and Strip followed, using his thumb to press the button for the tenth floor.

  “I like that girl,” Strip said.

  Ty glanced at him in surprise. It would have been less startling if Strip had just kicked him in the groin. But instead of “Huh?” he said, “Me too.”

  “But this is stupid.”

  Ty scuffed his foot like an insolent teenager, his anxiety rising in sync with the elevator skipping past floors as they rose too fast. “It just happened.”

  “She’s stupid, too. You’re both idiots. For you, this is just another drop in the bucket of your shit show summer. But you should have known better than to rope someone else into your mess. And she should have been smart enough to stay away. Because you know what?”

  Ty really didn’t want to know. “What?”

  “You don’t do well when your friends suffer. You were depressed for six months after Connor went away.”

  “No, I wasn’t—”

  “Why do you think I insisted management make you see a counselor?” Strip had his arms crossed over his belly and his bushy brows yanked together, making him look like a wise, mean bear.

  “That was you? They said it was policy—”

  “And why do you think I drove out to that godforsaken cabin you built in the middle of nowhere half a dozen times last winter?”

  “You said you needed me to sign hats for charity!”

  “Management can’t touch you, Ty. They can’t punish you. But if they know you care, they’ll do whatever they can to that girl to make sure you pay.”

  “They—”

  The elevator doors opened on ten, and Strip gestured him out. “Just think about it.”

  The tenth floor was home to upper management, and unlike the clubhouse level, with its cinderblock walls and ever-present smells of sweat and testosterone, this floor looked and smelled like money. The receptionist was beautiful and aloof, the walls were a gleaming gray with teal accents, and as though the executives wanted to remind the world that they were very rich, everything else was gold. Gold light fixtures, gold vases holding flowers, gold signs pointing the way to various offices. Ty was a millionaire, but he didn’t walk around with his credit card glued to his forehead.

  Ty gave the receptionist his name, and if she recognized it, she didn’t react. She told them to have a seat in the waiting area and pressed a button on her phone, speaking quietly.

  “I hate coming up here,” Strip muttered as they sat. Ty final
ly noticed that Strip wore dress pants and a button-up shirt instead of his usual team uniform. He must have grabbed them from the garment bag that had hung on the back of his office door for the past decade, untouched. The buttons on the shirt were screaming in protest.

  “Why?” Ty asked the question only because it was expected, not because the answer wasn’t incredibly obvious.

  “Because they only bring me up here to give me advice. Most of these guys have never held a bat, don’t know how to throw a ball. But they’ve got some kid with a calculator and a computer telling them how the game should be played, and they think they know something.”

  “That’s frustrating.”

  “It’s more than frustrating. But it’s my job to let them think they know how to do their jobs. So you know what I do?”

  Again, Ty really didn’t want to know. “What?”

  “I smile and nod. And I tell them what they want to hear, then they pat themselves on the back for a job well done, and let me go run the team. A lot of people ask how I managed to hold onto this job for so long, and that’s the big secret. I play ball.”

  Ty frowned. “Okay. But what—”

  The receptionist materialized from nowhere. Her dress was gray and her shoes were gold, like her wardrobe had been hand-selected to help her blend into her surroundings. “They’ll see you now,” she said. “Right this way.”

  Ty tried to hide his nerves as he and Strip followed her down a long hallway lined with doors that opened into increasingly large offices with increasingly better views. The sky outside was clear and blue, the sun already blazing, but inside it was stark and cold.

  As incident after incident had piled up all summer, Ty kept asking himself, What next? How could things possibly get worse? And now he knew.

  He’d broken the rules, but they wouldn’t fire him. They could tell Strip to bench him, but even these guys knew that benching him when the play-off race was so tight was a bad call. They could—and probably would—fine him. They could make everyone take another seminar about sexual harassment in the workplace, let the rumors swirl that Tyler Ashe couldn’t keep it in his pants and now everyone had to pay. But even that was wishful thinking.

  The receptionist stopped in front of a door with a gold plaque that read Human Resources. Strip went in first, with Ty right behind him, his feet stumbling on the plush carpeting that appeared out of nowhere. In contrast to the rest of the tenth floor, this room was nearly all white, floors and walls, desk and chairs, filing cabinets and computers. The only spots of color in the room were the human resources manager, Darlene, as indicated by the gold sign on her desk, and two familiar faces that turned when Strip and Ty entered.

  Ty froze. Gwen looked cool but resigned, her eyes dry, her skin pale. Next to her, Allison looked positively livid, like she’d tear Ty limb from limb and stain this whole room red if she could get him alone for a second.

  They were already seated, and two chairs waited next to them. Ty sat in the middle beside Gwen, and Strip took the seat on the end. Nobody spoke. It was strange, sitting inches away from Gwen and not being able to reach over to touch her hand or whisper in her ear. Not because they’d get in trouble, but because it was painfully clear she didn’t want him to. She didn’t even look at him.

  The HR manager was an older woman with white hair clipped in a knot at the nape of her neck, her pale blouse fitting neatly with the aesthetic of the room. She had a file folder open in front of her, and Ty could see the printed copies of the photos of Gwen at his apartment on the top. She flipped through the paperwork, her lips pursed, then finally adjusted her glasses and gazed at them.

  “Is it true?” was her first question.

  “Yes,” Gwen said. “It was. But it’s not now.”

  Ty wanted desperately to argue that point, but if there was one thing he could do to make the whole situation worse, it would be to insist that the reason they’d been summoned here was still very much real and present. Especially after last night, when he’d jeopardized the whole thing for no better reason than he’d had a bad day.

  Darlene made a noise in her throat and typed something into her computer. “How long?”

  Ty could practically hear Allison and Strip bracing themselves for the answer.

  “June third,” Ty replied, thinking of their first kiss at the bar. “Around ten p.m.”

  Gwen went still.

  Strip looked at him strangely.

  The manager made another note. “And for how long?”

  “Until last night.”

  Darlene glanced at him. “Convenient.”

  “Not really.”

  She looked at Gwen. “Is that true?”

  Gwen clutched her fingers in her lap so tightly her knuckles glowed white, but her voice was even. “Very.”

  Another note typed, each press of a key sounding like a piece of a lock tumbling into place, sealing away the past from the present. Which wasn’t at all how Ty wanted it to be, but was very much how it had to appear.

  “It was just casual,” Ty said, his heart aching with the lie. But he understood what Strip had been telling him in the elevator. If they knew Gwen mattered to him, they’d punish her even more. If he could do anything to help her, it was this. “We met when it was convenient, and it had nothing to do with work. We barely speak when we’re at the field, and I’m on the road half the time anyway. It was easy and it was fun, but it’s over. I have to focus on the team, on the game, getting to the post-season. She knows my reputation. No relationship comes before baseball.”

  Allison made a sound that might have been a growl, but he plowed on.

  “Just send down someone else from PR from now on,” he continued. “It’s all the same, anyway.”

  Darlene watched him carefully while he spoke, occasionally glancing at Gwen, who sat frozen and pale, like a bird in the winter.

  “I’d like to say something,” Allison said, when the tension became unbearable. “Gwen is my best employee. She’s hard-working, reliable, trustworthy, and diligent. Her work has not been affected by this relationship, nor will it be—” That line was accompanied by a stern look of warning at Ty, “—and those photos have no bearing on her performance. Tyler Ashe had a sex tape leaked recently—”

  Ty sat up straighter. “Excuse me!”

  “—and somehow he managed to keep playing baseball. That’s because professionals know how to keep their personal lives and their professional lives separate. Yeah, they broke the rules, but we all know you’re not going to punish Ashe for this, and the same policy should apply to Gwen.”

  Darlene waited for Allison to finish.

  “Write that,” Allison added, pointing at the computer.

  “It’s noted.” Darlene passed copies of a page from her file folder to each person, typed in a miniscule font that filled the whole paper. “As you’ve mentioned, relationships between employees are strictly forbidden, and the consequences for such are at my discretion. Given Mr. Ashe’s high profile, it’s extremely unlikely that this relationship won’t affect Ms. Scott’s role within the organization. Like it or not, people talk. I’ve already received several complaints.”

  Ty scoffed. “What? From who?”

  “That’s confidential. Regardless, given the timing of this news and the team’s current position in the standings, there is no time to debate the issue. Mr. Ashe, you are free to go. There will be a financial penalty for your indiscretion, and if Mr. Ripley wishes to impose an additional penalty on you, he may. Ms. Scott, your employment with the Thrashers organization is terminated, effective immediately. If you would like to appeal the decision, that is your choice.” She passed Gwen another piece of paper. “The information to do so is included here.”

  “Are you kidding?” Ty exclaimed, getting to his feet. “She’s fired?”

  Allison was already standing. “This has to be a joke. You know exactly how much stress the PR department has been under this summer, and now you want to fire my best employee? For what? This gu
y?” She waved at Ty like he was a gnat.

  “This is overkill,” Strip snapped. “We barely see the people from PR, and we ignore them when we do.”

  Allison glared at him, but he continued, unconcerned. “There’s no need to fire somebody for a fling. How’s that going to look? You fire the woman, but not the man? We’ll have an even bigger public relations mess on our hands, and one less person to deal with it.”

  “It’s fine,” Gwen said finally, standing and looking much stronger than Ty expected. Her flushed cheeks were stark against her pale skin, broadcasting her humiliation. “I’ll go. I want to.”

  “No,” Allison said. “We’ll fight—”

  Ty started to protest, but Gwen was already halfway out the door, and soon out of sight.

  Allison whirled on him. “This is your fault!” she fumed. “You—”

  “I know,” Ty said, startling her into silence. “I know.”

  He hurried out of the room and down the hall to the reception area, where Gwen waited at the elevator. “Gwen,” he said. “I’m so sorry. Please—”

  Without looking, she turned in the opposite direction and strode to the stairwell, yanking open the door and disappearing inside.

  “Gwen!” Ty followed and found her scurrying down the steps as fast as her heels would allow. “Gwen,” he said again.

  She paused on the ninth floor landing, her labored breath echoing in the concrete stairwell. “Stop,” she said, her voice breaking, the only show of emotion he’d glimpsed that day.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said again. “I’ll do anything—”

  “No.” Her voice was fierce, eyes shiny with tears. “Don’t do anything. Don’t say anything. Just play baseball. You need to focus on your job. I should have done the same.”

  “You did. You know what we had didn’t affect your work.”

  She looked at him with watery eyes. “You have no idea, Ty.”

  “Did you get my texts? I was going to find you today, I swear. I’m sorry about last night. I was frustrated and I took it out on you. I feel really—”

  She cut him off, eyes flashing angrily, even as a tear welled over and spilled down her cheek. “My life just fell apart, Ty. I need to collect my things and figure out what I’m going to do next. I don’t have time to hear about your feelings.”