Authors: Michelle Betham
Max stayed silent for a few more seconds, taking in a bombshell he just hadn’t been prepared for. How could he ever have seen
this
one coming?
‘I knew something had gone on between you and Ryan, but…’
‘It was sex, that’s all.’
‘It’s never as simple as that with you two,’ Max sighed.
‘Well, it certainly isn’t now.’
Max looked at her again, all hard-edged ice queen with a determination not to let her true feelings show. But he didn’t think even
she’d
be able to keep that up for much longer, given everything she’d been through, and everything she was about to go through now.
‘Does anybody else know?’
‘Just Ronnie.’
‘You haven’t told anyone at work?’
‘There’s no need for anyone else to know anything. I’m not showing yet, I can pass off morning sickness as something stress-related, and… Oh, I don’t know, Max. I really don’t know what I’m supposed to do next.’
‘I take it you haven’t told Ryan?’
She looked back down at her hands, shaking her head. ‘But I think I need to do that.’ She looked up at him, her eyes meeting his. ‘Don’t I?’
Max sighed again, walking over to the window. ‘I have no idea how he’s going to take this news.’
Amber continued to stare at her hands, the confusion she was already feeling doubling in intensity. ‘I’ve really messed up, haven’t I?’
Max turned around to face her, shoving his hands in his pockets. ‘It takes two, kiddo.’
‘He’s over there in Tenerife for no reason other than to try and get his head straight, and I’m about to drop
this
on him? So what was the point, huh? What was the point of him going over there if all this shit is about to kick off? How is any of this going to help him sort himself out?’
‘Okay, okay. Don’t get hysterical. Look, in a way, it’s probably best he
is
over there. It’ll give him some space to get his head around everything. If he was back here, I think there’d be a far greater chance of him going off the rails.’
‘You reckon?’
‘I know him.’
‘Yeah. So do I, remember?’ Amber threw her head back, running her hands through her hair. ‘That’s it. Decision made. I’m going to see him. ’She sat up, looking straight at her agent. ‘This afternoon. I’m coming with you. To Tenerife.’
‘Are you out of your fucking mind, Amber? You can’t just up and leave on the spur of the moment. What about work?’
‘I’ll tell them I need some time off. Surely you can sort something out for me, it’s what you’re good at, isn’t it? Come on, Max. Please. I don’t think I can go through the entire weekend with this hanging over me, avoiding conversations with people because I know they can tell something’s wrong, but I can’t say what. Not yet. Because I need to see Ryan first.’
‘Jesus, you kill me. You and Ryan, the pair of you – you fucking kill me.’
Amber stood up, walking over to Max, her hands in the pockets of her black trouser suit. ‘You know I need to do this, Max. I need to speak to him first. Before it all goes public. He deserves that at least.’
He looked at her. ‘You’re avoiding Jim, that’s what you’re doing. Come on, Amber. I know he’s down here this weekend…’
‘You have no idea what’s going on in my head right now, Max. The man I love with every inch of my heart doesn’t want me anymore, and I’m pregnant by a man I slept with purely to forget that fact. It’s so fucked up it’s unbelievable! So, yes. Yes. Maybe I
am
avoiding Jim – for now. Because, until I’ve spoken to Ryan, I really have no idea what to say to him. I don’t know how to handle this, Max. And I’m scared. I’m really, really scared. So, please, just get me on that flight with you to Tenerife, and let’s try and begin to sort this mess out.’
‘Thanks for doing this.’ Amber smiled at Max as she joined him outside in the hotel’s terrace restaurant for breakfast. Although she wasn’t in the mood to eat. Food was the last thing she felt like. ‘It means a lot.’
‘Well, you’re right, kiddo. This
is
a mess, but at least you came to me first, which means we can at least try and keep a lid on things until we work out exactly what’s happening. I take it you
are
keeping the baby?’
Amber just looked at him as she poured herself a cup of tea. She thought she might just be able to keep that down.
‘Okay. Point taken. Sorry.’
She sat back in the comfortable padded chair and pushed her dark glasses down over her eyes, staring out at the view of the Atlantic, the sound of jet skis already piercing the morning’s peace. It was the middle of February, the sky was the most incredible blue, and the sun was beating down on her bare shoulders, yet all Amber felt was a cold, fierce pain in the pit of her stomach.
‘Maybe coming here wasn’t such a good idea,’ she said quietly as a million memories of her visit to this beautiful island with Jim and the Red Star squad just a few months ago invaded her brain. She’d been happy then.
They’d
been happy then. It had felt as though nothing could have pulled them apart after all those years of wanting nothing but each other. Yet now look at them. Torn apart by – by what? By anything? Or by so many things it was impossible to separate them out?
Max turned to look at her. ‘Things happen for a reason, Amber. I’m a real believer in that.’
She said nothing. She’d long given up believing in fate.
‘Do you want me to come with you? When you tell him?’ Max asked, trying to direct the subject away from whatever she was thinking about, because, whatever it was, it wasn’t making her happy.
‘No. No, I think I’d rather tell him on my own, if that’s all right?’
‘That’s fine with me,’ Max sighed, placing his hands behind his head and stretching his legs out in front of him. ‘You know where I am when the pieces need picking up.’
She looked at him, not really knowing what he meant by that. Not that it mattered. Nothing mattered anymore except trying to get a situation she couldn’t quite believe she was in under some sort of control, to a point where they could at least begin to start making some sense out of it, anyway.
‘Do you… do you think it’s best if I just go round to his villa or… or should I ring him first? Shit! This is ridiculous, Max. I’m thirty-eight years old yet I’m acting like some teenager who’s got herself into trouble with the school’s most popular boy.’
Max looked at her out the corner of his eye, unable to stop a slight smirk from twitching at the corner of his mouth. ‘Just go and see him, Amber. Sitting here talking about it is only delaying the inevitable.’
She let out a quiet, frustrated cry, throwing her head back. ‘I want to run away. I really just want to run away, curl up into a ball and hide from all of this.’
‘No you don’t.’ Max sat up, leaning forward slightly. ‘Look, kiddo. You can tackle most shit, because I’ve seen you do it. You’ve got a reputation as this beautiful, smart, intelligent woman…’
Amber raised an eyebrow at the word
‘intelligent’
. She wasn’t so intelligent now, was she?
‘You’re a smart, intelligent woman,’ Max went on, ignoring her expression. ‘Successful, talented, stunning to look at…’
‘All right, Max, you can stop laying it on quite so thick. What’s your point?’
‘You can handle this, too. You just need to make a start, because it won’t go away. And the longer you leave it, the worse it’s going to be. Do you want the press to get hold of the news first? Is that how you want people to find out about it? You can’t hide a pregnancy forever you know.’
‘Jesus, don’t even talk about the press.’ Amber shuddered at the thought of what was going to happen the day the media got wind of this little gem of a story and, given her line of work, surrounded by media constantly, she knew that day wouldn’t be too far away. And that’s why, all of a sudden, she knew she’d give up every single second of her success if she could just go back to being Amber Sullivan, local North East Sports Editor and a woman nobody cared all that much about. ‘My dad is gonna flip, big time… I sound about fourteen again, don’t I?’
Max smiled, reaching out to take her hand, squeezing it gently. ‘You can handle this. Okay? Now go, go on. Go see him. He’s not training till this evening and he doesn’t have a match until Monday night, so at least your timing is pretty good. Sort of.’
Amber couldn’t help but smile back, leaning over to kiss her agent. Her lifeline. How she’d ever survived without him before, she had no idea. ‘Thanks, Max. I really love you for this.’
‘Yeah, well, don’t tell everyone I’m such a soft touch. I’ve got a reputation to keep up you know… Shit! Is that my phone?’
She left him to his calls and made her way back up to her room, her head still spinning with everything that had happened. Maybe if she closed her eyes and pinched herself she’d wake up and realise she was still on that blissful pre-season tour, she was still with Jim, and everything was the way she wanted it to be. Because she didn’t want it to be like this.
The cool of the air conditioning hit her head-on as soon as she walked into the room and she leaned back against the door for a few seconds, letting it wash over her.
‘I can do this,’ she whispered to herself, trying to push to the back of her mind her dad’s reaction to this news, Debbie’s reaction to this news – but thinking about Jim’s reaction was what hurt the most, what caused a wave of pain so raw to rush through her at such speed it knocked the breath right out of her.
Her phone ringing stopped her from sinking into another unnecessary pit of self-pity and she grabbed it from the bed, answering it immediately. Because she knew exactly who it’d be.
‘Where the fuck are you?’
‘Hey, Ronnie.’
‘Hey, Ronnie? Is that all you’ve got to say? Where are you, Amber, because if you’re where I think you are…’
‘He needs to know, Ronnie. Before any of this comes out, he needs to know.’
‘Jesus fucking Christ… Why didn’t you talk to
me
first?’
‘Because you’d have stopped me from coming here. You’d have tried to talk me out of it, tried to make me do…’
‘Amber, sweetheart, you’ve got me all wrong. I’m not stupid. I
know
you’ve got to talk to Ryan, I know that. I just… did you have to do it right now?’
‘Yes, Ronnie. Because I can’t even begin to work this whole mess out until he knows what’s going on.’
There was a brief silence from Ronnie, and even Amber couldn’t think of anything to say to break it as she walked over to the full-length mirror by the window, lifting her top up to reveal her still-flat stomach. Funny. She didn’t think she’d actually believe she was pregnant until that bump started to show. But right now there wasn’t even a hint.
‘We should have talked about this some more, Amber,’ Ronnie said quietly.
She closed her eyes, resting her hand on her non-existent baby bump. ‘Me telling Ryan I’m having his baby doesn’t mean me and him are suddenly going to live happily ever after. I just need him to know, that’s all. What happens after that is so up in the frigging air it’s lost gravity. So don’t go on about it, okay? We’ll talk about everything when I get home.’
‘And when
are
you coming home? Only, everyone here at Cloud Sports seems to think you’re on holiday for a week to deal with some urgent family problems.’
‘Well, that’s kind of true, isn’t it?’
Ronnie didn’t reply.
‘I don’t know how long I’m going to be here in Tenerife,’ Amber continued, finally letting her top drop back down. ‘Could be a couple of days, might be a bit longer. I just don’t know.’
‘You’re with Max, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And everything’s okay?’
‘So far.’
‘You told him yet? Ryan, I mean.’
‘I’m just on my way over to his place now. Shit, Ronnie, I’m so fucking scared.’
‘Do you want me to come out there?’
‘I
am
a grown-up you know.’
‘Really? Only, you don’t act like one sometimes.’
‘Piss off.’
‘I love you, too.’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow?’
‘I’m booking my flight online as we speak.’
‘Ronnie?’
‘Yeah?’
‘I
do
love you. You know that, don’t you?’
‘I know, kiddo. I know.’
‘And I’m sorry. For being such a major pain in the arse.’
‘Don’t be stupid. And I love you, too.’
She ended the call, throwing her phone back down on the bed before turning to look in the mirror again. She tried pushing her stomach out in an attempt to try and imagine what she was going to look like when this bump finally did start to show, but it wasn’t really helping. She’d lost so much weight after Jim had left her that she couldn’t even push out the tiniest of pot bellies.
‘Well, baby,’ she whispered, laying a hand on her stomach anyway, stroking it gently, ‘I can’t put this off for much longer, can I? Looks like it’s time to go tell your daddy everything.’
Ryan pulled open the blinds and looked outside, smiling to himself as he took in a view he was fast falling in love with. It was so calming, so peaceful, looking out to see nothing but that huge expanse of water stretching way out in front of him.
He loved the little fishing village he’d been living in since his arrival in Tenerife three months ago. He loved the fact he could walk down the small, narrow streets and nobody knew who he was. He loved the fact he could wander down to his favourite harbour-front restaurant and eat fresh sardines for lunch, or take a late dinner outside and watch the bright lights of Costa Adeje and Playa de las Americas out in the distance, reminding him of where he was, and the temptation that lay out there that he just didn’t want to take anymore. He was quite happy to sit on his own with a bottle of wine and the passing conversation of other diners, or the restaurant owners who’d often sit down and chat with him about his day. It was so different to the life he’d left behind in Newcastle. But whether it was one he could live forever, he didn’t know. He was happy here, and he was enjoying this unexpected but self-enforced loan period. He was enjoying the experience of playing in another country, of doing things a slightly different way. But he was also looking forward to going home. At some point.