Rooster: A Secret Baby Sports Romance (42 page)

And if she’s still in doubt about my intentions, I’ve got a foolproof plan to make absolutely sure she knows how I truly feel about her, she’s going to find impossible to refuse.

That’ll all come later, though. That’s my trump card in a perfect hand, and I’m not going to do it until the moment is right.

For now, while all of this bubbles away in the background, and Lucy and I jackknife from one made up scandal to the next, from old stories I thought were dead and buried to new ones we’re trying to create between us ourselves, I have a commitment to maintain a new image I’m desperately trying to hold onto for myself. The Giants have gone 7-0, which is even better than our start to the campaign last season. I’m excelling in almost every aspect of my game, despite what’s happening off the field, and I’ve never felt as close to perfection as I do right now. I’m leading the stats board, I’ve broken more records than I knew existed and this year could be the year they finally put me in the hall of fame. In short, life does not get much better than this.

Alright, Lucy and I have been put through the mill over the last few weeks, but that hasn’t pulled us apart. If anything, it’s only made us stronger. The whole world knows about us, which is exactly what I always wanted, and even though gossip columns lament the loss of a bad boy quarterback to an ordinary looking, normal-in-every-way girl from Boston, I couldn’t be happier.

That’s part of the reason for me doing this. I’ve managed to change my image and finally get at least a portion of the PR machine working in my favor, so I want to do the same for Lucy. I want to introduce the girl I know intimately to the world properly, so they stop assuming stuff about her that isn’t true. Lucy, however, is naturally skeptical.

“Another interview?” she asks.

“For both of us.”

“I don’t know, Alex. That’s kind of your world.”

I turn the magazine to a page about her titled
What do we know about Lucy Parker, the girl that’s got Alex Vann Haden’s attention?

I read: “Lucy is atypical for Alex. Lacking appeal in almost every department, we just can’t see what’s got the quarterback so worked up.”

“At least they’re not printing stories about you anymore”, she says.

“Doesn’t this stuff bother you?”

“You know that isn’t true.”

I go on. “Frumpy and mousy looking, this snap of these two out to dinner shows just how much she’s punching above her weight, which seems to be increasing by the way. Just look at the dress she’s chosen. I could go on.”

Lucy narrow her eyes. “It’s meant to be inflammatory, it’s an opinion piece”, she says.

“That’s why we need to do an opinion piece of our own.”

“Maybe I am punching above my own weight.”

“Yeah but you’re definitely not mousy looking, I mean that’s just insulting.”

Lucy smiles at me and I take her by the shoulders. “It’s only a couple of hours”, I say.

“I hate reporters.”

“Then you’ll be careful what to say.”

“You shouldn’t get bothered by this kind of stuff, you know? You seem more bothered than I am about this, which makes me worry that you’re embarrassed about me being described that way, as though the mighty Alex Vann Haden wouldn’t dare to be with someone ordinary.”

I give her my death stare. “You really think I’m mighty.”

“Alex, I’m serious.”

“I’m just sick of everyone making stuff up, especially after what’s happened so far this month.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll never be able to change that I’m afraid.”

“This could be good for you”, I say.

“I don’t like being the center of attention.”

“Alright, I’ll call it off. I just thought-.” I go back to the magazine. “Making ends meet at lowbrow magazine Endzone, where Lucy spends all of her time interviewing college football players, and utilizing her basic degree in English to write articles that lack passion and integrity. Come on Alex, this doesn’t sound like the girl for you.”

“It doesn’t say that.”

“It says it.”

I show her the magazine, my thumb highlighting the word basic.

“What do they mean by basic? How do you even get a basic degree?”

“I guess they mean it’s easy, you know, I don’t know-.” I’m getting those eyes again. “I don’t think your degree is basic”, I say.

“It’s not basic. It’s the same as every else’s. It was damn difficult.”

“I know that honey, you know that, but everyone reading this magazine now thinks the opposite.”

“They can think what they like.” She’s shaking her head. “Basic.”

“Shall I get the car ready?”

It doesn’t take much more to convince her. With magazine clutched in her hand, we take to the car, where Lucy spends most of the journey reading things out from the article and shaking her head in maddening disbelief.

For a long time I didn’t read what got written about me, but since that bullshit scandal broke, I’ve been much more careful about keeping tabs on what goes on in press and social media and what gets printed about me. It’s an ongoing war to stay on top, but I figure that if I do the work now and set the foundations, I’ll have to do much less later on.

Lucy was the same as me, which is why she’s never bothered to do anything about it before. What they say about her doesn’t affect the way I feel about her, but I do know that if there is an opportunity for us to print the truth, then we might as well take advantage of it.

The idea isn’t to challenge something that has already been written, more to show the side of Lucy that hasn’t been shown before. It’s almost exactly the kind of thing I wanted her to do for me when I asked her to the island before the season started. If they don’t know the truth, magazines and newspapers will print conjecture and conjecture is much more appealing if it’s designed to be provocative.

“I’ve never done an interview before”, she says.

I look over at her suspiciously. “You’re kidding right?”

“Not this way around. I’ve done plenty the other way around, but none this way around. What if they don’t like me? I am boring, you know? I’m not a superstar like you. I haven’t got the stories, I’m just going to come across as boring.”

I put my hand on her knee. “Believe me, Lucy, you are not boring.”

“I’m not a supermodel, I’m not an actress, I’m not a celebrity, I don’t come from a rich family, I don’t have a title, what am I going to talk about?”

“Just let your natural charm shine through.”

“Sleepy, adaptable and timid?”

“Just be yourself. Tell them one of your jokes. You could talk about your dad.”

I get angry rolled eyes for that, and I have to apologize for being inappropriate, even though I think it’s a good idea.

Lucy’s in two minds all the way to the studio. It’s an interview for Sports Illustrated our PR team plan to sell on to Reader’s Digest in a slightly different format, and she’s concerned that whatever she says will reinforce an opinion current media already has about her. I think it’s a great idea to project ourselves onto the American press as the perfect couple, and reinforce my position as a completely reformed bad boy everywhere but our bedroom.

For someone that loves her job so much, it makes me smile to see Lucy looking so awkward on the other side of the table for once. It makes me think back to the island and how confident she was at trying to get underneath my skin and rat me out for who she was convinced I was. Right now, Lucy looks like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a huge approaching Cadillac.

The interview is with us both, and I want the focus to be our relationship - which, by the way, we have now officially labeled in the way I always wanted us to - and, of course, Lucy’s sparkling personality. I don’t mind it touching on important themes, although Lucy may still be reluctant to open up about her father. I can do the critical, tragic shit and she can do the strong woman in the shadows routine if need be, because I know for a fact it’ll be impossible for her to come across as anything other than charming. As long as she understands her role as the interviewee and not the interviewer, we’ll be absolutely fine.

We do the introductions, chat for a couple of minutes and get right into it, that is, after Lucy has made sure that nothing she says is going to be used out of context, that we are provided a copy of the article before it goes live and that if there are questions she doesn’t feel like answering they get scratched off completely.

“I should have looked at the questions in advance”, she says.

“That’s kind of not how this really works, at least not how I like to do it anyway. I much prefer a kind of conversational style, but like I say, if there is anything you don’t want me to add, or you don’t want to answer, we’ll stop the tape and erase it.”

Our interviewer is Randall Buck, a veteran of almost forty years in the trade, extremely well respected both by readers and fellow professionals, well organized and extremely laid back. I’ve been interviewed by him a number of times before and I’ve always liked his approach, even though he hasn’t always had the nicest things to say about me.

“So, tell me how you guys met, and what your first impressions were of each other”, Randall says.

Lucy and I look at each other and smile. “You want to go first?” she says.

Randall chips in. “Let’s hear your version first, Lucy. Afterward, we can find out what Alex thought.”

“First impressions?”

“Sure.”

Her eyes go to me again. “We kind of got two goes at that”, she says.

“Well, this sounds interesting already.”

“Professionally speaking, Alex Vann Haden was the best football player I had ever seen. I grew up with football, it’s been a lifelong passion of mine and I eventually managed to make a career out of it in a slightly different way to Alex, but even at that age, he was doing stuff on the field I’d never seen before. He was an absolute animal. The problem was he was an animal off it too. Personally speaking, Alex was as arrogant as they came, and that opinion didn’t really change until we met again for the second time a couple of months ago.”

“So you didn’t really get along?” Randall asks.

“We didn’t actually ever meet.”

“You spent three years together at LSU?”

“That’s right.”

“And you spent all of those three years writing for the college magazine?”

“That’s also right.”

“You didn’t interview the college football star?”

Lucy’s eyes come to mine and I feel the need to jump in. “She tried. To be fair, she tried. I didn’t do interviews back then. I got the request over campus email and I just ignored it, not because I wanted to either, because, she was right. I was arrogant, but I was hiding something else, I liked her, like, a lot, and she wasn’t the kind of girl back then a guy like me was meant to be interested in.”

“So you have a different first impression?” Randall asks me.

“I remember seeing Lucy for the first time in the crowd at one of our training sessions on a freezing day in November and thinking I’ve never seen anyone as beautiful. I goofed the ball a number of times that day because I couldn’t stop looking at her.”

“He didn’t look at me once”, Lucy says.

“I was looking, she just couldn’t believe it.”

Randall takes control again. “So you were smitten, but you didn’t do anything about it?”

“No. I mean, I couldn’t because something happened to me that didn’t happen with any other girl at college. I thought about the possibility of getting rejected”, I say.

“That sounds serious.”

“It was. It was frightening. Completely debilitating.”

“And how about you, Lucy. Do you remember that game?” Randall asks.

“I remember every single game I watched, every single play, every single thrown ball or goofed ball or intercepted ball, I felt every sack, mourned every loss, felt every win just as hard. I was obsessed.”

“And what was it about Alex that got you obsessed?”

She looks at me again with that deepness that has settled so beautifully into our relationship, and I put my hand on her thigh to give it a squeeze.

“At the beginning, I had no idea. I kind of thought he was a jerk. I wasn’t the most outgoing person at college but even so, Alex was definitely not my type”, she says.

“A case of opposites attract?”

“A case of the mysteries of love more like it. Alex did absolutely everything in his power to make me dislike him, and it worked. I hated him. I wrote about how good he was, and secretly hated him, and then realized I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I was obsessed, but it took a long while to realize, or at least to admit to myself that I was falling in love.”

“From afar?” Randall asks, his eyes lighting up.

“From the stands, and the corridors and out of classroom windows, I was falling hard.”

“And then college was over, before you two even shared a word?”

“I remember a party we both went to, I’m not sure if Alex will because he was wasted, and I thought, even though we were there with a whole bunch of different people from two completely different college worlds, I thought, this is the moment, this is when our paths are going to collide, this is where fate makes its mark.”