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I just nodded, because honestly, what was I supposed to say to that? Never before in my life did I have to worry about whether or not someone would be waiting to take my picture while I was out having a good time. Tommy’s hands were gripping the steering wheel tightly as he pulled out onto Lake Shore Drive, his knuckles going white. We drove in silence for a moment before he let out a breath.
“Where to?” he asked me after the tension slowly dissipated from the car. I rattled off the directions to get to my apartment before letting the car go quiet again. Tommy’s eyes were fixed on the road in front of us. The way he drove the car was exactly like how he moved on the baseball field—confident. After a moment, his eyes slowly looked back over toward me.
“So how’d you get to be a photographer for the Cougars?” He was clearly trying to make an effort at conversation, but the last thing I wanted to do was fight through a normal conversation with the guy I had imagined making out with. Especially while I was wondering if I’d have a job in the morning.
“That’s a long story,” I told him, watching as Lake Michigan went by in a blur of streetlamps and black water outside my window.
“I’d like to hear it.”
My eyebrows shot up in surprise at his comment, but I kept my gaze firmly out the window as Tommy pulled into the parking lot of my apartment building. My entire experience with Tommy was the opposite of what I’d pictured him to be. He had barely drunk anything, had no women falling over him, and he seemed genuinely interested in me. A nobody. All of those things were dangerous. They canceled out every reason I had firmly placed him in the no pile. If none of those reasons were true, then I was in serious trouble. There was no practical reason to deny the way my body seemed to react around him.
“I don’t want to tell it.” I opened the door and stepped out. “Thanks for the ride.”
I didn’t bother to see Tommy’s reaction. My mind was firmly worried about the fact that I might be out of a job by tomorrow morning thanks to a guy with a camera. Kind of poetic.
Maggie
“It’s not that bad,” Olivia told me as I hid under a blanket on her couch. When I had woken up the next morning to multiple text messages from her saying that photos of Tommy and me were all over social media, I immediately took the first bus I could grab over to her apartment. This felt like a massive disaster, and one that I knew I couldn’t face by myself.
I was kicking myself from the moment I got on the bus. I had known what Tommy’s reputation was and had warned myself not to become one of the girls that left clubs with him. Even if all Tommy did was offer me a ride home, it was becoming painfully obvious that the media loved to twist the reality into something that would draw in traffic for them. If anything, I deserved the consequences for getting distracted by the attention of an attractive man. I knew better than to put myself in any kind of position that could be questioned by anyone. The entire bus ride to Olivia’s apartment I had opened and closed each one of my social media accounts with the intention of looking at the photos myself, but chickened out before I could actually scroll to them.
“I don’t care if it’s not that bad. My face is out there for everyone to see!” I groaned.
“Well, it could’ve been a really ugly picture for people to see. At least it’s not that.” Lottie peered over Olivia’s shoulder from the opposite side of the couch. She tilted her head, her honey-blond hair falling over her shoulder as she studied the screen. Her blue eyes squinted as she analyzed the photo with a critical look that was Charlotte Thompson’s signature look. “You look beautiful in it, Maggie.”
Olivia’s eyes were also glued to her phone as she thumbed through a thread talking about the paparazzi photos. She had been giving me a play-by-play of Tommy’s fans freaking out over the new photos. He had developed a fanbase much like if he were an attractive actor or performer, and from what Olivia was reading off social media, they were ruthless.
Many of them were trying to figure out who I was. Those girls were practically intelligence officers. Within hours, they had found my headshot from the Cougars’ staff page and my name. Luckily, no other information had been leaked so far. The unhinged posts from random strangers that were fans of Tommy’s were enough to remind me that he was far from the kind of guy I normally dated. Being anywhere near him would put me in the public eye, and that was the last place I wanted to be.
“So what even happened with you two last night?” Olivia asked.
“When you started having your fun, I decided I wanted to go home. Tommy offered to take me so I didn’t have to get on the L.” Olivia would be the hardest person for me to sell this to. She could sniff out a lie better than a bloodhound on hunting days. “There was a guy waiting to snap a picture by the parking lot.”
“Unlucky,” Olivia mumbled. It was Olivia’s typical catchphrase for my life. She started using it after one thing after another went wrong in my life as a way to lighten the mood. I don’t think I had it in me to tell her it never really lightened the mood.
“None of this would have happened if we’d stayed home and watched Pretty Woman like we always do,” I whined, still hidden under the blanket.
“If we had stayed at home, you would have missed getting to talk with him.” Olivia pulled back the blanket that I had been using to shield myself from the world. She was wiggling her eyebrows suggestively like I was not on the brink of potentially falling apart. For all I knew, those groupies that fawn over Tommy after games would show up at my apartment and throw their foam fingers at me. I shuddered as I imagined that scene unfolding.
“And how does that make up for missing Pretty Woman and having the hashtag ‘Mommy’ trending on social media?”
Olivia grimaced at the hashtag.
“At least you had a good night last night from the sounds of it,” I directed toward Lottie. Olivia had sent multiple photos in our group chat last night of her sister actually letting loose on the dance floor with her and Jamil.
“You act like I’m attached to my email inbox,” Lottie murmured as she scrolled through her email inbox.
“Lottie, you are the very definition of a workaholic. Your face would be stamped in the dictionary next to the word,” Olivia replied as she switched to a different social media app.
There was a reason that Charlotte Thompson was the most sought-after sports physical therapist in Chicago. Charlotte Thompson didn’t do fun, and last night was a definite exception to her very strict rules.
Lottie rolled her eyes at her sister before she looked at me with sympathy. “‘Mommy’ is a terrible couple’s name.”
It was definitely not the most glamorous couple name the public could have come up with. I groaned inwardly at the fact that my brain was already using the word “couple” for me and Tommy. But I couldn’t deny the flutter of my heart that I felt at the idea of being associated in any way with him.
I blamed my hopeless romantic tendencies. When I met Luke, I swooned the first time that he looked at me like I was the sun and he was a planet in orbit. At that moment, I knew what people meant when they said it was love at first sight. It was amazing to me that out of all the people in the world, someone like Luke had decided to give me a chance. After Luke, I was sure I would never have something like that again. I was sure that Luke was my once-in-a-lifetime kind of love, and I was either doomed to live my life alone or never feel fulfilled romantically.
Another piece of me felt guilty to even find another person attractive or have daydreams of tracing every tattoo on a certain person’s arms and running my hands through his long hair. It felt traitorous. But what was even scarier was that the piece of me that had felt called to Luke the first time he had looked at me like I was the most important thing in the world felt like it was stirring, knocking the dust off itself the moment that Tommy had caught my eye there with Jamil and Adam.
