Natalya’s eyes narrowed to slits. “This is the life of a professional athlete, no? Go where they tell you. We can’t all be lucky enough to be screwing someone who plays our own sport.”
Charlie beamed. “Yeah, I definitely recommend it,” she said. “It’s just so much more convenient. But I’m happy you met Benjy. Everyone always talks about what meatheads NFL players are, but he seems like a really nice guy.”
“Where is he tonight?” Jake asked. “I assumed he’d be here, since we’re in his home city.”
Natalya turned to glare at Jake. “You think he wants to come to another of these parties? I’ll see him later.”
Marco stepped in the middle of the awkward threesome. “Ladies? Jake? I’m saying goodnight,” he said. He kissed Natalya’s cheek and followed it up with a peck on the corner of Charlie’s mouth.
“That must be your cue, too,” Natalya said to Charlie, waving expansively. “Don’t you two just make the cutest couple. Couldn’t have planned it better if you tried.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Charlie asked.
But Natalya had already turned to greet a bevy of college-aged guys who were on the tour as hitting partners for the women. Dan had been invited to the party, but as always, he declined.
Jake pulled gently on Charlie’s arm. “You sure you don’t want to ride back with Marco?” he asked.
“I’m sure. I’m playing first thing tomorrow. Let’s go.”
Jake hesitated, and Charlie peered at him. “Jake? You have something going on, don’t you? Who’s your target?”
He snorted, and Charlie couldn’t help but smile. Her brother always looked his most handsome in one of his fitted dark suits with a white shirt open at the neck. He wasn’t conventionally gorgeous like Marco, but his height combined with his obsessively excellent grooming—neat, trendy beard; perfectly maintained tan; longish hair professionally trimmed every twenty-one days—made him attractive to men and women alike. When he wasn’t working, Jake tended toward skinny-fit jeans with cashmere hoodies. Oversized black frames and one of his million pairs of vintage Nikes kept him looking like he could be anyone from a trendy gay Chelsea guy to a cool, youngish Park Slope dad. Charlie wondered yet again why he wasn’t dating someone terrific.
“Target? Aren’t you sweet. Like I have to attack someone to get him into bed.”
“Not exactly what I said, but hey, if that’s how it is . . .”
Charlie followed Jake’s gaze to Natalya. He was studying her intently as she air-kissed the starstruck college boys who flocked to her whenever and wherever they had the chance. Even from across the room, it was hard not to watch her.
“She’s enough to make you think women aren’t so bad, huh?”
“Oh, stop it, Charlie!” Jake snapped. He was headed toward the door before Charlie could respond, and she didn’t think she could have been more surprised if he’d turned around and punched her. Nothing upset Jake, ever. Certainly not Natalya Ivanov.
They rode back to the hotel together in silence. Charlie patiently waited for him to apologize or explain, but when they walked into the lobby, he muttered that he’d see her at the site the next day and disappeared into the elevator without waiting. She peeked into the lobby bar, hoping to bump into Marco while knowing full well that he was already in his room and probably asleep, before heading to her own room and getting undressed. She set her phone alarm and confirmed her wake-up call with the front desk and then climbed under the covers and turned off all the lights. She lay perfectly still on her back, arms and legs outstretched, palms facing up, and breathed. Four counts inhale and four counts exhale, until she felt her entire body begin to relax. It had been a great night, better than she’d even expected. She and Marco were officially a couple, at least as far as the public knew. Inhale, exhale. Her new coach had her on track to climb the rankings, and it seemed to be working. Inhale, long exhale. Her opponent the next day would be tough, because at this level they all were, but Charlie felt a rare calm and a complete confidence that she would soundly beat the girl and go on to advance in the tournament. Inhale, exhale. Everything was in alignment. This was her time.
11
bedazzled
KEY BISCAYNE
MARCH 2016
The Key Biscayne players’ lounge boasted a huge roped-off patio, flanked on all sides by palm trees and giant windows. As the early-morning light poured in, Charlie once again thought how lucky she was to have a career that followed the sun.
“All my men await, I see,” Charlie said, nodding hello to Dan and Todd and kissing Jake on the cheek.
“Why are you just staring at your phone like an asshole?” Todd yelled at Dan, while staring at his own phone. “Take her bag to the locker room and tell the attendant we’ll be ready for a stretching room in ten minutes.” Dan reached over for Charlie’s racket bag and immediately headed downstairs.
The lounge, usually packed with players and coaches draped across the leather couches, staring at their phones and iPads, was virtually empty this early: only Gael Monfils and his coach sat in the corner, drinking what looked like hot water and lemon, and a teenage girl that Charlie recognized as a wild card was asleep on a chaise longue chair wearing sweats and a pair of hot pink Beats headphones. The flat screen TVs mounted on nearly every vertical surface showed mostly empty courts. Some doubles players were warming up on Court 4, and Charlie’s opponent was beginning to stretch on Court 7, but otherwise all was quiet.
“She’s here early,” Charlie said, nodding to her opponent on the screen.
“You would be, too, if you were ranked in the seventies. She knows she’s going to lose, but be ready for her to put up a good fight. Watch the drop shots. She’s surprisingly skilled with them,” Todd said, never looking up from his phone.
“You feeling a little better today?” Charlie asked Jake. He, too, was staring at his phone.
Both Jake’s and Todd’s devices beeped.
“They’re ready for us,” both men simultaneously announced.
“Who’s they?”
“Meredith’s girl. She’s here and all set up.” Jake stood and hoisted his Jack Spade man purse over one shoulder.
“Excuse me, what?”
Todd and Jake had already reached the door that led to the women’s locker room. “Her name is Monique, and she’s got your new outfits and everything else you’ll need,” Jake said, holding the door open for her.
“Can someone speak English here, please? I agreed to a stylist for off-court help. Not for what I wear to play.”
Todd motioned toward her outfit. “I’m no fashion guy, but even I know that doesn’t scream Warrior Princess. Or anything good.”
“This is what I have to wear,” Charlie said, motioning down toward her turquoise and pink tank dress and coordinating undershorts. “I have two backups in my bag plus approved socks and sneakers. Or did you forget that my contract requires this?”
“That’s all been worked out,” Todd said. Again, his phone beeped.
“Worked out how? What’s going on?” Charlie stood, hand on hip. As a signed Nike athlete, Charlie was contractually required to wear the clothing that Nike provided for her in the color and style of Nike’s choosing. She could make the occasional request, which they usually did try to honor—preferring a built-in sports bra to a shirt that required a separate one; feeling more comfortable in a dress rather than a top and skirt; wanting thicker straps on her tank top versus skinny ones or, worst of all, short sleeves—but that was pretty much all the input she got. All the Nike-signed women would wear different variations of the same color every tournament, and there really wasn’t too much you could do about it. Turquoise and neon pink wouldn’t have been her colors of choice, but so long as it was comfortable and it fit, which it admittedly always did, she’d long ago stopped wishing for more control.
“Monique is freelance, an
d she’s dressed everyone. She happened to already be in Miami this week for a Harper’s Bazaar shoot,” Jake said, scrolling through his work BlackBerry. “Nike gave me written approval for a rebrand, and they messengered over some options first thing this morning. They’re willing to let you break ranks with the color coordination in favor of better publicity. Monique is waiting in there to put it all together.”
Jake yanked open the locker room door and Todd motioned for Charlie to walk ahead. “Just go. And do what she says.”
Charlie flashed the guard her credentials and walked into the carpeted locker room that no one except players—not coaches or physios or friends—was permitted to enter. Charlie immediately wondered how Monique had managed it.
“Charlotte? I’m Monique. Yes, I can see you are every bit as tall as they said. I really didn’t believe them.”
“Didn’t believe who?” Charlie asked.
Monique had taken over the entire stretching area off the changing room. There was a portable garment rack stuffed with hooded sweatshirts, warm-up pants, tennis dresses, skirts, tank tops, and T-shirts. Off to the side was a folding table overflowing with undershorts, sports bras, socks, and various sweatbands. Strangest of all, every single item was black.
“Your coach. Your brother. Wikipedia. Six feet tall? So few of even the models these days are that tall. But don’t worry, I sized accordingly.” Monique finally stood up. She was surprisingly unkempt, but in that fabulous, bordering-on-homeless-looking way: stringy, waist-length platinum hair with three inches of black roots; silky black harem pants with elastic around the waist and ankles; a messy tangle of silver and gold and leather chain necklaces; a men’s V-neck undershirt topped with a weathered moto jacket; and chunk-heeled, snakeskin booties that could, oddly, work for both prostitutes and grandmothers. The pièce de résistance was a diamond-encrusted platinum infinity ring that wrapped around and between all four fingers of her left hand, rendering her entirely dependent on her left thumb and right hand for even the simplest of tasks.
“I’m an athlete, not a model,” Charlie said, trying to keep her voice light. “Plus, Nike has my measurements down to the millimeter. They custom-make all my outfits. They know my sizes.”
Monique laughed. Not nicely. “Yes, well, there wasn’t time for that today. Kissing Marco Vallejo last night changed the rollout schedule, so we’re doing the best we can on short notice. We’ll patch it together for Key Biscayne and then—where are you next? Acapulco?—we’ll have it done right.”
There was so much to dissect that Charlie didn’t even know where to start. “Patch it together?”
“Come here, we don’t have a lot of time. Don’t you have to be, like, carb-loading or something at eight?”
“Breakfast? Yes, I do try to eat that.” Charlie walked over to the garment rack and began looking through the clothes. “Why is everything black?”
“Warriors wear black.” Monique didn’t look up. She was busy pairing a top and skirt together.
“I actually prefer dresses,” Charlie said. “I get distracted when I’m wearing a tank top and it twists up when I serve. What about this one?”
“Hmm,” Monique murmured. She sounded supremely uninterested. “My, there’s really not a lot of variety in tennis wear, is there? Here, I want you to try this.” She held up a relatively innocuous plain black tank and a straight skirt.
“No one wears black,” Charlie said, panic rising. “This is tennis, not a nightclub.”
“Try it on.” Monique’s voice was calm but firm: there would be no more discussion.
Charlie stripped completely naked, and stood tall: shoulders back, hips out, strong and confident and proud. She hoped to make her new stylist at least a little uncomfortable, but Monique didn’t seem the least bit surprised. Instead, she slowly moved her gaze from Charlie’s feet up to her face, coolly examining every inch of her naked body.
“Lovely,” she declared after a long moment, during which Charlie was irritated to discover herself feeling awkward. “Really just so much better than all the starving models. Beautiful stomach, real boobs, some curve around the hips. Some might say the thighs are too strong, but I think they work for you. And your ass is to die for. How do you keep it so high?”
Charlie felt her cheeks go hot. “I can’t decide if I want to kiss or hit you right now. Both, I think.”
Monique threw her head back and let out an addictive laugh. “Then I know I’m doing something right. I like you. You’ll work. Just trust me, okay? You’re going to kill it.”
Charlie nodded. When Monique directed her, she tried on the tank top and the skirt. Both were supremely basic, pieces she’d worn thousands of times, the only discernible difference from the literally hundreds of skirts and tanks she owned being that they were black.
“Mmm, turn around? Okay, I like the little flare here, but we definitely need to take the length up.” She yanked upward on Charlie’s bra straps, causing both her breasts to give a little bounce. “Good, I like that. I’ll just do a little work here and . . . here.” She placed a couple of safety pins, scrawled a couple of notes in a little red Moleskine, and turned to look at Charlie. “Okay, get back in that hideous turquoise thing and go have some breakfast. When can you be back here? Twenty minutes?”
Charlie nodded.
“I’ll have everything ready by then.”
“You’re going to alter them? It’s comfortable the way it is!” Charlie didn’t mean to whine, but there was no way she was letting this woman—this stylist—screw up her comfort level on the court. She was a tennis player, first and foremost—not, as Monique had so subtly pointed out, a fashion model. Wimbledon and the shoe debacle of 2015 were still fresh in her mind: there could be no more wardrobe malfunctions. Not one.
“Go. Leave me. I don’t have much time,” Monique said. She reached into a gigantic canvas tote bag and pulled out a sewing machine.
“Is that seriously a—”
“Go!”
Minutes later Charlie left the locker room. Jake and Todd immediately descended on her to ask a million questions, but Charlie insisted she was going to reserve judgment until she was dressed. She ordered oatmeal with almond butter and sliced bananas with a side of two hard-boiled eggs from player dining and tried her best to watch her iPad. Earbuds in. Completely ignoring her brother and coach. Concentrating on the latest This Old House was far better than focusing on her building anxiety over her upcoming match, so she chewed slowly and methodically and silently. The moment she finished, she headed back to the locker room.
“Sorry, I know that wasn’t long but I have to get dressed now. Like, this second. I’m not cutting short my practice time just to—”
Monique held up her hand. “I’m finished. Come here.”
Charlie walked over to Monique’s makeshift workshop in the stretching room and noticed two other players watching them from the lockers. Charlie could see why. In the barely twenty minutes she’d been gone, Monique had somehow managed to sew a thin band of black leather along the bottom of the skirt.
“Oh my god, you did this? Wait, when did you do this? And how? Monique, they look awesome, but there is absolutely no way I can wear leather on the court. You understand that, don’t you?”
Monique snorted. “Stop talking and get undressed. Right now.”
“But it’s leather.”
“Leather accents,” Monique corrected. “Naked. Now.”
Charlie glanced up at the wall clock. She needed to be on the court in ten minutes if she wanted to fit in her entire stretching and warm-up regimen. Acutely aware that the two other players were watching her every move, she once again stripped out of her turquoise dress. First, she pulled on a pair of the black undershorts that Monique handed her; they were the same ones she usually wore, and she didn’t even notice until Monique pointed it out that these now had a “C” and an “S” embroidered in a gl
ittery fabric on her ass. One on the left butt cheek and one on the right, to be more precise. And yet, they didn’t feel any different.
“Your skirt flips up, what, a million times each match? And the entire stadium is staring at your ass, am I right?”
Charlie nodded.
“It’s probably the main reason men watch women’s tennis,” Monique announced with authority. “We’d be downright remiss if we didn’t take care of this branding opportunity.”
“Amen, sister!” one of the players called from her locker. They weren’t even pretending not to watch. “I’d like some ass branding, too. Do you have any more letters in there?”
Everyone laughed, including Charlie. She covered her bare breasts with her hands and gave a little flounce in front of the mirror. As predicted, her skirt flew up and her silver initials were on full display.
“Here, now this.” Monique handed her the black Nike sports bra she’d tried on earlier, only now this one had crystals studded across all three intersecting back straps.
“What, do you, like, bring your own Bedazzler?” Charlie asked, dumbfounded. She pulled the bra over her head and was relieved to see that the stud backs were covered underneath in a silky soft fabric. Nothing felt any different than usual—better, even.
“Yes.”
“I was kidding!”
“I’m not. It’s an actual Bedazzler, from the infomercial in the early nineties. I have two backups from eBay just in case. I would die without it. Here, put the tank on.”
Monique had taken the standard Nike tennis tank and cut a personal pizza-sized hole out of the back—just large enough to reveal Charlie’s toned shoulder muscles and the rhinestones that now decorated her sports bra.
“That looks really good,” Karina Geiger called out, and gave Charlie a thumbs-up. “Maybe I’ll try it, too,” Karina guffawed as she ran her hands down over her large, squared-off hips.
“Thanks,” Charlie smiled. She had to admit, she agreed. Without being asked, she pulled on the tennis skirt. Though the leather was obvious to the eyes, there was nothing but that silky soft fabric touching her skin. It looked badass but felt great.