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I t was too quiet in the bedroom. I should have heard the sounds of boxes breaking down and stretch wrap getting sliced, but when I listened, there was nothing. It was suspicious.

Equally silent, I walked from the kitchen toward that room. Things were better now that there was more than just a narrow tunnel in the main area of the condo. You still had to maneuver around extra furniture and unpacked cartons and it still looked messy and overly full, but after a lot of work, it was also a place where someone could live. I was happy to acknowledge that there was much less of a dirty warehouse vibe now.

The bedroom was also improving. After clearing some space, I had brought the blow-up mattress from our model home stuff as a stopgap, so that Tyler had somewhere to sleep. Thinking of Iva and her previous questions about where the sheets might have been, I washed them thoroughly before putting them on and he seemed fine with it.

Yes, so far, the job was going pretty well, but I had needed help with moving some of the bigger pieces. Like the casket, for one—it felt like that was filled with lead, but it couldn’t sit in the middle of the floor and block everything. Also, there had been way too much furniture from the former rental house, so I’d had to put most of it (for now) in an empty unit until I could figure out where it should go permanently. The question remained about whether Tyler wanted to buy it or if we needed to ship it back. Luckily, the landlord out there had been very understanding when I’d spoken to him, an attitude which I personally found hard to grasp. If someone had walked away with my stuff, I wouldn’t have said, “Sure, tell him to take his time and let me know.” I would have called the police, but such was the life of a football star.

So I’d needed help moving that furniture and shifting other pieces around, and I’d turned to a nearby source to get it. He was supposed to be working on removing the rest of the wrap from the stuff in the bedroom and then flattening some of the boxes I had already emptied, but it was still quiet in there and for some reason, the door was now closed.

I turned the handle and pushed it open.

“Oren! Sweet Jesus!” I briefly covered my eyes, but I had to deal with this. “Put it down. All of it!”

He looked at me, unblinking, and let the items fall from his hands. The little wisps of fabric floated back into the box, the one labeled “lingerie.”

“What are you doing with her underwear?” I asked, but I already had a very good idea. “Is that it? Do you have any more?”

He reached into his pockets and pulled out several other pairs, and then, still watching me, he reached down the front of his pants and took out even more. He dropped it all back into the box without breaking his stare.

“Get out of here,” I said. “Get out!” I followed him through the front door, locked it behind us, and went into the leasing office to call Iva.

She sucked in a shocked breath when she heard the story of Oren and Shay Galton’s underwear. “Damn! Damn, Kasia!”

“I’m sorry to bother you, but I didn’t know what to do,” I told her again, and she also repeated her words.

“Damn! He was playing with it?”

“I think he was playing with himself,” I clarified. “I don’t even want to look at that box now but someone is going to have to wash all that stuff. Would the lingerie get ruined if I use bleach? What about some kind of pure antiseptic?”

“No, don’t use bleach! Maybe vinegar, but you’ll have to be careful because I bet it’s all really nice and expensive,” Iva said.

“It looks that way. Like tiny scraps of lace and clouds, but so sexy.”

“Right now, I’m wearing a pair of underwear that someone could make into an emergency shelter,” she said glumly. “Ugh, I wish I hadn’t heard this story.”

“I’m sorry,” I apologized to her, but I also meant it in a more general sense. I was sorry that we all had to live in a world where that had occurred. “I feel so bad that I let it happen—”

“You already know that you shouldn’t have,” she told me.

I did know that. But I couldn’t move everything by myself! I’d had to get help from someone, and Oren was already on the premises. I’d offered to pay him for his assistance for just a few hours, and I made sure that he only worked for me when he was off the clock for the condo complex.

“It was a mistake,” I agreed. “What do I do now?”

“What can you do?” she asked in return. “You let him in there and it’s not part of his actual job, so you can’t complain to anyone above me. Not that they would do anything about him, anyway.” In the past year and a half since he’d been hired, they hadn’t wanted to hear about any problems with him—and Iva’s boss in the main office had told her about some kind of familial relationship that Oren enjoyed with a person even more elevated in their hierarchy. That was why Iva had been keeping the log about his behavior. She’d been hoping that compiling a giant amount of evidence would make a difference, because reporting his individual transgressions sure hadn’t.

Unfortunately, I thought that she was right about what had just happened with Shay Galton’s underwear. He hadn’t been in his official maintenance capacity when he’d abused those thongs, and I didn’t feel like there was much I could do about it except to stop our extra activities and keep him out of Tyler’s condo.

“Oren knows that I’ve been working there.” I didn’t have to tell Iva that I hadn’t been as careful to only do my second job outside of when I was on the clock for my first one. I had double-dipped, as Tyler had called it when he’d considered hiring me, and now Oren was aware of that. He was rubber, with all his failures bouncing right off, but I might get fired—might? No, I would get fired for sure if my bosses also became aware of what I’d been doing. This was a great job and I didn’t want to lose it, and I didn’t want my actions to affect Iva, either.

“Shit,” she said. “I don’t want to say it, but I’ve warned you.”

She had, but she hadn’t tried to stop me from doing all my double-dipping. She knew that I needed it, because my dad and I were barely covering things. He got some disability money, but it wasn’t enough for our expenses and I wanted to improve stuff for him, like getting him more speech therapy and buying a better wheelchair so that he wouldn’t feel so trapped in our house. I saved everywhere I could, and I never did anything like buying thousands of lacy thongs so that I needed a lingerie box that was the same size as a refrigerator. I hardly ever went out like Tyler and I had done, unless I forgot my cooler (and I rarely did that). The summer before when I’d gone to the movies to watch him on the big screen was the first time in years…

There was no excuse. “You were right to warn me,” I said. “I guess I’ll tell Tyler that I can’t work for him, and I’ll—damn, I still don’t know what to do about Oren.”

In Iva’s opinion, there was nothing to do except move past it. “And also explain to Tyler Hennessy what happened with his girlfriend’s underwear, of course,” she said firmly.

Of course. I imagined myself doing that. “Then Oren reached down into his pants,” I would say, and I closed my eyes and covered them with my hand, too.

“Where is Shay, by the way?” Iva asked. “Why isn’t she there taking care of her stuff by herself?”

We settled into a gossip session fueled by my research into Shay Galton’s social media posts, because I certainly wasn’t getting any information from Tyler about her. “She’s in Thailand on the beach. Didn’t you see her posing with the snake?” I asked, and Iva quickly looked and was either horrified or impressed. She felt both ways, she explained, because it was definitely sexy but snakes slithered through their own feces and urine. Everyone knew that.

“If she’s smart, she washed her hands,” she announced. I heard water running in the background and assumed that Iva was now washing hers, after thinking about all that snake bacteria.

“I’ve asked Tyler about when she’ll get here,” I mentioned. “She had all the furniture packed and moved so she must like it, and I need to know what she’ll want to keep. I’ve told him that they’ll definitely need a bed.”

“That air mattress will deflate if they’re both on it,” Iva agreed. “Especially if they get busy.”

“They will,” I said, recalling how they’d made out in the bedroom while wearing their fur hats. “They were practically on fire when they were kissing in front of me, and they were standing up. Imagine if they’d had a flat surface and free use of all four of their limbs!”

There was silence from her end of the call—until I heard a little sniff. “Iva?” I asked. “Are you ok?”

“I have a problem but I don’t think you’ll understand it,” she said, sniffing harder.

“Please go ahead and tell me. I owe you after that Oren story.”

She was quiet, and I was too. “Dominic doesn’t want to have sex with me,” she finally said. I’d had a feeling that her unhappiness had related to her stupid boyfriend, because it always did. “I’m not sure if it’s because I’m so ugly right now, or if it’s because he only thinks of me as a mother or something, but he just won’t. Last night, I tried to give him a blow job and he pushed me away and got kind of mad. What guy gets mad about oral sex? Isn’t that why they’re always going to prostitutes?”

“He goes to prostitutes?” I asked, shocked.

“I don’t mean him in particular, I meant in general,” she said quickly, but I got a feeling that she did mean him, exactly him. “He was probably just tired. Don’t you think?”

She’d been right and I really wasn’t the person to ask about this, but I gave it my best shot. “Maybe you should ask him about it. He could tell you why.”

“Do know how embarrassing it is to be turned down like that? To be naked, and he pushes away your hands and says to leave him the hell alone?”

“Oh, Iva…”

“He just got home. Talk to you later,” she said, and hung up.

I sat for a moment, trying to think of ways that I could make her feel better and/or hurt her a-hole of a boyfriend, but then I had to get home myself. I checked out the window to make sure that Oren’s car was gone so I could avoid him, and Tyler’s SUV wasn’t there yet, either. I went and put a note on his door, saying that we needed to talk, and I texted the same thing.

But even after I’d cleaned up from dinner and prepped for the next day, I hadn’t heard from him yet. Things only got worse the longer you put them off, so again, I texted the Woodsmen player who was now in my contacts. “Hi,” I wrote. “I got quite a bit done in your kitchen and we need to discuss your girlfriend’s underwear.”

It took several more hours for him to respond and I was in bed, nearly asleep, by the time he wrote back. “What?”

“The kitchen is fully stocked and I unpacked pots, pans, and everything else I found. Your former landlord in CA says that stuff was yours, not his. So it’s all done.”

“What about the underwear?” he wrote.

“I meant Shay Galton’s thongs and bras,” I answered. “Her lingerie.” Then I told the whole story. I said that I had asked Oren, our maintenance man, to help me because some of the stuff was too heavy to deal with alone. I winced, but I went ahead and also related the part about how he was supposed to have been breaking down boxes, but I saw him having a private moment with the undergarments.

And then Tyler didn’t answer for a while, which I understood. It was really gross and upsetting, and he was probably trying to get a grip on it. “I’ll have to quit working for you,” I wrote.

“Why?”

“Because Oren could tell on me. He could tell my real bosses that I’m doing another job at the same time as I’m supposed to be doing only the condo stuff, and I’d get fired,” I explained.

“Who would believe the guy who got caught with a thong down his pants? I’ll tell them that you don’t work for me, that he’s a fucking liar who was jerking off with my girlfriend’s stuff.”

I read that and shook my head. “But I was the one who let Oren into your apartment to do that,” I countered.

“You don’t have to quit.”

“Why?” I typed quickly, and waited for a while before he responded again.

“Because I’ll back you up,” he finally wrote. “I’m eating the food you got.”

“Good. I’m really sorry about Oren.”

“Come to the training building tomorrow,” Tyler wrote.

Huh?Did he mean that he would lie for me, and that I should keep doing the double-dip? Where did he want me to go—the Woodsmen practice facility?

But he didn’t respond again, no matter what else I wrote. I thought that I understood the location he’d meant, anyway. The team held all their summer practices at a separate building, not the stadium. It was kind of in the middle of nowhere, a big, ugly place that looked a lot like an orange prison. I’d spent plenty of time there because fans always hung around outside the gate to watch the players come and go and to get autographs. I had been one of those fans on many occasions, screaming for guys like Davis Blake and Knox Lynch, holding out my autograph book to whoever would slow down enough to sign it.

Tyler must have meant for me to go inside, though. Despite how bad things had been with Oren and with Iva’s sad story, I got very excited.

I told my father about it the next morning—I told him about my visit to the Woodsmen practice facility, not any of the other stuff. He certainly didn’t need to worry about me losing my job. “I’m not sure why Tyler wants me to go, unless there’s something that needs my organizational help. Maybe his locker?” I asked skeptically.

“Don’t you go into the locker room,” Dad ordered.

“Plenty of people are in there besides the players,” I said. “There are journalists, photographers, and Woodsmen staff. The guys aren’t walking around naked.” I didn’t think so, but maybe they were. Anyway, I had already viewed Tyler’s naked body. I thought about that, as I had quite a bit since the day that I’d gone into his bathroom and seen him so clearly. Then, he’d gotten out and held up that little t-shirt that didn’t cover him for crap. He still wasn’t the best about keeping clothes on but the bathroom doors could shut now, since I’d partially emptied the bedroom. I’d also bought him towels so he could also wrap himself in those…it was kind of a shame.

“Kasia.”

I looked across the table, embarrassed. Couldn’t I keep my thoughts clear of Tyler’s amazing butt and those pecs…good grief. Couldn’t I keep my mind clear of that for the fifteen minutes it took for us to eat breakfast? I could, I told myself. “Do you want to come with me?” I suggested. “I can write and ask, and then you could see the inside of the practice facility, too.”

“No, I don’t think so. I’m feeling tired.”

I kept track of when Dad left the house, and it had been thirteen days since the last time. “I don’t have to go there either,” I said. “You and I could do something else. Didn’t you need more ties to hold up the tomato plants?”

“You can’t miss seeing this opportunity,” he said. I passed over a napkin, and he carefully dabbed the side of his mouth. “We can go to the hardware store another time. Take pictures.”

I would, as I always did.

More information had come from Tyler while I was asleep: “10” and “Pass is on the table.” I guessed that it was some kind of pass to get inside the parking lot, because there was a guard shack and they were very careful about who was allowed to enter. From my house, the condo complex was the opposite direction from that place, so I hurried over to get the pass at Tyler’s and then drove out into the country. My dad called me on the second leg.

“Hello, it’s your father,” he said when I answered.

“I know,” I told him, smiling. He always said that.

“I read about what the team is doing today,” he continued. I had bookmarked several good Woodsmen fan sites on his tablet, and he kept up with the news and gossip pretty well. “Their families are coming to have a lunch.”

“Really? It’s like a party?”

No, there would be a practice, he explained. It would be light, though, and family members were invited to watch. Then they would have a big meal together so everyone could meet before the players left on their team trip to Mackinac Island. After they came back from that, it would be time for the preseason.

“I didn’t know they had this event,” I said, and my father explained that it was new as of this season. They were working harder on team relationship stuff, and part of that was trying to bring together the players’ families. “Family” was a constant theme for the whole organization: the fans, players, and employees were all part of the Woodsmen family. We belonged.

“But I’m not really related to anyone and I barely know Tyler.” Barely Tyler. Bare Tyler…there I went again. “Why would he have invited me?” I asked, refocusing. I looked at my dashboard where I had carefully placed the parking pass. Later, I would put it in a plastic baggie and tape it into my autograph book—and that was in my purse, just in case any of the players wanted to sign it.

Dad didn’t know the answer to my question. “Be careful taking pictures,” he warned. “They may not appreciate it, since this isn’t like Fan Day. It’s not for publicity.”

But there was some publicity stuff happening. I discovered that when I arrived at the practice facility, the ugly building painted in the beautiful shade of Woodsmen orange. I pointed out my pass to the security guard and he waved me right into the lot, which looked more crowded than when I’d been here before and had spied over the top of the fence. There were many extra people, including some real photographers. One was snapping shots as we got out of our cars and I tucked back my hair and smiled into a lens, having no idea why she’d want to record my presence.

“Can you send that to me?” I asked. I could give it to my dad.

“We’ll share a link to a website with all the images,” she said, and I went with everyone else toward the big building.

This was a very, very different experience from Fan Day. I had been part of that as a spectator, someone watching the players from across a table and monitored by Woodsmen employees. Not that it wasn’t great, but this? It was amazing! They were all here, including guys from the old teams. I spotted a retired member of the D-line, Vashon Shultz, and I loved him. I almost got teary when I saw him again—and there were so many others. Gunnar Christensen! Good grief, I did have to wipe away tears, even though I could see him whenever I wanted. He and his wife owned a bookstore nearby, and they were often there with their kids.

I was just overwhelmed, because not only were those guys milling around but all the current players were here, too. That included the one I actually knew and who approached when he saw me. “Hi,” I told Tyler. “Thanks for inviting me to this. Why did you?”

“Hi,” he answered. “I thought you liked the Woodsmen shit.”

“I do!” I said. “I’ll come to all the Woodsmen shit if you ask me. Are you going to practice now?”

“You get to watch,” he said.

“I’ve never been to an actual practice, and I’m really excited. Except, are they going to try to hurt you?”

“We’ll see.”

I looked around more. “Is Shay Galton here?”

“No, she’s in Miami at a club opening.”

“Do you have other family attending? Your mom?”

But then one of the coaches was calling all the current players, and the rest of us followed them toward the indoor field. There were bleachers set up with individual cushions with the Woodsmen logo, and I wondered if they were meant to be souvenirs. My father would have loved to have one.

The family of the new Woodsmen offensive coordinator sat next to me on their own cushions. His wife introduced herself as Alicia Nour and she was very nice, and her kids were funny. They knew as much about the team as I did so we talked for a while, but they got quiet when I said that I was here for Tyler.

“Tyler Hennessy?” one of the daughters asked, and she exchanged a look with her little brother. “I’m not going to say anything.”

“What would you say?” I asked.

“Dalila!” her mother interrupted. She shook her head sternly. “We don’t know him very well, not yet. I’m looking forward to getting to know him better.” Her daughter made a face as if she’d just found a hornworm on a tomato leaf.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Alicia said firmly, and a whistle blew as the practice started. She got distracted by watching her husband and the players, and also when her youngest son dropped her phone under the bleachers and her little daughter started to cry.

“What’s wrong with Tyler?” I whispered to the girl she’d called Dalila.

She had plenty to say when her mom wasn’t listening. “He’s a real booty hole. Wait, are you his girlfriend?”

I laughed. “No! Why is he a booty hole?”

She thought he must have been born that way, and it was a shame, but some kids came out nasty (like a girl in her class…that was a story I tried to head off, because I wanted to hear about Tyler). Basically, he’d done nothing to endear himself to anyone, not to the coaches and not to the other players.

“He complains. He says that the stadium is small and a piece of shit.” Her eyes slid to her mother, but she was heading off with the younger boy and the tiny girl to try to get under the bleachers. “He says that the guys on the offense suck, that Kayden Matthews is a terrible QB, that the coach doesn’t know what he’s doing. The O-line is weak, the running backs are slow, and the worst part—”

“There’s something worse?”

She nodded. “He started making fun of César, César Hidalgo.”

I knew all about our former tight end, the guy who’d held the starting job until he’d retired and the team had signed Tyler. “What did he say about Hidalgo?”

“That he was old and he should have retired three seasons ago. Nobody liked that, especially since César isn’t there to defend himself.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked her. She knew everything.

“I make my brother Omar eavesdrop on my mom and dad,” she said. “I pay him a buck for every juicy thing he tells me. They won’t ever get mad at him because he was the baby for so long before Salma was born. He’s such a baby,” she told me, rolling her eyes. She wanted to watch the practice then, and so did I, but she’d given me a lot to think about. I knew that Tyler hadn’t been the most popular guy on his former team in California, not according to all the gossip from out there. He certainly hadn’t always been the friendliest person to me, either, and yeah, he had been outright rude more than once.

Ok, so he was just a booty hole. Not always, though, I told myself. He hadn’t been when he’d waited for me, to walk me to my car. He always did that when he came home and found me working in his condo. He wasn’t rude when we were together there, either, although I could also say that he wasn’t always the friendliest, or the most clothed. But to go out of his way to insult his teammates? It almost seemed like…no, he wouldn’t have purposefully antagonized them. Right?

Anyway, he wasn’t doing that today and no one seemed to be trying to truck him, which made me glad. I watched as players laughed and talked to each other, but no one was chatting with Tyler. Well, if he’d behaved the way the girl had just described, why would they have? He performed in practice just as well as the other guys, as far as I could tell. If I was being totally honest, he probably did better—but all the Woodsmen were awesome, as always.

I was bursting with questions by the time that they came out of the showers and it was time for everyone to go in for lunch, which was a huge and lavish buffet. I took some surreptitious pictures to show my dad, and I’d taken them of the practice, too. I watched now as the guys started to stream out towards us, smiling as they joined their wives, girlfriends, kids, and sometimes parents. They all seemed to have people here, but Tyler hadn’t answered about where his own mother was, and Shay Galton was in…where was she again? Somewhere fun, and I could check her social media later.

Tyler finally came out, too, and he looked around briefly before his eyes landed on me. Then he smiled, and I felt just the same as when he’d done that once before: as if someone had opened a curtain and let sunshine pour in. I smiled back as he walked quickly over.

“That was a good practice,” I said, and he nodded.

“Not bad,” he answered. “Are you hungry?”

I was, and I wanted to try everything so I got a plate and started to fill it. We talked as we moved down the buffet line, about how the workout had gone, about him learning the playbook, and about the woman in Building D who had called me three times today, a Saturday, to complain about misplacing her wallet in her condo—or she could have lost it at work, at the grocery store, or at the gym, and she wanted to know if I could find it. I followed him toward the long tables, which I guessed were set up so that everyone would eat communally and meet new people. But it seemed to be dividing so that the offense, defense, and special teams players self-selected to be near each other. Jory Morin from the O-line sat with his wife, each of them holding one of their twins. She was next to the quarterback and they were surrounded by the center, right tackle, and two of the receivers. But we didn’t join that group.

“Let’s go here,” Tyler said, and he picked a spot at the end of the table where the special teams guys sat, which was also the farthest away from everyone else.

“Ok,” I said, and took the chair across from him. “Is this what you guys get to have for lunch every day?”

“Yeah, pretty much the same.” He looked at my plate. “You took as much as the linemen do.”

“I got a little excited,” I admitted. “I tend to do that at buffets because I want to make sure I get my share.”

“They’re not going to run out. Here, I’ll help you.” He did that by stabbing several bowties from my plate and popping them into his mouth.

“I don’t like when people touch my pasta salad,” I told him, and he shrugged and swallowed in a very conspicuous way. “Why didn’t you want to sit with the guys you play with?”

“I play with them, too,” he told me, glancing at the long snapper and the holder sitting a few chairs down. I waved and smiled, and they nodded back. There were Woodsmen everywhere, and it was a little hard to take.

But I settled down as I ate, because I was excited but also hungry. “How come you wanted me to come today?” I asked Tyler.

“You didn’t want to?”

“I really did,” I said immediately. “I’m thrilled to be here, more than I can put into words.”

“Why didn’t you ever go to a game? Because the tickets are too expensive?”

“That’s part of it. It’s mostly because my dad could never bring himself to go and I never wanted to do it without him.”

“Why?”

I shrugged and he imitated me, shrugging back.

“I heard that you were purposefully picking fights with the other guys,” I mentioned. “Is that true?”

“Is that what they said?”

“Would they have reason to say that?” I asked, turning the tables.

“Do you want the rest of that pasta salad?”

No, I was getting full. I turned my plate as well, so that he could reach it. “You’re annoying to talk to,” I let him know.

“Ask better questions,” he suggested, “and you’ll get better answers.”

“Ok, what did you have for dinner last night out of the groceries I bought?”

“I made a balsamic glaze and put it on a caprese salad, and then I grilled chicken breasts with that same glaze. I also toasted brown rice and cooked that. I finished all the chicken you put in the fridge.”

There had been two full breasts, split, which was a lot of chicken to finish by himself. “That sounds really good,” I said, both surprised and impressed. “I made pasta with sauce out of the jar. But I also made a salad with fresh stuff from the garden.” He didn’t seem as amazed by my output. “How did you know how to make all that?”

“I like to screw around with cooking.”

I had unpacked several boxes of kitchen gear, and his former landlord in California had told me that none of it belonged to the rental house there. “How did you learn? From your mom?”

“Sure,” he said. We were silent for a while. “Has that guy said anything? You know, the thong thief?”

“Oren,” I supplied. “No, and I don’t think he’ll talk. I hope not,” I continued, wrinkling my nose as I recalled the scene. “I’m going to take all of her underwear and get it really clean.”

“Don’t bother. Shay has plenty more. She won’t notice if I throw it away.”

“I guess so,” I said slowly. No, I would still wash it all. “When will she be here?”

“Maybe after I get back from the team trip.”

Then I would have only a few more days to get everything in order in their condo. I felt a lot of pressure to have it really nice—after all, he was paying me. Also, I kind of wanted her to be impressed.

“Can I get your picture?”

The same woman from the parking lot stood with her camera ready, smiling at us.

“Sure,” I said, and we both looked at Tyler. He nodded and leaned across the table, toward me. He also smiled at the camera when she held it up.

“That’s a great one. You’ll love it,” the photographer said. “Can I get your name?”

“Kasia Decker,” I said.

“Ka-sha?”

“K-A-S-I-A,” Tyler spelled. “It’s Polish.” He took another bite off my plate and I nodded, smiling again.