§1 — Hook
The conference room on the forty-seventh floor smells like new leather and the lemon polish the cleaners use on Sunday nights. It is Monday. The polish has not had time to dull. I notice these things the way other people notice the weather.
Across the table, Marcus Bell — my partner, the Bell in Vance & Bell — is doing the polite version of what he calls his vulture face. The clients are a couple. They have not been a couple for nine months and they are pretending, for the lawyers, to be civil.
"The morality clause stays," I say. I am looking at the husband. He is the one who needed it written; he is the one who will need it enforced. "Reciprocal. Either of you triggers it, the prenup waterfall flips. We added the publicity addendum on page four."
"That's aggressive." His attorney has a voice like an unscrewed jar.
"It's symmetric." I close the folder. I have not opened it once during this meeting; I memorized the deal points on the elevator ride up. "If you'd like to revisit the asymmetry, we can revisit the original clause."
The wife exhales. It is the smallest sound, but I hear it. I file it. She wanted this. She will sign in seven minutes.
She signs in six.
Marcus walks them out. I stay in my chair and let the polish smell settle. Twelve years ago, in a different room, in a different city, I tried to win an argument that I should not have tried to win. A trade clause. An owner who did not like a young Black agent — younger, then, and Black, still — telling him the rookie deal was bad. The rookie was traded mid-season. I was, as my grandmother would have phrased it, quietly seen to. Two years of nothing. Two years of restocking. Two years of learning that the way to win is to never need to.
I do not push back anymore. I negotiate around things.
The phone in front of me lights with my assistant's name. Maddox Holt and counsel, in the lobby. Five minutes early.
I send back a single character. A period. It means let them wait the full five.
I look at the lemon polish on the table. I think about the fact that Maddox Holt — middle linebacker, New York Liberty, league-leading fines, eight months from free agency — has come to a sit-down on a Monday morning. Players come to my office for one of two reasons: they are firing their current agent, or they are dying.
He is not dying.
I straighten the folder. I do not open it. I have memorized this one too.
§2 — Build
He is not what I expect.
I expect tall, and he is. I expect built, and he is. I expect the kind of stillness men of his size grow into when they stop having to prove anything to a room. He has not grown into it yet. He folds himself into the chair across from me like the chair has been put there as an insult.
"Ms. Vance." His agent says my name. The agent is named Briggs, and Briggs has the kind of smile that does most of his negotiating for him. "Thanks for the time."
"Mr. Holt." I keep my eyes on Maddox. He keeps his on the window behind me. "Briggs. What can Vance and Bell do for you."
"We'd like to talk about representation."
"You have representation."
"We'd like to talk about better."
I let that sit. Maddox finally looks at me. The look is not what the room has prepared me for. The room — the suit, the watch, the publicist somewhere two floors down — has prepared me for swagger. What I get is a man who looks like he has not slept in a week and is pretending, with what I can immediately tell is enormous effort, to find this whole errand mildly amusing.
"You've been fined four times this season, Mr. Holt." I keep my voice flat. "You're under a gag order from the league office for the comments after the Buffalo game. Your endorsement portfolio has lost two anchors in the last six weeks. Are you aware of all of that?"
"I'm aware."
"Are you aware that I do not represent players who do not want to be represented?"
His mouth moves. It is not a smile. It is the place a smile would go if he had the energy.
"That's why we're here," Briggs says, and slides a folder across the table.
I do not take it.
"Open it, Reagan." Briggs has known me long enough to use my first name, and short enough that he has not earned it. "It's not a contract."
"Everything that crosses this table is a contract."
"It's a proposal."
I open the folder. The top page is a one-pager. The header says Holt — Engagement & Image Restoration Strategy, Confidential. Below that, in twelve-point Garamond, is my own name.
I read three lines. I stop. I read them again.
The proposal is for me to become Maddox Holt's fiancée. Six months. The morality clause in his current deal triggers next March; an engaged man scores 41% better in league image polling than a single one with his rap sheet. The math is on page two. Page three is the term sheet — exclusive client representation through next contract cycle, agency Series-A introduction at Liberty owner level, public split protocol drafted by Vance and Bell.
The pen in my top drawer, the one I keep for closings I expect to win, suddenly feels very far away from this room.
§3 — Twist
"You're joking." I keep my voice flat. The flatness is the only thing keeping the rest of me upright. "Briggs. You're joking."
"I'm not joking."
"I have a firm." I close the folder very carefully, because if I close it the way I want to close it, it will leave a dent in the table. "I have a Series-A in seven weeks. I have eleven other clients. I have a goddaughter. I have — Briggs — I have a life."
"You have," Maddox says, "a Series-A in seven weeks."
I look at him. He is looking at the folder. He says it like a man reading off the side of a milk carton.
"You don't get the Liberty owner in the room without me." His voice is soft, which surprises me, and steady, which surprises me more. "You don't get the Liberty owner in the room without me, and you know that, because you've tried twice this year. I'm not flattering myself. I'm telling you a fact."
The fact is correct. I do not say so.
"Mr. Holt —"
"It's six months." He looks up. His eyes are the wrong color for the rest of him; they're a tired, kind brown. They make the rest of him make less sense. "Six months and a press release. We don't — we don't sleep together. We don't pretend to. We're engaged on paper, in photographs, at three charity events Briggs picks. October, we walk away. You amicable, me a changed man. Your firm gets the round it needs. I get to play out the season without the league suspending me."
"Your morality clause —"
"Triggers in March." He has clearly run this. Clearly run it more than once. "An engagement buys me eight months of front-office goodwill. After March it doesn't matter. After March, anything I do, I do as a free agent."
"And what about me."
He does not have an answer for that. I do not actually expect him to.
I stand. I do it slowly because the thing my body wants to do is something less useful. I pick up the folder. I do not hand it back; I tuck it under my arm, which is, technically, the more aggressive choice. Reading material.
"Briggs. Mr. Holt. I appreciate the candor of the proposal. The answer is no."
"Reagan —"
"The answer is no, Briggs."
I walk out of the conference room. I walk past my assistant, who has the sense to look at her monitor and not at my face. I walk past Marcus, who is on the phone in his glass office, and who lifts his eyebrows at me, and who I do not stop for. I walk to the elevator bank. I press the button. The button is warm. Someone has just used it.
The elevator doors open.
§4 — Cliffhanger
He is already inside.
He has come down the back stairs. Forty-seven floors of back stairs in dress shoes, in a suit, in eight minutes, while I was tucking his folder under my arm and explaining myself to no one, and he is not even out of breath.
"You can take the next one," he says.
I do not take the next one. I step in. The doors close. Forty-seven floors is a long ride. Forty-seven floors with Maddox Holt is a longer one.
He does not look at me. He looks at the brushed-steel panel where the floor numbers tick down.
"I'm not going to ask you again," he says, somewhere around thirty-eight. "I want you to know that. I'm not the kind of man who asks twice."
"Good."
"I just want to say one thing."
The numbers keep ticking. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight.
"My brother died the night I got drafted." He says it the way you'd read a weather report. The way I read deal points. "Heart thing nobody caught. He was the one who was supposed to play this position. Everything I do on a field — every fine, every stupid hit, every — every fight I pick — I'm doing it because if I stop moving for one full second I will lay down on the fifty-yard line and not get up. The league is going to suspend me before March. My agent knows it. My publicist knows it. I know it. You, Ms. Vance, are the only person in the city of New York who can keep me on the field for the eight months I need to be on it. I am not asking you for a favor. I am offering you a contract. The contract is the only honest thing in my life right now."
The numbers tick. Eleven. Ten.
He still has not looked at me.
"That's all," he says. "I just wanted you to have the actual reason. Before you said no for good."
The doors open into the lobby. The Monday morning crowd is moving across the marble. He steps out. He does not turn around.
I do not get out.
The doors start to close. My hand comes up — not because I decided to do it, but because my hand has been faster than my mouth my entire life — and I catch the door.
"Mr. Holt."
He stops.
I stand in the open elevator. I am holding his folder. I am holding it the way you hold a thing you have already decided to read.
"My answer," I hear myself say, "is not yet."
— to be continued in Ep2