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“Oh, I’m definitely going to be dazzling the lovely Tess Powell, but that’s for my benefit, not yours,” Bodhi informs me, reaching into the cubby under the dashboard when he stops the cart a few feet from my ball, pulling out the shirtless dude romance book, and smacking it into my chest. “Learn how to dazzle and get your own dirt. I bookmarked page 120 for you and highlighted the parts that will remind you what those dangly things in your shorts are for.”
Grabbing the book, I chuck it right back into the cubby.
“I know what they’re for, asshole. I can’t just show up here after two years and try to get in her pants. That’s not what this is about, and you know it. I need to get our friendship back on track first.”
“But to do that, you’ll have to tell her why you dropped her like a bad habit two years ago,” he reminds me.
“Yeah. And that’s the problem. If I tell her that, she knows everything. I’ve already freaked her out by showing up here without any warning. I don’t want to give her a heart attack on top of it.” I sigh. “So, I can’t move forward with her in any way until I can get our friendship back. I can’t get our friendship back unless I can get her to forgive me. And I can’t get her to forgive me unless I give her a valid explanation for why I stopped talking to her. It’s just one big circle of suck.”
We sit in the cart, staring out at the 8th fairway quietly for a few minutes.
“Oh, and she was all fired up about me accusing her of being a stalker or something, so that’s a fun new development in her hatred of me,” I finally speak, still wondering what that was all about.
“Oooh yeah, I might know a little something about that,” Bodhi says sheepishly with a grimace.
“Explain,” I order with a glare when he doesn’t immediately tell me everything he knows, because that stupid accusation has kept me up every night since then, wondering if Birdie really was going through some sort of memory loss and that joke I made in the pro shop suddenly wasn’t so funny.
“Okay, so in my defense, I found out about this around the time when the blocking and the changing of the number was happening, you were flipping tables, completely fucking up The Miles Cup, and in a really bad headspace,” Bodhi explains. “I didn’t think adding one more thing on top of that was a wise decision, and then we were never allowed to speak about her—the blip—again, and I kind of forgot all about it until now.”
I punch him in the thigh as hard as I can when he pauses again. “Tell the story faster!”
“Goddammit, that hurt!” Bodhi complains, rubbing the top of his thigh and scowling at me while he continues. “Remember that publicist your dad hired on a trial basis for a few months back then? I think her name was Candace.”
“It was Callie.”
“You sure? I don’t remember her looking like a Callie.”
I ball my hand into a fist and lift it up by my shoulder.
“Right, so Callie, who didn’t work out, because she didn’t care about getting on top of your publicity, she only cared about getting on top of your dick.”
She was pretty good at her job, but her advances started wearing on me after a while and especially after I heard from a few guys on the pro circuit that that was Callie’s thing. Only signing with clients she wanted to sleep with. And she succeeded until she got to me and I had no interest.
“My dad barely batted an eye when I told him to let her go, and she was gone within an hour. He never did anything I asked without a lecture first,” I remember aloud.
“Yeah, he didn’t put up a fight, because he’d already gotten a few complaints about her,” Bodhi says. “I overheard him talking to someone. She had logged into your social media accounts and sent out messages from you to fans she considered a threat, saying their overenthusiasm was making you uncomfortable and it was starting to feel stalkerish, and she said if they didn’t ease up, you would get the authorities involved. I think I remember your dad saying it went out to like, fifty women. The list of female fans the messages went to was still on his desk when I went in his office later that day to grab some waters out of his mini fridge. I only saw the top page, but it was alphabetical. So I saw the Bs.”
“Oh no,” I mutter, already knowing exactly what he’s going to say next.
“Oh yeah.” Bodhi nods. “Everything happened at one time. Callie sent out the stalker private messages that looked like they came directly from you, since everyone knew you ran all your own social media back then, one of which went to Birdie, and then you logged into your accounts an hour later and blocked her there and then on your phone. And your dad decided to conveniently leave Birdie off the apology tour with the rest of the female fans Callie offended, because he’s an opportunistic asshole who decided he was quite fine with one less distraction in your life.”
