pinky promise - jamie tartt

‟ PINKY PROMISE „

[content warning: mentions of workplace intimidation/harassment]

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"Ladies and gentlemen, I am by nature a believer. Ghosts, spirit guides, aliens. Still, I can't actually tell you what lives beyond our physical world."

Tate listened carefully to Ted's speech with her attention trained on the bin set in the middle of their huddled circle in the locker room, only glancing up when she heard the door open. She felt herself deflate slightly when she saw Rebecca enter—instead of the still-missing Jamie fucking Tartt.

She stood beside Colin with her arm linked around his, a picture frame clutched to her chest and her head leaning against his shoulder. Roy shared first, an emotional story about how his grandfather had given him a blanket to remind him of home when he was recruited to Sunderland then passed before he was ever able to see him again. Tate felt her chest ache for Roy, who grew embarrassed when Isaac called him out for calling it a blankie.

Some of the sacrifices made Tate laugh, some made her heart nearly crack, but she rolled her eyes playfully when Richard dumped a small bottle of sand from a beach in St. Barts where he first slept with a supermodel. She didn't really expect much else from him, actually.

Colin, proudly, put the keys to his Lamborghini into the bin.

"How you gettin' home?" Beard asked, which stumped Colin. Tate chuckled at his reaction and pressed a placating kiss to his shoulder in attempt to soothe the burn.

More and more sacrifices were made, until Tate was the last one left holding her item.

"My turn, I guess." Tate offered, not allowing herself to acknowledge the fact that her throat was already tightening. She knew she didn't have to confess anything, but the whole point of the evening was to do a cleansing of sort.

And though the boys were working to appease the so-called spirits that haunted the club, Tate figured a cleansing of what weighed heavily on her heart worked just as well.

She detangled herself from Colin and stepped forward, slightly, attention trained on the nearly full bin in order to keep her nerve.

"Last season, I ended up really fucking hating football." She began before she could chicken out. "Like, for a while I was planning on quitting working here because I couldn't stomach going to any of the matches."

"Well, that's fucking inspiring." Roy huffed. The corners of Tate's lips curved upwards for a bare moment, though the weight of the framed photo, picture-side pressed against her chest, kept her tethered to the moment.

"Last season," She continued her story after briefly scrunching her face up in playful protest at the captain's comment. "Rupert still owned the club."

And with that simple sentence, it was as if all the air had been sucked from the room.

Tate couldn't bring herself to look at Rebecca, at anyone, as she held the framed photo closer to herself.

"He... he made working here miserable for me. He never tried anything," She was quick to add at the lethal expressions that covered nearly every face looking back at her. "But he would visit me in my office all the time. Would stay for an uncomfortably long time. I think he actually thought he was being charming. And I realized pretty quickly that the only reason he hired me was because I was young and pretty and stupid and it made me want nothing more than to quit to get away from the sport that I had loved since the time I could walk."

Her voice cracked, the sound nearly echoing in the silent locker room.

"For a while, he took away the joy in my job and that developed into a hatred for football. It was really bad for me. But I was determined to prove to my... my family that I could handle this, handle moving to England on my own and working this amazing job. Then, one day, when it got extra bad, I broke down and called my brother, crying, and even though it was like three in the morning in his timezone, he answered. I didn't tell him about Rupert, because then he would have been on the first plane here to probably murder my boss."