"You really thought I'd stay away?" Bianca says, returning to a world that kept moving without her. In this thrilling sequel to Obsessed. Bianca's back is she the same? What happened while she was away? With her return, old wounds are reopened, forc...
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The cameras flashed again, bright enough to leave white spots across my vision.
I held the pose for another few seconds, one hand resting against the side of the oversized Adidas display behind me, the other tucked casually into the pocket of my trousers. The photographer kept talking from behind the camera, asking for another angle, another expression, another shot that apparently needed to look effortless even though we'd been doing the same thing for nearly two hours.
"Perfect, Jude. Just turn your shoulder slightly."
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I did as he asked, keeping the smile in place.
The studio was warm from the lights, crowded with racks of clothes, assistants carrying garment bags and people moving around with the kind of urgency that made everything feel more important than it actually was. Music played quietly through the speakers, mixing with the clicking of cameras and the occasional burst of laughter from the production team.
This was the world I understood.
Football, sponsorship, training, cameras, press, and match days. People asking me what I thought about the season, what I thought about the next game, what it felt like to score in front of thousands of people. Simple questions and predictable answers. A life where everything had a name.
I could handle that. What I couldn't handle was everything that existed outside of it.
"That's it," the photographer finally said. "We've got it."
I dropped the smile immediately and exhaled, rolling my shoulders as someone came toward me with a bottle of water.
"Good shoot?" one of the Adidas staff asked.
"Yeah," I said, taking the bottle from him. "Long one, though."
He laughed. "You footballers don't know what long means."
