Fish: Fuck you.
Evan: You’ve gone viral. Fishette is trending.
Fish: Fishette?
Bouch: You’re screwed now, the fans have named you.
Fish: Named me?
Bouch: Yeah, they merged your names together. Collette and Fish. Fishette. It’s cute.
Fish: No, it’s not. I’m having an existential crisis.
I look up from my phone, heart hammering, and scan the plane. Three rows back, Collette is huddled with Marlowe, their heads bent together over a phone screen while Billie and Zara peer through the gap in the seats behind them. All four of them are scrolling with the frantic energy of people watching abuilding burn down in real time. Collette looks up, and our eyes lock. Just for a second. And I see on her face the same cold panic that’s running through my veins right now. She’s not amused. She’s not flattered. She’s terrified.
Shit.
We arrive in Pittsburgh.I dump my bag in my hotel room, have a quick shower, and change before heading down to meet the team for dinner. The room is standard road trip, beige walls, stiff duvet, and a view of a parking garage. I check my phone. #Fishette hashtag has its own fan account now, it’s been three hours.This is fine. Everything is fine.
I open my door and nearly walk straight into her.Collette.She’s standing in the hallway in sweats, with her hair up, phone in her hand, looking like she was about to knock on someone’s door and got the wrong one.Or the right one.We stare at each other for half a second, both surprised, and before I can think, I grab her arm and pull her into my room.
“Fish …” She squeals.
“Just …” I check the hallway both ways before closing the door.Empty.“We need to talk.”
“No shit,” she bites back, yanking her arm free. “But the last thing we need is someone seeing me entering your room. I can’t be in here.”
“You’ll be fine,” I reassure her, which apparently was not the right thing to say.
Collette places her hands on her hips, those hazel eyes narrow on me, and I swear I can see steam rising from her ears like a cartoon character about to detonate. The room suddenly feels very small. She smells like shampoo and something citrusy,and the combination of that with the fact that she’s furious and standing three feet from my bed is doing things to my brain that are not helpful right now.
“It’s not fine.” She gestures at the room, at me, at the general situation. “If anyone sees me coming out of your room right now after everything that got posted today …”
I take a step toward her to calm her down, but she flinches back. “Don’t you dare come near me.”Okay. We’re at that level of anger.
“Collette, please. Let’s talk.” I sit on the edge of the bed, trying to look as non-threatening as a six-foot-two man can look, which is probably not very. “Just breathe.”
“Don’t tell me to breathe. Do you understand what today has been like? Do you have any idea what Pierre and Felix are going to say when they see these comments?” Of course I do. I’ve spent the entire flight catastrophizing about it. “Fish, this is a problem.”
“It’s the internet. It’ll blow over.”
“Will it?” She holds her phone up. “#Fishette is trending. There are fan accounts. People are making edits. People think we’re …” She stops herself and shakes her head, like the idea of the two of us together is physically repulsive. “This is such a mess.”
Okay. Cool. Glad to know being associated with me is a mess. That feels great.
I watch her pace the small space between the bed and the window. Three steps one way, three steps back. Her sneakers squeak on the carpet every time she turns.
“We’re not together,” she says, mostly to herself. “We’re not anything. We’re colleagues. I work for the team. You play for the team. That’s it.”
“I know that. Everyone knows that.”
She looks up at me, and I genuinely can’t tell if she’s about to cry or rip me to shreds. Both feel equally possible. “Then we need to be more careful. Whatever this looks like on camera, we need to dial it back. The content, the …” she waves a hand “… the whole thing. I can’t have the internet thinking there’s something going on when there isn’t.”
Something shifts in my chest, not anger, something worse … disappointment. Not because I want something to be going on, there isn’t, we’re friends, that’s it, end of story, but because for a few hours today, people looked at me and saw something other than the playboy with the revolving door. They saw a guy who might actually have someone. And it was nice. For about five minutes, before the whole thing caught fire, it was nice.That’s pathetic.
“I understand,” I tell her.
“No, I don’t think you do.” She stops pacing. “My professional reputation means everything to me. I have had to work so fucking hard because of who my brothers are. I know people look at me and think I’m just some bimbo working in social media, the perfect nepo job, but I’m good at this. And because my brothers have afforded me opportunities I wouldn’t normally get, I have to work even harder to prove them all wrong. The last thing I need is for everyone to think I’m dating one of the team.”