Sparring Partners: Grapple Tag

Kat and I had hated each other for two years, and the company away-weekend put us in the same room with a wrestling mat.

How it works: read, then choose what you do. Only the right choices earn the happy ending.

I’m Dani, I’m twenty-eight, and for two years I have wanted to push Kat Marlowe off something tall.

Kat is thirty-one, six feet of tattooed smirk, and she is the reason I’m not an Associate Director. She beat me to Senior Account Manager. She beat me to the Hargreaves pitch. On Thursday she beat me to Associate Director, and she announced it in an email that began “No hard feelings, Dani.”

So of course Gareth, our sales director, put us together as “buddies” for the Calloway Digital away-weekend at Hartley Park Spa and Sports Hotel. Then he blew a whistle in the sports hall and announced Grapple Tag, a team-building game played on a foam wrestling mat. He picked us for the demonstration round. Gareth hates himself.

Kat stood across from me in black leggings and a crop top, the swallows and peonies down her left arm shining with sweat, the words stick the landing inked along her ribs. She cracked her neck.

“Try not to cry, Dani,” she said.

Round one lasted nine seconds. She hooked my ankle, dropped me, and landed on top with her knee between my thighs, her ponytail swinging in my face, her whole warm weight holding me to the mat.

“One,” Gareth shouted.

She smelled of coconut and effort. I was breathing hard, and not only from the fight.

→ I hook her leg and flip her

→ I slap the mat and walk out