I had been an absolute bitch to him during the last one, but I really just didn’t want him to know how much I was hurting. I was rallying. I was busy. I wasn’t just moping around thinking about him. I was doing stuff while thinking about him. Important stuff. Stuff about him, actually, which was likely why I had been thinking about him so much. The story series.
I didn’t know whether he knew, but I had been spending a lot of time with his mother. I hoped she hadn’t told him because that would have just made things awkward. We were sat together at game two, watching her son basically dominate.
This last interview… I didn’t even want to have it. I was so tired with what I had been working on. I had hardly anything left to ask him about. It was the last one. I didn’t want to phone it in, but I felt like the real important stuff had already been said and done. I approached him after the game, and we greeted each other like strangers. Again, we just used some courtside seats rather than going back into the locker room.
“I wanted to ask you about women,” I said. He frowned. What a question. I was already bored.
“What about them? You’re going to have to be more specific.”
“I want to know what women mean to you, as a man. As a person.”
“From the age of twelve, I was the only man in the house, with two women.”
“Did you feel you had to protect them?”
“Once my father was gone, not as much. I felt like I had to take his place, though, to some extent.”
“Provide for them?”
“Yeah. Sort of like that.”
“Your mother is obviously a huge supporter.”
“She’s my mother. I love her. She comes to a lot of games, but when she doesn’t come, I know she always watches them. She was, she is the most important woman in my life.”
“She raised you under pretty difficult circumstances.”
“She’s the greatest story of strength and recovery that I know. She had every reason to give up, but she never did. She just kept coming back. A lot of the things that happened to her should have killed her. They should have run her into the ground, but she didn’t let them. She just became stronger. I try my hardest to make her proud every day.”
“What about your sister?”
“She’s so smart. I wish I was as smart as her. She’s the person who I would go to prison for. The two most important people in my life are women. The most fantastic women I know.”
“You obviously love them, but what about the other women in your life?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You do have a reputation for womanizing.”
He looked at me silent for a while. I knew by now that I wasn’t going to get him to really open up. He was preparing himself to give me something generic and boring. Whatever. It didn’t matter as long as he answered the question.
“I respect every single woman I've ever been with. I don’t use women, and I don’t lie to them. I don’t think the fact that I've been with many women should say anything about… anything, really.”
I didn’t have the energy to pull apart what he had said about the women he slept with and try to apply it to me. I was done. I was finished. I wasn’t trying anymore. I had more pride than that.
I had met up with Pamela Rock, Dante’s mom after the interview. She didn’t seem to hate me the way her son did. I liked her, so I was glad that was the case. I wondered how many of his other hookups were that close with her.
“How was he?” she asked.
“Not the best interview we’ve ever had. He wasn’t that chatty. Sort of taciturn.”
“He's concentrating on the game, dear,” she said.
“Of course, he is—but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t still hate me.”
“He doesn't hate you, Quinn.”
“I did something he asked me not to do, and he doesn't trust me anymore because of it. Even if he doesn’t hate me, he doesn’t want to see or hear from me again once this season is over and our professional engagement comes to an end.”
“Quinn, Dante completely changed when he met you,” she said.
“No way. He was still getting into trouble and being outrageous. The only thing I stopped—for a while at least—was him sleeping around.”
“Trust me, Quinn, I saw the change in him when you entered his life. You’re the best thing that has ever happened to him.”
I sighed and let her butter me up. It felt good to hear, but what the fuck was she talking about. She couldn’t mean Dante Rock her son, could she? Because that man wanted me as far away from him as I could get. I had made him madder than I had ever seen anyone get, and I had broken any trust or faith that he had in me. I didn’t think that that still made me the best thing that ever happened to him.
Maybe she knew something that I didn’t know. I figured that she and Dante had probably talked about me together, but who knew about what? I wanted to ask her what she meant, but would it make a difference if I knew? It wouldn’t make a difference if I knew. Dante hated me now, and the season would be over once this game ended.
That would be the end. The official end of the time that Dante Rock had to dedicate himself to me. After the final buzzer went off, it was game over for more than just the season. I would finish my pieces and that would be that. I would just watch Dante Rock on TV like everyone else. I would be able to say that I had experienced a side of him that so few ever got to see, but I would have to live with the fact that it was my own fault that I would never see it again.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Dante
This was it. The last game.
This was the grand finale. What we had all been waiting for. What we had all been busting our asses for.
I had made it to a championship before but had never been on the winning team.
This time was going to be different. Every team went into a championship with the intention of winning but there could only really be one. That one would be us.
We had been on a winning streak. We were the obvious answer.
In my career, I just wanted to win that Championship trophy one time. Once would be enough.
I thought about the things that would change if we won. Once we won because that was what was going to happen today.
This was the end of the season till next year. It was also the end of something else. Quinn and I… well, we had been over for a while now, but this would be the end end. The real end. After this, she was just another reporter. She couldn’t come to me for shit once this game was over. I would just wait for her little stories or whatever to come out and that would be that. I wouldn’t even read them. I didn’t have to. I was there for every interview, I knew what they would be about.
***
We sealed the deal in overtime.
I heard the applause and joined in the celebration but… if this was what winning was like… I hadn’t been missing out on much. They named me MVP, which was nice of them, or whatever. There were a lot of people around me bumping into me and pushing mics in my face. None of them was Quinn.
I had been so locked on the game I hadn’t even noticed if she had been there watching.
“Dante, Dante,” I looked for whoever it was calling my name. The guy was handing me a mic; they wanted a speech. I wanted to roll my eyes, but I smiled instead. I took it.
“The journey to get to this point as a team had been long and hard. This is a real victory for the Yellow Jackets,” I said. The crowd cheered. I could have probably just stood there and told them my Chipotle order and they would have still cheered. “Mom, this one’s for you,” I said. I beckoned her over. She always sat courtside at games. I had to do a double take because the woman standing at the seat that was next to hers looked a hell of a lot like Quinn.
It was her.
When did she get there?
Had she seen the entire game?
Mom came up and she let me hug her even though I was sweaty. She turned and she called Quinn over. She didn’t look at
me, but she stood at mom’s side.
“This is an amazing win. It’s been a tough season, but you’ve made us all proud to call ourselves fans. Dante, for your MVP win, I have something for you. A surprise,” she said.
A what?
What the fuck was she talking about?
“We’ve been working on something for you, son.”
We? She and who?
Suddenly all the lights went down and the jumbotron lit up.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Quinn
The last time I had been this nervous was when… I had never been this nervous.
I had gone to school for journalism but had ended up focusing on print. I wasn’t a documentary maker, but I knew how to cut clips together. It was only about half an hour’s worth. That wasn’t hard. It wasn’t a Scorsese or Coppola job, but it wasn’t meant to be. It just had to look presentable. The video editing software had been crashing my computer the entire time I was trying to put the shit together, it better look presentable. It would be like the Blair Witch Project, but about Dante.
I couldn’t stand hearing the sound of my narration. I should have gotten someone else to do it. That was a thing, though. Wasn’t it? The sound of your own voice was always annoying to you? I tried to keep my eyes on the screen, or on the ground. Anywhere but on Dante. I watched the Dante on the screen.
He had been all I had been able to think about. The documentary had been all I had been able to think about—and since the doc was about him, he had remained close, too. Surprisingly, it was not until just now, as the documentary was beginning, that I really thought about what it was he would feel watching it. I wasn’t going to chance watching him. I had seen it beginning to end so many times, but it was different seeing it again now.
Now I was finally going to show it to other people. It wasn’t going to be a piece that belonged to me anymore. Now it was for whoever was watching. It was for Dante.
There was tons of footage of Dante all over the Internet. I didn’t have to look far to get shots of him on the court, showing us all why he had been MVP for his team so many times. Everyone had seen that before. It wasn’t anything to see Dante play because everyone had seen Dante play.
Pamela Rock, Dante’s mother was the one with the real juice. Juice, in this case, being home videos. She might have lived in a million dollar house in Calabasas, but she still had a VCR—and she had given me boxes and boxes of home videos and told me to knock myself out. She said I could use any of the footage that I wanted, as long as I didn’t damage the original tapes. When I told her I was doing a documentary tribute for her son, she was all for it.
David, the guy in IT who I had asked to help me digitize some of the footage had laughed at me for about an hour before he finally did it. Dante, as it turned out was adorable as a kid. He was very small until puberty when he had shot up like two feet. I had the footage of him as a kid spliced in with footage of him now as a professional basketball player. I used some of the audio from our recorded interviews in with it. I even used the footage of him that I had taken, the footage where he was on the courts, or in the locker room, and the clip that had gotten me into trouble with him in the first place. The short clip of barely twenty seconds of him asleep in his bed in his home.
I wanted the whole story.
That meant going to the scene of the crime.
Dante hadn’t been kidding when he had said that the place he had grown up, Cavett, was in the middle of nowhere. I’d had to drive there using a rental from one of the larger surrounding towns and nearly missed it. You would if you blinked too long. Pamela had given me their old address. The house, there didn’t seem to be anyone living there anymore, was still standing.
There were a few people who remembered him from when he was a boy and who had agreed to interviews, including a woman who claimed to be his ex-girlfriend from middle school. They talked about him like they were proud just to have known who he was before he got famous.
All that, the travel and interviews in Ohio, had been the easy part. Showing the Dante Rock timeline became tricky because of what had been happening recently. The things I found out were even surprising to me. I had managed, after nearly begging to get the heads of various women's shelters around LA, to reveal Dante’s donation history. I had thought the million on the spot during the Inside the League interview had been a lot.
Nope.
The amounts that he had been donating since the beginning of his career came to close to two and a half million. He regularly funded drives to purchase women’s sanitary and health products for the shelters because homeless women and women in transitional housing had different needs than men. The thing was he had never ever done it in his own name. He had done it in his mother’s name every time.
I wanted to end with the thing that was most controversial. That, of course, was all the shit that had happened with Grace Whitley. Getting an interview with her had been exceedingly hard. I inserted audio from the phone conversation I’d had with her and then revealing the truth about her. You learned a lot when you did the right digging. Her real name wasn’t even Grace Whitley. It changed depending on where she went and who she was talking to.
As it turned out, she was a con woman. She used the fallacious claims that men in high places, athletes mostly, had assaulted her in order to secure large payouts from them. Dante had been a hard egg to crack and had basically given her a run for her money. She was intending on most likely coming after him again.
She wouldn’t be now.
It ended and the credits rolled.
I exhaled. It was over. I had watched the finished program over and over so many times while I was editing it down, but this was the first time that someone else besides Pamela had seen it. I spotted at least ten things that I wished I had changed for the final cut, but it was too late now. I didn’t want to look over at Dante, but right then I couldn’t resist. I looked. He was still watching the screen. His face was hard, but it was completely still. His eyes didn’t give away anything about what he was feeling.
He looked over at me, and it took everything I had not to look away. I had been wishing that he would look at me with something other than frigid indifference, and well, he was. He was looking at me with something. I didn’t know what. I didn’t know what to do because he wasn’t doing anything. Did he like it?
If he didn’t, that didn’t matter because he hated me already. He wasn’t really the person I was trying to impress, but his approval would have meant the world. I never wanted to misrepresent him, and a lot of what was in the film were things that nobody knew about him but himself, his mother, and me.
It was the Dante behind closed doors. It was the man who he didn’t let everyone see—and I had just shown everybody. The crowd was applauding.
I panicked when I saw him start walking. He started moving towards me, slowly, his eyes locked onto mine. My breathing slowed, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say when he got to me.
He stopped in front of me. I licked my lips and looked up at him.
“Dante—”
“Was it your idea?” he asked.
“I wanted something visual to accompany the stories,” I said meekly. God. That sounded so bad. It sounded like I just made the doc for my own career.
“Is that why you wanted that footage of me?”
“I had wanted it for me. I thought you looked peaceful. Putting it together… I wanted everyone to see it. Just a little bit of the man I know you are,” I said. He smiled down at me, leaning down to kiss me. He held me to him, pressing my body into his. The applause from the crowd was deafening. I mean, it must have been because I barely heard it. All I could feel was Dante. I felt the warmth and affection I had lacked from him for so long. He broke the kiss and pressed another to my forehead.
“Dante, did you know what was happening? Did you see this before we did?” a man asked. I didn’t even know who he was, a reporter or something. Dante ignored his question and wrapped
his arms around me.
I heard shouts of “Who is she? Who is she?” from various people. Dante released me and took one of the mics that was being held out to him.
“She’s my girlfriend,” he said. “I love her.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Dante
I asked her to move in with me right after the championship win.
I should have known she would be difficult about it.
She tried making all these excuses, like it hadn’t been long enough, or that she didn’t like the location. The second excuse was an absolute lie. I knew she loved the house. The first one that we hadn’t been together long enough was just that. An excuse.
Untouchable: A Dark Bad Boy Romance Page 22
