Second Chance: A Dark Bad Boy Romance

by Kathryn Thomas

  Being on the court, the times that I was, it tended to be for work. Sometimes I would catch highlight reels or interviews and see myself in the frame. It was both amazing and embarrassing. Maybe it was stupid, but I thought of video footage as direct slices of the past that were saved into permanence, and it always felt strange to me to see a literal past-version of myself. It was like another level of this intense self-awareness. I began my speech while the players trooped off the court behind me and the crowd erupted into cheers seeing the cheerleaders take their place.

  I had ended up a journalist because I was a nerd and loved to read. I had ended up a sports journalist because what I lacked in actual athletic skill, I made up for in theoretical and sports knowledge. Behind every sport that was played on the face of the earth was a history and theory. There were records of games and players. There were times, dates, and figures that were significant. There were names that were relevant and events that were legendary. My dad had planted the seed by taking me to games and having me watch with him. Of course, he had friends who he could have done these things with, but I think it was the only thing he could think of at the time to do with me that constituted some sort of bonding. I was his only child, and I had done him the disservice of being a girl. He never tried to play the games with me because I never wanted to, but he did let me sit with him and watch.

  He had also been patient, answering all my questions—which I would ask during the games—interrupting it and making him pay attention to me when he would rather have been focusing on the players on the television. That was when he would tell me who was who and why this guy was considered better than this other one and for what reasons. He told me why the game had to stop whenever a player hit another guy and why the crowds seemed to have chants and all the intricate rules that came together to make organized sports work.

  The first time I had watched a basketball game in an arena, I had been like six or so. I remembered feeling that it was very loud. The only thing I heard over the din of the crowd was the squeaking of the players’ shoes on the shiny court floor and the whistles sounding every so often. I remember the crowd being rowdy and the team that my dad had come to see ultimately losing, but I knew that I had had a good time and it was something that my dad liked and interested me, as well.

  The atmosphere at games, when you were really there, just feet away from the players and watching the action unfold—next to people who were just as excited and tense and anxious as you were—was something everyone has to experience at least once in their life. It was like there was a charge running through you and it was running through all the rest of the people there who also wanted to see their team win, whether they supported the opposing team or not. You didn’t get the feeling of electric community when you were down courtside for work. You couldn’t get caught up in the action of your team performing because some of the time…a lot of the time…more often than not…frankly…your team wasn’t playing. You reported on whatever game was being played, and it was your job to stay on top of the action, to pursue the players and coaches, and to not miss anything.

  The Charlotte Yellow Jackets were playing the Dockside Gulls. At the halftime whistle, the Yellow Jackets were down forty-three to fifty-one. The Yellow Jackets were my team, had been since I was younger, having been born and raised right here in Los Angeles. They played a mean game and usually led their matches right from the beginning, but today they were straggling. Not by much, but I wondered what the coach would have to say about that.

  Being an athlete myself had never been in the cards for me. I didn’t have that sort of drive and the stomach for constant failure and pain. I was a nerd; I couldn’t play sports and that was why I had read so many books when I was a kid. I did like sports, however, the theoretical side of them. I liked the analysis of game plays and the development of the sports into what we now know of them from their inception years ago.

  I playfully called myself a sports historian, but my job was reporting. I reported the sports news as it happened. I did sideline reporting, but the thing I preferred was interviewing and writing pieces based on the interviews. I liked to put together journalistic pieces because there was so much to say about a game or about a player than just the final team scores or a certain guy’s career stats.

  I liked to think that the league had an asset when it came to me, and it was true. The people my age and younger working for my outlet were interns and personal assistants. My parents had suggested getting in early with a news network as an intern or a personal assistant when I was still in college, so that I could show my chops, learn a lot, and hopefully start in a writing position earlier than the people who didn’t. I had started from the bottom, and now I was a reporter and correspondent. Yes, the gig was my dream job, and yes, a lot of the players were surprised by the questions I asked them and the sports knowledge I had.

  I had been on the sidelines for other sporting events, but I liked basketball the best. For one thing, the courts were covered, which meant we weren’t affected by incumbent weather. For another, we were indoors, which meant I didn’t have to worry about my heels digging up someone’s AstroTurf or special grass. I felt that the game, from the size of the court to the fact that it was played inside, was just tighter and more controlled than other games.

  I smiled and shook hands with Garrett Trudeau, the coach of the Charlotte Yellow Jackets. He had finally gotten away from the team long enough to give me a few words. He was an older guy; they all were. He had coached basketball at every level, from high school to professional in the National Basketball Association. He was a legend in his own right, and I knew as much about the man as I did about the players. That was another thing. It was a little surreal, meeting all the players and sports figures that I had studied and heard so much about in person. It was a little intimidating when it was a person whom I respected—like Garrett. We were going to be on camera; I had to keep my cool and try not to make a fool out of myself in front of a legend.

  “The Yellow Jackets are down at the end of the second quarter, how do you think they can rally and rebound from a possible loss?” I asked. Garrett looked a little surprised at the fact that I had suggested his team might lose. I wasn’t wrong. The game wasn’t over yet. Anything could happen between now and the next couple quarters. There could be an injury, there could be a foul. Anything. Of course, I didn’t want the Yellow Jackets to lose, but it was a possibility in every game, especially when they were against a team that was evenly matched with them.

  “They don’t have many points on us. Their lead isn’t substantial enough to make us worry,” he said cockily.

  “With a view of the season, the way it has been so far, what do you think you guys need to do to stay in the game?”

  “We're on the right track, all we really need is for Dante to be Dante.”

  He wanted Dante to be Dante.

  The Dante to which he referred was the Charlotte Yellow Jackets’ point guard. He was—as far as anyone in the league was concerned—a machine. He had been playing since his early twenties after he had gone to college the same place I went: UCLA. He had gotten in on his basketball playing, of course, and had had a full-ride scholarship. Wasn’t it cruel the way people like me, whose skills did not typically earn then full-ride scholarships, had mountains of student debt to pay back, and people like him, whose skills did earn them full-ride scholarships, made the entire sum of money that I owed in one or two months?

  Dante Rock had the career stats of someone who had been playing for ten years, while he had only been at it for six. His backstory was one that people loved to repeat because fans ate it up. He had come from a single-parent home in a small Ohio town after his father had left his mother. He had picked up a basketball—and the rest was history. That was the come up that so many young men wanted but so few would actually get because of the sheer level of skill that was required to be an elite athlete in this sport, or any sport for that matter.

  He had gone from living in a
town that wasn’t even indicated on major maps, where the entire population could fit several times over in the arena we were in at that very moment, to living next door to directors and movie stars in Hollywood and having enough money to literally purchase the entire square foot area of land on which his home town sat if that was something that he felt he wanted to do.

  To say that Dante carried the Yelowjackets was unfair to the rest of the players. He was, however, a real asset. He had been Rookie of the Year and the Yellow Jackets’ MVP not once but two times. Garret saying he wanted Dante to be Dante was implying a lot more things than just fantastic basketball playing.

  There were a number of things wrong with that statement. I knew what he meant, but he had to be able to tell that the statement itself really could have gone either way. Dante being Dante could refer to the fact that the man was well on his way to achieving legendary status in the league and he wasn’t even thirty yet. He had talent out of his ass, and his worst games were comparable to some people's best games. Basketball is a team sport, but the guy shone. It was just a fact. Trudeau was probably counting on the guy to get them in the door and win the championship. If anyone could take them all the way, it was Dante Rock.

  That, of course, relied on a number of factors. There was Dante Rock the star athlete, who everyone expected to succeed, and who did succeed. Then there was the other Dante Rock, the one you read about on trashy gossip blogs because he was photographed partying on a yacht or he was banging this girl or the next. He was still sort of a young guy, and he was earning millions of dollars a year. The fact that he had no family, wife, and kids, at least no kids that he knew about to support, meant nearly every dollar of that salary was disposable income.

  He disposed of it extremely well, with no help. It wasn’t a secret that the guy lived in the Hollywood hills in a mansion the size of some small towns on his own. It was not a secret that he collected luxury sports cars the way some people collected stamps. The guy was single and rich; he was living it up. I couldn’t even be mad because somehow, living like a total degenerate, he was still able to perform on the court. He was affectionately referred to as a bad boy, which was annoying to me, because all he needed to be in the news for was his job…and that was playing basketball.

  Dante was so good at his job, he was such an exceptional player, that that meant his other indiscretions were mostly just overlooked. Oh, did he have racy pictures of him and a number of unidentified women leaked onto the internet? Was there photo and video evidence that he had had a weekend-long bender in Vegas and had maybe managed to burn through hundreds of thousands of dollars in a casino? Was the man with a different model or actress or socialite every other weekend? It didn’t matter because he would show up to the court the next day and dunk on you, me, your mother, and everyone else.

  He had somehow managed to balance the two sides of himself. His partying and his job really depended on each other if you thought about it. He partied as hard as he did because he had the money, station, and resources to do so. He played so well because he needed to get that money in order to keep acting like a hoodlum in his off time. He had a good stasis going and hadn’t gotten into too much trouble… lately.

  There were times he would slip and get suspended, but still, overall, he seemed like too much of an asset to his team for them to let him go.

  “Dante’s a big player for you guys. Do you think this could be his first championship?” I asked.

  “It would be a first championship for a lot of the guys on the team. I think the lineup could get us that win. I’m confident in our players.” I smiled at him. So diplomatic. We could just cross our fingers and hope that on game day Dante wasn’t passed out in a villa somewhere in the Caribbean with half their cheer squad.

  “Dante seems a little off his game tonight, wouldn’t you say so?” I asked. He looked surprised…like I had blindsided him with that one.

  “What the guy does in his personal life is his business. He always delivers when he comes to the court.” That was true. Dante had missed a couple clear shots and had been a little slow, but if this was him when he was bad, he was still better than most of the guys on the court. Trudeau had unintentionally answered a question I hadn’t even asked him. Apparently, Golden Boy Dante had partied a little too hard last night and was paying for it today.

  The coach looked over at Dante and waved at him. I panicked, thinking for a second that Dante would come over, but he didn’t. He was on the bench, sitting on his own. He raised his arm acknowledging the coaches greeting. I looked at him and our eyes met. He winked at me. I turned away immediately and thanked the coach for his time.

  There was still a little time before the fifteen minute halftime was up. I wanted to talk to some of the players, but there was no way I’d be able to have a whole conversation. You didn’t really know what to expect when it came to the sports types. All of them were athletes, and when it came time for them to interview, you sort of got an idea of who the guys were that only had athleticism going for them. It wasn’t funny; it was just interesting. Some of the guys were hopeless at interviews. They were players first, second, and last. They didn’t do the cameras-and-media part of the whole deal. These were the guys who made my job harder than it needed to be, but I understood. They were there to play; people like me were just an inconvenience. They would only give me as much as one or two words and force me to ask more and more questions to get them to give anything up. They wouldn’t really look into the camera, and they would give off the vibe that there was literally anywhere on earth that they would rather be than being interviewed by me.

  Then there were the media darlings, the guys who could hoop and could also charm the fans and have a few interesting things to say. Dante fell under this category. He was great in an interview, and a few other guys really knew how to work the reporters and the press. They had a good time with it, and they were the ones who tended to get the sponsorships and brand deals because they were good talkers. They could be spokespeople for different things and their likeness, personalities, and the fact that they played on this team or that would give them a way to generously supplement their sports-career paychecks.

  I thought about Dante again. He was there. I had him in my peripheral, but I didn’t want to look right at him because I thought he would be looking right at me. The wink had been cheeky, and there was no way in hell that I was the only woman that he had ever winked at. There was no way I was the only woman he had even winked at in the last twelve or so hours. It had made me a little nervous, I wasn’t going to lie. Whether or not I was looking right at him, I knew what he looked like. Who didn’t? The pictures on the internet were more than enough. They were all there. The man in his uniform, out of his uniform, out of his clothes and in his swimming trunks. Even in a little less than that, too.

  He was tall, obviously, but he even looked it, sitting there on the bench. His limbs were long and rangy, padded with lean muscle. He had a face that he could have used successfully in a modeling career. It was the sort of face that was most accurately described as beautiful. It was hard and masculine—with enough softness that balanced it out. His eyes and hair were light. The hair was blonde, and his eyes were green. He had dimples in both his cheeks when he smiled, or smirked, which was what he was doing when I decided to take a chance and glance over at him. He looked tanned every time I saw him. I thought it was more to do with his heritage, which was Mediterranean, than his frequent use of tanning beds.

  He had a couple tattoos—(that wasn’t an irregular thing for athletes)—but they weren’t visible when he was in his uniform. I knew, not because I had seen them personally, but because I had done my research before coming here today. I had just been talking about him to his coach. Whether or not I wanted him to be, he was a star. He was the star. An interview today with the man himself, Dante Rock, was what I needed to get. It just was.

  What could be better than a quote from the man himself? I could ask him about whether he felt pressure
being in the position he was in, or what he thought he had to do to make this his first championship. Did he care that he had—up to this point—not gotten a championship?

  As far as athletes went, he was amazing in front of a camera. He must have had some media training because he was communicative, looked like he paid attention when he was spoken to, and was funny and magnetic when he talked to reporters. He knew just what to say, which meant a lot of people like me were clamoring for a chance to talk to him. He was the sort of interviewee who made interviews fun. He made them feel more like a conversation, from what I had seen of him.

  I had not interviewed him. At least, I had not interviewed him yet.

  I had imagined it, because, of course, I had. I was a sports journalist and he was pretty high up there on the list of people who were my dream interviews. It would be gold. A real tell-all with Dante Rock, an exclusive where he opened up about his career and his stresses and his history, would do wonders for my career. That sort of piece in my portfolio would be priceless. I wanted it—and maybe today I would be able to get it, or at least get the guy to agree to have it with me.