I didn’t like thinking that she was somewhere mad or sad about what I had said to her. I didn’t expect her to hear those shitty things from me and just go on about her day and her life, but I also didn’t want to think of her somewhere still crying because of them
Quinn. She was the past. She was the past. If I repeated it enough times, maybe I would believe myself. I was still mad. I was still livid about what she had done. I could choose to be sad about it and think about her, or I could choose to be mad and use that anger for something.
I was choosing anger.
What was the use of my rage if I couldn’t crush it into something useful, like a win?
There was still a championship to win—and that shit had my name all over it.
Getting through the first series was a cinch. All I had to do was play ball and die. This was my job. If I could concentrate and take all that shit I was feeling about her and have it make me a better player, then all this shit would be worth it.
She sure knew how to stay on a guy’s mind though.
I realized with some anger that she had actually listened to me and wasn’t calling or trying to text me anymore. The communication from her directly to my phone completely dried up. Just like I had asked, she was contacting my agent through her network rep.
It was sort of funny how much it got to me. It was me who had asked her to contact me that way, but I couldn’t stand having messages from her filtered through other people. I didn’t want to hear her words through other people. I ignored the messages. Apparently, there were just two interviews left and she wanted me to confirm the second to last one.
This was it then, huh. Nearly the end. It would be sad to see the end of this era, but all great things, right?
I agreed to see her before a game because I didn’t want to stay behind after one and talk to her in an empty locker room. I probably wouldn’t be able to control myself.
I saw her walking up to me across the court.
The last game I had seen her at, she was in jeans and a sweatshirt. I almost hadn’t recognized her because she looked so different. She was completely stripped down and not in the way that I liked her to be. She even looked shorter. That was because she hadn’t been wearing heels…but still. She had looked defeated—like there was nothing for her anymore.
She looked like she was going through a breakup.
Today, she was back in her usual sexy skirt and blouse. They were sexy whether or not she intended them to be. She looked a little different, still sad. She wasn’t standing up quite as straight as usual or something. It was there in the way she was carrying herself. She wasn’t happy.
I didn’t want to care, but I did.
A little.
“Good evening, Dante,” she said.
Good evening? Were we in a damn classroom? When had she ever said that to me? Was she about to start calling me Mr. Rock, too?
“Hey.”
“Can we go back into the locker room, or do you want to sit here and talk?” she asked.
Alright then. Right to business. I wasn’t complaining.
“Here,” I said. The arena was totally empty, so we just sat on two of the courtside seats with her recorder between us.
“You seem well. The championship is coming up, are you nervous?”
“No, we're on a winning streak. Success is the only real option. It's expected. Playing an undefeated team rattles the opponent. They almost make themselves lose for you. It’s great.”
“That’s a pretty reckless thing to say,” she said.
I looked at her. I couldn’t read her face. I knew she wasn’t one hundred percent, but she wasn’t defeated either.
“I don’t think it’s reckless if it's true.”
“That is a pretty steep claim. Maybe too steep.”
I looked at her. What was she doing? More importantly, what was she implying? Usually, the reporter just took your quote and moved along. What was she asking me? Was she challenging me? Did she want to see me do it? Did she think I couldn’t do it? What was she trying to say?
“Nothing is too steep if it's true. Our record speaks for itself,” I said.
“Would you speak so confidently if you were on your opponent’s team?” she asked.
“Being on another team would not knock my confidence if that is what you are asking.”
“It isn’t. I’m asking whether you feel if talking like that isn’t a bit presumptuous.”
“The championship is ours. Half the work is believing that you are going to get it. The rest is working for it.”
“Winning a championship would be good for your career. You haven’t won one yet. With your recent record with the Yellow Jackets, would you say that you need it?”
I wanted to laugh. She was just taking shots now. She was basically roasting me and calling it an interview. What she had said about the championship game was not wrong. It was all true. I was in hot water with the team—and with the league in general. Being part of a championship winning team would do wonders for my standing and how much they would decide that they liked me in the future.
Them liking me was extremely important.
It was literally the difference between me having and not having a job.
It wouldn’t hurt winning a championship. That had never hurt anyone’s career.
“It would be good for anyone’s career. Not just mine. I play as part of a team. Not alone.”
“Hm. I’d say that sometimes you got carried away with your own victory on the court and not the team’s as a whole.”
“Oh yeah, why would you say that?”
“I ask the questions, Dante,” she said.
Oh shit.
It was like that? I smiled at her. She was letting me have it. Yes, she did. She did ask the questions. Maybe she was someone that I had to be more scared of than I was. I had been treating her like she was on my side all this time because, for a time, she had been. Who knew about now? Now she sounded mad. Now she looked like she was out for blood. Now I was in trouble.
What would she write though?
I knew it was way too much to say that she would want to defend me or see me do well or even to win that championship that we had been talking about. I thought about it. What I had said to her, she probably didn’t want to see me win anything or be happy in my life again.
I had maybe been a little mean to her, more than she had deserved to hear from me. I was mad, but I didn’t think that was an excuse. It was a reason. She had disrespected me. I didn’t want to apologize. I wasn’t going to because part of me just didn’t believe that she would really screw me over. I told her to say whatever the hell she wanted and to do what she wanted, too, but what she decided to say about me would likely have a huge impact on my career.
She was the reporter who had done my Inside the League interview after all.
What was she going to say?
“Besides yourself, and your team, and your reputation, who would you try to win this championship for?”
“You really think I want this win for anyone other than myself?” I challenged.
“Tell me. You have a lot of people who want to see you fail, but you have some who it's in your best interests to impress.”
“My family. My mom and sister.”
“Not your dad?”
I narrowed my eyes. Where was she about to take this?
“No. Not him. He isn’t a part of my life.”
What was she doing? Why was she talking to me like that? Nobody tried it. Nobody ever dared. I was used to having reporters kiss my ass, and she hadn’t. Not once since we had known each other, but then she hadn’t done this either. I never got the impression that she might hate me from any of our conversations.
Did she?
Did she circle around from liking me to hating my guts, and if she did, was it because of what I had said to her?
If that was the case then, of course, it was because of what I had said to her. I had been cold-blooded. Maybe I hadn’
t wanted to hurt her specifically, but I had wanted to preserve myself, even if that meant hurting her in the process.
Guess I did it.
Was she…?
Was she over me?
She was sure acting like she was. She was acting like a girlfriend who really didn’t want anything to do with her ex.
If she was over me… did that mean there was someone else?
I hated how curious I was about her. What was she thinking? What was she doing? What was she up to? What was she going to do to me?
“So only select members of your family matter.” That one hadn’t been a question. She had just said it like it was a statement.
“Family is extremely important to me. I don’t think the people you share your genes with are all that make up your family. Blood relation is the thing that matters least. What matters is love. If someone is your family, you love them unconditionally and it doesn’t matter whether you are their blood or not.”
“Have you always felt like that?”
“Yes. For as long as I can remember.”
“From your public persona, you probably wouldn’t be surprised to find out… in fact, you probably already know that virtually nobody has you pegged for a family guy.”
“They're wrong.”
She looked at me and her eyes, for the first time, felt cold.
“How?”
“I love my family. There is nobody I have to prove it to but them. Fuck public opinion. They don’t care about what's important to me. They care about what I can do for them. I would die for my mom and sister. I got my mother a house in Calabasas so she wouldn’t have to live in the middle of nowhere anymore. I take her to church whenever I’m free and can make it.”
“You sound like a man trying to make a point,” she said.
Fuck, she really wasn’t going to let me win today. Her mind was made up, huh.
“I don’t have to convince anyone of anything. If they don’t want to believe me, then there is nothing I can do to make them. The public not believing me isn’t something I care about or can change. I don’t answer to them. I answer to my family, and I answer to myself.”
She paused and watched me for a second like she was waiting for me to continue talking.
“Good luck in your next games,” she said suddenly. She stood up and picked her recorder up, turning it off. I stood and looked at her.
“What? The interview is over?”
“Yes. It's over. Was there something else you wanted to say to me?”
Yeah. Yeah, there was. Why was she being like this? I didn’t like feeling like there was something going on that I wasn’t being told about.
“What are you doing, Quinn?” I asked her.
“My job. Your game is about to start. Go do yours.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Quinn
Watching Dante play, it was like he was trying to make up for all the time he had had to spend on the bench this past season.
He was killing the opposition. Murdering them.
The Yellow Jackets were going to be in the championship. They had done it. He had done it. All that was left was winning that game. That and our last interview.
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 did
n’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.
Second Chance: A Dark Bad Boy Romance Page 61
