Love To Love You (Love/Hate #3)

by Isabelle Richards

  Heisman’s bark echoes up from downstairs. He probably needs to go out.

  “I’ll get him,” Chase says as he spins around and rushes out as fast as he came in.

  Breakfast? “You mean there’s food in the house?” I call after him.

  “My mother went shopping,” he shouts back.

  Oh, thank God. Having skipped lunch and been too busy to get dinner last night, my stomach is growling so loud, I was worried they’d hear it on the radio. I was almost ready to break down and eat those disgusting pea things in the cupboard.

  Noticing I’m still in my PJs, I dash upstairs and throw on some yoga pants and a hoodie, then I find Chase in the kitchen.

  He holds out a plate. “Vegan French toast with baked apples on top. I made it myself.”

  It smells so freaking good. I can’t believe he did this. I’m not sure how much he knows, but he knows I was in LA and didn’t tell him. That’s enough to rightfully piss him off. And he still made me breakfast? I’m so damn lucky. I reach for the plate. “Thank you. That was so sweet of you.”

  He pulls back the plate. “Not until you tell me what’s going on. Don’t let the sweet gesture fool you, I’m pissed you’re keeping shit from me.”

  I tuck a stray curl behind my ear. “I didn’t intend to, I swear. Things just got hectic. A bunch of things came together after you’d already left for Dallas. By the time you got back, we had no time together for me to explain before I had to hop on a plane to LA.”

  “Bullshit,” he says through an intentional cough. “There were a million times you could have told me. Cop-outs are for losers. Try again.”

  Leaning against the counter, I press my lips together as I search for the right words. “You have so much on your shoulders. So much stress. So much pressure. I wanted to ease some of your burden, and I knew if I talked to you about my plans, you’d say no, and then you’d just be more stressed thinking about me. My staff has been keeping me quiet, saying it was the best thing for ‘us,’ but I just couldn’t do it anymore. So I broke ranks and started making calls. Shelly, Scott, your parents, Carmen. Everyone said this was the best play anyone could make for you, and that you’d be too worried about how it would impact me to see the big picture. So I made a decision, and I went with it. I’m sorry you’re upset, but I don’t regret it.” My stomach growls so loudly it sounds as though there’s a bear in the room.

  “Damn, Ari, what did you eat? I told you this all veg diet isn’t good for you.”

  My hand goes to my stomach. “I haven’t eaten since I grabbed a LÄRABAR on my way out the door yesterday morning.”

  With a set jaw, he glares at me. “Jesus, you need to take better care of yourself!” He slides the plate across the island. “Keep talking.”

  I pull a fork out of the drawer and dig in. In between bites I tell him everything: firing my agent and Helen, looking for someone new, Shelly getting me on any show she can. I wipe syrup from the corner of my mouth. “I just couldn’t sit back and watch you be trashed anymore. Someone had to change the conversation.”

  He runs his fingers through his hair as he paces the kitchen. “I get it. But you’ve got to understand that right now, my life feels completely out of control. The fate of my career is in someone else’s hands. People are saying all sorts of horrible things about me, and I can’t do anything to stop it. I’m fucking helpless, and I hate it. Tate’s pulling this shit to get back at me or the team or whatever, but I have no idea what he’s going to pull next. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. When I found out you were in LA, my heart sank. It was just one more example that I have no idea what’s going on in my life. Who else is lying to me? I know you’re trying to protect me, but I don’t need protection. I can handle it. What I can’t handle is you keeping shit from me.”

  My head drops in shame. My only intention was to ease some of his burden. The last thing I wanted to do was make him feel worse. “I didn’t think about it from that perspective. I’m so sorry.”

  “We have to work together. The only way we’re going to get through this is if we act as a team. That means we have to communicate.”

  “I know,” I say with a nod. “Look, there’s something else. Yesterday—”

  I’m interrupted when the doorbell rights.

  “We’ll pick this up later. We’re not done,” he says as he walks to the door.

  I hear Chase tell our guests we’ll be meeting in the living room. I take the last bite of his amazing French toast and head in to meet them.

  A short pixie of a woman stands in the middle of the living room, staring at the painting of Paris that takes up most of the wall. “This is really beautiful. Who’s the artist? I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “I have no idea. It’s not my house,” Chase says. He gives me a puzzled expression. “Ari?”

  “We actually have no idea. My father bought it for my mother when she was playing in the French Open. He was walking through Montmartre and saw the artist working on it. He instantly knew my mom would love it, so he chatted with the artist to see if he’d be around later in the week so Daddy could bring Mom by. Later that night, when they got back to the hotel, the painting was waiting for them. They tried to find the artist but never could. Daddy searched for him every time he went back to Paris, but he disappeared without a trace.” I hold out my hand. “I’m Arianna.”

  “Butch,” she says, shaking my hand.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  Meeting her in person is awkward. This woman probably knows more about me and the things I’ve done than I do. This perfect stranger knows about the darkest moments in my life, and now she’s in my living room and I’m supposed to offer her juice and fruit. Awkward doesn’t begin to cover it. But it’s something I need to face head on.

  I gesture for her to sit with me on the sofa. “Thank you for everything you did to find me last year. I was in a really bad place, and I’m not sure how I would have gotten out of it without Chase, and I know he wouldn’t have found me without you. So I owe you an enormous debt of gratitude.”

  “No thanks necessary,” she replies, looking slightly uncomfortable. “It’s really nice to see you doing so well. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve pulled out of the gutter only to find them back in it a short time later. That’s not you though. You’re building schools in Africa and mentoring runaways. I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you still together and happy.”

  I glance at Chase across the room, speaking with Carmen. “Despite everything that’s going on, we’re very happy.”

  “Good,” she says with a smile. “Stay that way. Now let’s chat about how we can help you put this mess behind you.” She raises her voice. “Are you two ready to get started?”

  “Let’s get a move on,” Carmen replies.

  Butch connects her laptop to the flat screen. While they’re syncing everything, my phone rings across the room.

  Chase looks at the screen. “Shelly. You want to take it?”

  I shake my head. “I’m sure it can wait. This is more important.”

  “Alrighty,” Butch says once she’s ready to go. “Carmen, some of what you’re about to hear was obtained through… creative means. Feel free to tune out during those parts.”

  Carmen pulls out a notepad from her briefcase. “I didn’t hear that. As far as I know, you’re an upstanding member of the investigative community who always follows the letter of the law.”

  “Excellent,” Butch says as she claps. “This can get a little confusing, so feel free to stop me. Let’s start from the beginning. Barry Brown from DeadSpin opens his mail one day and poof. There’s a copy of Chase’s check and a flash drive. He plugs in the flash drive. It’s a recording of Tate telling an unidentified person about how you approached, cajoled, and enticed him to take out Oliver Marshall in the Super Bowl. Brown went live with the story, and it’s blown up from there. But he has no idea where it came from. He hasn’t been able to find anything else to corroborate the
story. He’s starting to feel as though he was set up.”

  “Because he was,” Chase retorts. “If only he’d done his job and looked into this before he spouted off at that damn press conference, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  Carmen twirls a pen between her fingers. “So who set this up? Who benefits if Chase goes down?”

  “Every other team in the NFC,” I reply too quickly. I tap my chin as I consider the likelihood of another team putting this plan into motion. “I can’t see another team doing this though. I think this cockamamie scheme was thrown together by some desperate jackass who isn’t smart enough to see the big picture.”

  “I agree,” Butch says. “The check gives them something to make a little smoke, but they don’t have enough to make an actual fire. This plan has no staying power. They can’t get a favorable resolution, so what’s the point? Either they just want to create a distraction or they aren’t smart enough to see that.”

  Carmen taps her pen on her pad. “The one thing we know is Tate has to be involved. He had to give the copy of the check and make the recording, but what I can’t figure out is what he stands to gain from all this. What did you find out, Butch?”

  Butch presses a button and shows a picture of Tate on the screen. “First and foremost, let me say, he’s broke. He’s broker than broke. He’s made over ten million dollars every year for the last nine years, and from what I could find, the homeless man I gave a dollar to outside the 7-11 has more money than he does.”

  She clicks a button on her laptop and shows a breakdown of Billy’s financial mess. “Eight kids, six different baby mamas. The child support alone would cripple him. Forty grand a month! Add that to a number of houses, sports cars, a luxury liner bus—I’m assuming that’s what he needs to use when it’s his turn for car pool—and a crazy sneaker addiction. Now that he’s lost that ten-million-dollar paycheck, he’s on the fast track to bankruptcy.”

  She clicks again, and the screen shows a map with various states circled. “To make matters worse, he has a bit of a gambling problem. He owes money to some very nasty people all over the country. In fact, that weekend he was supposed to be going to his hometown to help the tornado victims, he was in New York at the New York Players Club, investing the tornado relief funds in his poker game. He lost. Big time. He still owes a lot of money.”

  “I’d love to say I can’t believe it, but that makes a helluvah lot more sense than Tate actually going out of his way to help people,” Chase says. “I can’t believe I was dumb enough to fall for his story.”

  “That bastard!” I turn toward Chase. “We need to do something for that town. When all of this clears up, we’ll have a fundraiser, or maybe get a group together to rebuild houses or a community center, like a Boys and Girls Club. We have to do something.”

  “Definitely,” he replies. “Once the guys on the team hear about this, we’ll have plenty of volunteers to help.” He looks at Butch. “They will hear about this, right? I’m assuming the press will catch wind of all this at some point.”

  She winks at him. “I have a flash drive with everything a reporter needs to nail him to the wall. Copies of all the checks he cashed from other players on his team, bank statements that show his withdrawal from a bank around the corner from the Players Club, and a copy of his NYPC ledger.”

  “I do not even want to know how you got your hands on that. But that isn’t want concerns me the most,” Carmen says. “This still doesn’t make sense. He’s broke. No team will touch him because he’s a child-beating degenerate. How does this scandal help him? This just digs him further into the hole. It doesn’t add up.”

  She’s right. As much as I want to blame it all on Tate, this only shifted the conversation from him beating his girlfriend and son to him going after a beloved player. He’s dumb, but is he that dumb?

  “I still think it does,” Butch answers. “Here’s what we know. After his agent failed to get him picked up by another team, Tate fired him. The trouble is, no one else wanted to touch him. So he ended up with some guy named Wallace LaRue.”

  Carmen, Chase, and I groan. LaRue’s client list is made up of people who can’t even make it onto the celebrity D-list. Someone who might have been famous for a split second and will do anything to cling to that spotlight. These people end up on bad reality television and writing tell-all books that no one really cares about.

  “Oh, so you know about him. Good, so I don’t have to explain.” She flips through a number of slides about LaRue. “From what I’ve learned, LaRue tried everything, but not even the lamest of the lame reality TV shows wanted Tate. No one wants to read a tell-all book about him being a disgrace until there’s been some redemption, unless he’s a part of a bigger scandal. Tate has made four adult films, expecting them to bring in a surge of cash, but sales are weak at best.”

  “None of this explains why he would insert himself as the villain in a scandal,” Carmen states.

  Butch explains, “He needs a story to sell. Something that people will want to hear about. People love a good sports scandal: BALCO, steroids, Bountygate, Deflategate, the list goes on and on. People condemn those involved but are dying to hear all the juicy details. Look at Tanya Harding. She’s a pariah; the world despises her for what she did to Nancy Kerrigan. But millions of people bought her book.”

  I follow all the moving parts, but it just seems fantastical, like something out of a bad Lifetime movie. “This is a bit far-fetched, don’t you think?”

  “Is it?” Butch asks. “He’s desperate and broke. I think we all can agree he can’t rely on his smarts to bring in the bucks. All he has is his name, which is about as worthless as a snorkel on the Titanic. So he can go porn, which he’s tried and failed at, or he needs something big.”

  The more I think about it, half of the bad Lifetime movies probably have LaRue connected in some way, so who knows. Maybe this is legit.

  “There’s no way Tate was smart enough to come up with this plan,” Chase disputes.

  “Tate may not be, but LaRue is. I spoke to two former clients who said he tried this conspiracy-after-the-fact-thing with them, but it never took wind. They didn’t have a smoking gun. There was no check to build the fabricated scandal from. With Tate, he’s got something. But it only works if Chase actually goes down. The NFL has to find enough to suspend you, otherwise his plan doesn’t work.”

  “If you’re right, he’ll need more than what he has,” Carmen says.

  Butch nods. “Agreed, and the pressure is on. My sources inside the NFL say they’re getting close to calling it. They can’t find a thing. Not surprising, since nothing exists. If I haven’t found anything, there’s no way they did. If Tate doesn’t feed them some sort of additional proof, then this all goes away.”

  “The investigation maybe, but my character’s still shot to hell.”

  Butch presses her lips together and gives Chase a forlorn look, as though she wishes she had something better to tell him. “We’ll have to find a way to expose him. It’s the only way.”

  “If this is actually what’s going on!” Chase shouts. “This is one theory, after a hypothesis, after a supposition. We could be way off base and wasting time chasing possibilities while my career goes in the toilet!” Chase pushes out of his chair, threads his fingers behind his head, and paces the room.

  “You’re right, there’s nothing concrete tying Tate to anything yet, but I’m working on it. DeadSpin has allowed me to run fingerprints on the envelope and flash drive, etcetera, in exchange for an exclusive. I have investigators looking for anything that can fill in the missing pieces. We’re all over this. We will find something. I’m sure of it.”

  “I need some air. I’m taking the dog out,” Chase says as he storms out of the room.

  I debate going after him, but I decide he needs some time by himself. I turn to Carmen. “I spent all day yesterday and today demanding proof of Chase’s involvement in hopes of lighting a fire under the NFL’s ass. If Butch’s theory is true,
it’s going to light a fire under Tate’s as well. Maybe he’ll do something impulsive and slip up.”

  Carmen looks at her notes. “We’d better hope so, because right now, I don’t see how we’re going to get Chase out from under this. We can’t even put Chase on Oprah to tell his side of things. If he goes out there and tries to sell this…” She holds up her pad. “He’ll sound desperate and paranoid.”

  Butch unplugs her laptop from the TV. “Why don’t we go? We’ve given you guys enough to think about for today.”

  Carmen and Butch pack up, and I escort them out, thanking them both for their hard work. As I walk them out, I notice Chase’s truck is gone. He must have taken Heisman somewhere. I can’t blame him for needing to get away for a bit.

  When I get back inside, I hear my phone ringing in the living room. I get to it too late, and the call goes to voicemail. Glancing at the screen, I notice I have twenty-five missed calls. At least twenty of them are from Shelly. That can’t be good. She never calls this many times unless it’s a crisis. My thumb hovers over the talk button as I muster up the strength to make the call. I’m not sure how much more crisis we can take right now.

  “Hey, Shelly,” I say, then hold my breath, waiting for the bad news.

  “Where have you been?” she screams so loudly I have to pull the phone away from my ear. “I’ve been calling you all morning.”

  I plop back on the sofa. “With Chase’s lawyer strategizing a way out of this. What’s going on? Where’s the fire?”

  “First, your hashtag, #showmetheproof, is blowing up! You’re trending! People keep tweeting, demanding the NFL give an update. The response is incredible. We’ve got stories by reporters in all the major markets you’ve spoken to. People are asking questions, doubting the stories they’ve been fed. Your plan is working!”

  Good news? I’m shocked, but I’ll take it. “That’s fantastic!” I say at the same time she says, “Except.”

  And there it is. She decided to lead with the good news before hitting me with the bad. I should have seen that coming. “Except what?”