by Kathy Lyons
“I didn’t mean it that way,” she said, obviously seeing my expression. “I meant…I just…” She took a deep breath. “You always get me doing things I know I shouldn’t.”
“You wanted to,” I said. I’d wanted to. Like my next breath had depended on it.
“I did,” she said. “I just…” She shrugged. “I just don’t know what to do next.” Neither did I. And I loved that she was so open about what she was thinking. But that didn’t change the problem. We couldn’t date. Not if she stayed a journalist. No way would the Bobcats allow that. And if we couldn’t hang out together, just exactly what was left? Nothing. So maybe I could fudge the rules a bit. Maybe we could see each other as normal people?
“Do you, um, want to see a movie sometime?” Like tomorrow? Like right now?
“Um, yeah. That would be nice.”
“How about dinner first? Movie afterward.”
“Sure.” She flashed me an uncertain smile. One that had her eyes softening and her shoulders easing down. That was good. I wanted her relaxed around me. I mean, the sex was fantastic, but the after-sex awkwardness had to go.
I reached out my hand. She entwined her fingers in mine. Sweetly petite. Amazingly soft. I just wanted to tuck her close and never let her go.
“I’ll walk you to your car.”
“Okay,” she said. Then she sighed. “But we have to get my stuff.”
Back in Nico’s office. Right. “Okay.”
We walked hand in hand. We talked about what movie we wanted to see. About what restaurants she liked. I let her pick both. Thankfully, she selected the newest comic book movie, and I was grinning as I knocked on Nico’s office.
“Come in,” he said, his voice unusually cold.
I didn’t think anything of it at first. Honestly, I was too wrapped up in touching Heidi to care what Nico was doing. Except when I looked into the office, he was playing with his phone, spinning it over and over between two fingers.
Nico was not a man to fidget. He didn’t play with his clothing or his electronics. He kept his body under complete control all the time. So the fact that he was spinning that phone made me nervous. But before I could ask, his gaze cut hard and cold to Heidi.
“No articles, Miss Wong. Not even so much as a score report.”
She stiffened. I did, too. His tone was like a slap in the face. Especially since she’d already promised this wasn’t an interview.
“Nico—” I protested, but she cut me off.
“This wasn’t an interview,” she said, her voice suddenly hard. “I already promised that.”
“You can’t print anything about the Bobcats, Miss Wong, because you aren’t on the approved press list.”
“You have my press credentials right here,” she said as she grabbed her purse and lanyard.
“I’ve taken you off the list. You won’t be allowed in the press room again.”
I jolted. “Nico, cut it out,” I said. “Heidi and I are old friends.”
The man’s gaze drifted slowly to me. His expression was almost pitying. “You rookies are all the same. You don’t realize there are no old friends. Only leeches and the press.” It was clear from his tone that the press was the uglier creature.
I stiffened. “Look, asswipe—”
He tapped a button on his phone, then spun it so we both could see. There in stark black and white was video of me and Heidi. Of what we’d done on the table in the press room.
“Jesus—” I breathed, my entire body going cold.
“That’s the thing with this stadium. There are cameras everywhere,” Nico said. Then he stared hard at Heidi. “One word from you and this goes public. Imagine going for a job interview and having this be the first thing your employer sees after Googling you.”
“You fucking bastard!” She spit. Which was a lot nicer than the words that were flying through my brain. But I wasn’t a man for words. I went for the phone.
Nico tried to grab it, but I was faster. And while he was still reaching, I broke it in half. The crunch was audible, but not nearly as satisfying as I wanted. Especially when he rolled his eyes.
“It’s not stored on my phone. And I’m not planning to use it.”
“Then erase the files.” I was a large man, and he was sitting down. When I lean down and pitch my voice low, people tended to back away. I rarely got mean, but sometimes—
He grabbed my throwing arm with hard pressure. It was a quiet threat that was echoed in his eyes. I was a pro athlete, physically strong and definitely capable. But he’d been trained by the marines. There was no way I was going to win a fight between the two of us.
“Erase the files,” I said anyway.
“I’m not going to use them,” he said, his tone matching mine. Then he looked over at Heidi. “Not unless she breaks her word.”
“You can’t control what I write!” she said, her voice tight and angry.
“I can’t,” Nico agreed. “I was just showing you the consequences if anything comes out that has anything to do with our boy here.”
I slammed his hand off me, but I didn’t follow it up. Especially since he was ready with a counterpunch if I’d gone with my fists instead of my brain. “I’m not your boy,” I gritted out.
“No. You’re a rookie who doesn’t understand the press.” His gaze settled hard and heavy on me. “I’m protecting you.”
I wanted to punch him in the face. I wanted to take his phone pieces and shove them up his ass. But I saw in his expression that he meant what he said. He really did think he was protecting me. And maybe he had a point. Maybe Heidi had been playing me, but I didn’t believe it. Not for more than a second. But in that one tick of the clock, a sliver of doubt wiggled in.
She had gotten me to talk about things. Personal things that were meant for her alone. Plenty of careers had been destroyed with less. A casual statement overheard by an unscrupulous reporter. An accident that was nothing, but made to look like something.
I was the clean-cut kid from Nebraska. Or so the Bobcats claimed. I couldn’t afford to let anything damage that. Certainly not in my first season. There were too many ways to get bounced back to the minor league.
“She’s not going to print anything,” I said. Then I looked at Heidi.
She was flushed and angry. Her entire body was rigid with fury and her eyes blazed. But there was nothing either of us could do and she knew it. She’d come here for an interview, and now she couldn’t even print the scores without risking having that piece of filth plastered all over the internet.
“Heidi—” I pleaded, but I didn’t know where to go from there. I couldn’t fix this. I didn’t know how. Which left her blinking fast against tears she refused to let fall.
“Fuck you,” she whispered at Nico. Then she spun on her heel and left. The only thing that remained of her in the room was the Bobcats cap she’d flipped upside down on the desk.
Chapter Nine
Heidi
I slammed the door to my apartment, my eyes burning and my throat clogged with tears. Never in my life had I felt such humiliation, and it made me clench my teeth against the scream. Then I realized it was Saturday night and in this complex, I could scream all I wanted and no one would care. My next-door neighbor was playing techno loud enough to aggravate my headache. Even so, I buried my face into a pillow before I howled until I was hoarse.
And then—eventually—I stopped. It wasn’t as fast as turning off a faucet, but a girl can only scream so long until she starts searching for a weapon. Question was, what exactly was I going to grab? And how should I wield it?
I chose my phone. I wasn’t really feeling violent. I just wanted to talk to my best friend. Seconds later, she answered the phone with a sleepy, “Yeah?”
I glanced at the clock. It wasn’t even midnight and I’d woken her up? “Sam? Are you okay?”
“Hmm? Oh yeah. Just fell asleep watching something. Movie, I think.”
“Wow. What happened to my party-girl, best friend?”
“School loans happened. And Janet just moved in with her boyfriend, so I’ve got to cover all the rent. Why the hell didn’t I go to bartender school? At least I would have something to do on a Saturday night.”
“Because you work ninety hours a week in real estate and will start making billions any second now.”
“Turns out it’s not so easy to make billions. And just because I got my Realtor’s license doesn’t mean I can close a sale.”
I winced. Of the two of us, I thought she’d be rolling in the dough way sooner than me. We both thought that her looks and personality would bring in the male clients. Add in her smarts and she ought to be closing deals left and right. Apparently, not so much.
“You’ll figure it out. I believe in you.”
She chuckled. “God, I love you. Now give. Why’d you really call? You’ve got that I’ve-been-screaming-into-a-pillow hoarseness.”
Did I? Yeah, well maybe my throat was a little raw. I got up to get some water while I explained. “I did something stupid. Really stupid. I even knew it was stupid, but I did it anyway.”
“Oh, those are the best mistakes.”
“They are not!”
“Did it involve blood? Brain damage?”
“No!”
“Then they’re the best mistakes.”
“Career suicide isn’t good in any way.”
She snorted. “You don’t have a career. You got laid off, remember?” I could hear her open up a soda can, and I wished I was sitting right beside her making popcorn while she poured the diet sodas. Two years ago, we would have sat facing each other on the couch, doing each other’s toenails while dishing about life. Now we had to settle for late-night phone calls to a muffled techno beat.
It totally sucked, and my misery deepened by another fathom.
“I wish you were here,” I moaned.
“Quit whining and tell me who you slept with.”
I jolted. “How do you know I slept with someone?”
“Because you always say that’s a huge, stupid mistake. Did you use a condom?”
Did I mention that she was smart? And way too perceptive. “Of course, we did.”
“It didn’t break, did it?”
I shuddered. That would just put icing on the humiliation cake. “No. I’m good in that department.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“It got recorded.”
A moment of stunned silence, and then a squeal. “You bad girl, you! Oh my God, was it hot? Can I have a copy?”
“No!” I took a breath. “Though if things go badly, I’m sure anyone with internet access will get a copy.”
She blew out a slow breath. “Ouch. Well that sucks, but you’d hardly be the first or the last. So give me the details. Slowly. Take all night if you need to. Paint a really good picture.”
I chuckled despite my misery. “I’m beginning to regret calling you.”
“Liar. Come on. Let me live vicariously through you. Because, sad to say, I’m not getting any, and I miss it.”
“It’s not so much what I did as much as with whom.”
“Yeah? Who?”
I pulled the phone away from my ear knowing that a squeal was about to come. Then I took a deep breath and confessed. “Rob Lee. We did it twice in the press booth at the stadium. The security cams got it all.”
The squeal didn’t come. In fact, it was quiet enough that I thought we’d been disconnected. But after a moment, I heard a low whistle.
“This is why I advocate regular sex. Otherwise, you build up until you seriously explode.” Then she paused a moment. “Was it good?”
“The best.” In fact, as miserable as I felt right then, parts of me were practically buzzing with happiness.
And now she squealed. A happy high note that never failed to make me smile. “Hot, recorded sex with superstud Rob.”
I groaned.
“Okay, okay,” she said, returning to her serious voice, though I could tell it was a struggle for her. “Tell me everything. Exactly.”
I took a deep breath as I went into the kitchen to get some water. And when I had hot tea brewing, I started the tale. Everything from becoming a stringer at the paper—which she already knew—to the moment I’d stomped my Louboutins right out of the stadium. And at the end of the tale, my tea was cold, my face was hot from humiliation, and Samantha had stopped making gasps and had headed into grumbles of rage. It was part of why I loved her so much. She exactly echoed my emotions when I needed her to.
Except when she spoke, it was with a delicate confusion. “So, um, is this a revenge call?”
I exhaled and tried to pull myself together. “Of course, it is.” Mentally I envisioned blowing up the entire stadium. And while I was at it, I’d obliterate the Indianapolis Sun, too.
“You know it’s not Rob’s fault, right?”
Of course I did. He’d been as outraged as I was. More even. And he’d broken that phone, which had been really satisfying to watch. “This always happens with him. He sucks me in, we have a great time, and then I end up feeling humiliated.”
Samantha made soothing sounds that were completely incoherent. Which meant she was thinking hard and not telling me what she really thought.
“Spill it,” I ordered.
She took a moment, but finally talked in an überrational tone that would annoy me if she weren’t my best friend. “First, nobody cares about an internet sex tape.”
“My parents will kill me. My brothers will never let me forget it. And we’re not even going to talk about the prayers I’ll have to do at the ancestral shrine.”
“Oh, right. You have family who cares.” That was one of the things that separated us. My family scrutinized everything I did, every moment. It’s the reason I went to school out of state: to try to get some distance between us. Sam’s family had tons of money but none of the caring that should happen with loving parents. I longed for my relatives to butt out. She longed for someone to show interest in anything she did.
Which meant that she had no understanding of what a family drama like this could do to me.
“Everyone will see it, Sam. My cousins in Hong Kong will see it and talk to my aunts about it who will be shamed, and they’ll scream at my mother. She’ll be mortified, and that’s nothing compared to what those biddies at mah-jongg are going to say to her at home.” I shuddered at the thought. “It’s not just me who’ll twist on the damaged family-honor spit. It’s everyone related to me. And even if I could ignore it, they can’t. It’s too important to them.”
She sighed. “Just how long will the shaming last?”
“Forever. Stuff like this doesn’t go away.” It’d be brought up at every family gathering for generations. I still heard about my great-uncle who was caught urinating in a public fountain and he’d been dead for thirty years. “I’d been doing so well, Sam, and now it’s all gone. A sex tape is proof that I can’t make it on my own. God only knows what will happen if I have to head back to Chicago because I can’t pay my bills.”
“Oh shit.”
“And if I ever confess I don’t want to go to law school, then I might as well step in front of a moving train.”
She took a deep breath. “Let’s not get hasty here.”
I wasn’t being hasty. I was being real. She had no idea the pressure on Chinese girls to perform. Good job, good husband, good face that showed respect to the elders at every turn. I never spoke out, never did anything for myself. Except for that one time on spring break. And again this afternoon in the press box.
And both had ended in disaster.
I flopped backward onto the couch. “What am I going to do?”
“Simple. Go write the story.”
“What?” The word came out more like a squeak.
“Look, everybody has a sex story. And those who don’t, wish they had.” I heard the rustle as she dug into her cabinets, probably for popcorn. “So you had hot sex with a superstar. Who hasn’t had that fantasy?”
>
“Me.”
“You lived it. And wow, I am never going to look at the announcer booth again without thinking of this.”
Me, neither.
“So write the article. Whatever article you want. Show them that they can’t control you with fear.”
I shook my head. “I’d lose my job as a stringer for sure. And can kiss goodbye any paper wanting to hire me again.”
“Not if the article was really good.”
Not true. Plenty of great articles made zero public impact. Besides it didn’t matter. “Didn’t you hear what I said about my family? My parents would die—literally die—from the mortification.” That wasn’t an exaggeration. My cousin didn’t get into a single Ivy League college and her father had a stroke when he heard the news.
“Okay, that’s bad, but what happens if you cave now? If you give in and don’t write the article.”
I didn’t have to answer. Bills and more bills. Even with a food-service job, I wouldn’t be able to make my rent. And that didn’t even touch the reality of what it’d do to my dreams. If I couldn’t make a go of journalism, then I’d have to move home and face the daily pressure to go into law when I had zero desire to do it.
Then I heard Sam take a deep breath. “What do you want to do? Don’t think about the money or the family drama. Just close your eyes and think about what you want to do right now.”
“I want…” Rob. Well, duh. Even humiliated, I still flushed at the memory of what we’d done. And ached to do it again. But outside of that, what did I want? I picked the next best thing. “I want to write an article about Rob. I want to finish what I started and prove to myself, my jerk ex-boss, and everyone at the paper that I can do it.”
“There you go.”
“But I don’t want to get fired because of it.” And I didn’t want Rob to get fired, either.
I took a deep breath and thought about something Rob had said this afternoon. That even the superstar athletes couldn’t control what happened in their games. And that trying to cover every eventuality would make them crazy.
Could I follow his example? Could I just do what I wanted and pray that it didn’t destroy my life?