Second Chance: A Dark Bad Boy Romance

by Kathryn Thomas

  The way he held my gaze, I felt a little like he might lean in and kiss me, and I wasn’t really sure that I would have stopped him if he did. He had made a full one-hundred-eighty-degree shift from that slick talking baller I was talking to during the game.

  “This isn’t for you; it’s for me,” I assured him.

  “As if you won't enjoy having Dante Rock at your beck and call for the rest of the basketball season? You don’t know how many women would kill each other for the chance.”

  And there he was again. Arrogant smart talker and cocky bastard. Thought I had lost him for a second. I moved a step back so his hands left my shoulders. He had referred to himself in the third person. Why did that piss me off so much? I did it sometimes, but it was so obnoxious when he did.

  “If you fuck with me, Dante, I will make it so that you will never make another cent playing basketball in this entire country.”

  “I got you. No need to be bitchy about it.”

  I narrowed my eyes and he laughed at me.

  “See ya later, TMZ, I’ll be waiting on your call,” he said as he began to walk away.

  “Oh and Dante, one more thing…”

  Chapter Six

  Dante

  I was behind the wheel; I probably should have waited a little while to stop being so mad first. I didn't need to get in a wreck. Not with this car. I had just gotten it. It was last year’s Lamborghini Huracan and I had had it customized on the inside so that it could actually accommodate a person who was six foot seven. It had been a bitch to finally get them to color it the color I wanted, matte black. At least I could count on the traffic here in Los Angeles to slow me down.

  I’m not a good guy. I’m not, but at least I fucking know that. I’ll stand in it and own it. I’m a piece of shit, and I have never claimed to be anything other than just that. I start fights, I fuck girls whom I never call back, I spend my money on shit I don’t need, but I’m not an abuser. No fucking way. I’ll do a lot of shit, but I have a line too—and hitting women crosses it.

  Who the hell was that broad anyway? Where did she come from and why was she after me for hitting her. I had fucked a lot of girls when we were both drunk, but I knew for a fact that this was not one of them. Even if she was, there was no way I gave her that black eye because I don’t hit women. I don’t fucking hit women.

  I saw my mom get banged around too much for me to ever even think of raising a hand to a woman. If I throw a fist at someone, it's because I know they can throw theirs back just as hard. What kind of piece of shit coward hits a woman? You might as well just have your cock and balls cut off because you don’t deserve them. You aren’t a man, not a real one if you would do that to a woman.

  I gripped the steering wheel tighter as I started to remember. Ha. Remember… I never fucking forgot. I never forgot my mom and my dad. I never forgot the way I would hear her scream and cry and beg my dad not to come after my sister and me. I remembered her telling me to take my little sister, Gabbie, into the other room and to lock the door from the inside, not opening it up for anyone but her. Gabbie used to cry, and I had to hold her and tell her that everything was okay. It was a lie every fucking time. He nearly murdered her, more than once. The way she used to plead with him, I know he was taking it all out on her, whatever he wanted to do to me and Gabbie.

  The thought still scared me to this day. Sometimes we would be in the house at the same time. Other times, we would get home and mom was so beat up, she could hardly get out of bed. There would be blood on her face and the bedcover and she would tell me not to let Gabbie in the room. She used to send us to sleep over at the neighbors sometimes when she didn’t want us to hear another fight and the neighbors would just silently take us, no questions asked. They knew what was happening. Everyone knew. Mom used to try to hide it with makeup and dark glasses, but she always took it off at night and her skin was raw and bruised. Even our teachers at school started suspecting things because both of us, Gabbie and me, started tanking at our education.

  Our grades slipped; we stopped talking to other kids; and we started acting up. When mom was finally called to school because I had been fighting, she had cried. When we got home, she hugged me and cried some more. Her tears got on my hair and on my face, and I just wanted her to stop. She kept saying that she thought she had failed, that I had turned out just like my dad.

  She might as well have told me right then that she didn’t love me because it hurt just as if she had. The man who had made her life and ours a living hell before he finally walked out completely and left us high and dry? That was the man she thought I was going to be? I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I fucking couldn’t let it happen.

  She had been begging me since I was a teenager to get into therapy so that I could talk about all that stuff with someone. She had been and I think it was the main thing that had gotten her this far. There were many times when I thought that this time or that time was going to be the last time that I would see her alive. She had needed it though. The guy never touched me and he had never touched Gabbie. Mom was the one who received all the real abuse. Then there was the whole mess after with the drugs, but she was better now. She was fine and healthy.

  I ended up going to therapy, eventually a few times because it meant so much to her. I didn’t really get along with that dude who was talking to me. He seemed like an asshole. Like he knew it all and everything I was saying to him was just really boring because he had heard it all before. I didn’t feel like he was listening to me. I felt like he had just been sitting there as I talked, waiting for me to finish so he could sit there and give me the rundown of everything he believed in his opinion was wrong with me. I didn’t want to know what was wrong with me I just wanted the asshat to listen. I was paying him four hundred and fifty a fucking hour to fucking listen, and he wasn’t.

  I had bailed after a few sessions, but there was this one thing that I had ended up taking from the session. He spoke to me like I was a child who didn’t know big words. He said that abuse tended to go in a cycle. If a person was abused, or exposed to abuse, there was a good chance that they would become an abuser themselves.

  That shit hit me like a ton of bricks because fuck that. Fuck that and fuck that guy, Dr. Percy Longenekker, yeah, that was his real name. He didn’t know me. All his degrees and shit didn’t mean he knew the person that I was and what I was thinking. He didn’t. He didn’t know shit.

  He had been saying there was a chance that people who had experienced abuse could go on to become abusers themselves, but what I had heard was, oh, Dante, you are going to be an abuser if you aren’t already. It felt like he was pointing the finger at me. I kept it cool in the session because I didn’t want to have to talk to the police if I punched this guy out and he called them. That would have been more trouble than he was worth because he was wrong.

  First of all, my dad yelled, he yelled the house down, but he never touched me. He never laid a hand on me or on Gabbie. It was my mom who had been abused, and she never, she never did to us what he did to her. Never. She protected us and tried to make sure we were out of the house when it happened so we wouldn’t have to hear it or see it. Was that what he had meant? Was he going to try and say that my mom had done something to us?

  I’m not perfect. I fly off the handle a hell of a lot, but the one thing I swore to God that I would never do was to raise my hand to hit a woman. It didn’t matter if she did it first or what. I wouldn’t fucking do it.

  My mom was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life. She survived, barely, but I never fucking forgot.

  And now that bitch. Quinn.

  She thought I was really out here hitting women and that made my blood boil. Not only that, she had me by the fucking balls. Where’d she even come from? One day I'm playing ball, minding my own business, and the next this reporter is trying to get me to tell all about this other crazy woman who thinks I hit her.

  This wasn’t right. The women I kept around were never this much trouble
. I liked it simple. I offered only one thing and I expected them likewise to offer me only one thing. I never asked for more and never offered more. It was simple, the exchange, and I expected it to be respected or else we just weren’t going to work out anymore. That was it, really.

  I had never… I would never.

  I didn’t know the woman, and even if I did, if someone hit her it sure as shit wasn’t me.

  Quinn Blaze. I had never had a woman lord over me like this in my life. She had me by the balls. It wasn’t as if she could write that I had hit that lady because I hadn’t, but then again, who was to say that she wouldn’t. Maybe she hated me enough to spin an article that was false. She didn’t talk to me like she believed me.

  Why was I so chopped up over this? Yeah, the woman had the power to say whatever she wanted about me and have it read and believed by millions of people, but that wasn’t the problem. It was her. I wanted her to believe me. I saw the way she was looking at me when she thought I had done it, and I didn’t want her thinking that about me. I couldn’t have that. She looked, not scared, but disgusted. Like she didn’t want to be around me and I had to make her believe me.

  Fuck. She already didn’t like me and now there was this fucking shit. She was so tough to get through to. Whatever power I had over other women, this one was immune.

  I was a grown man, nearly fucking thirty and this woman had the fucking gall to order me around? She had the audacity to threaten me? I didn’t have anything to be scared of, but I didn’t take orders. I didn’t let people order me around and make conditions about what they wanted from me.

  She had an entire laundry list of shit she wanted from me. It was like being a kid, and I was not anybody’s fucking child. She wanted me to live like a monk or something. She didn’t want me to drink, to go out, or to get girls. That last one was definitely going to be a problem. The only way I would be able to stay away from other girls was if she was providing some other avenue for me to get my dick wet.

  If that smart mouth and her pussy weren’t available for my use whenever I needed them, then we were going to have a problem. She wanted me to be available whenever she wanted to ask me things. She needed me interview ready at all times and that, that was just not realistic.

  No way. It didn’t work like that and she needed to learn that. I just needed to teach her.

  I didn’t like this. It was a new position for me. I had had women on top of me before, but not in this context. Usually, those women wanted to be there. I let them be there and I enjoyed them being there as well. I did not like this. Quinn was hot, she could get it. I wanted to give it to her, but I knew better than to fuck with her, or fuck her, especially now when she had the power to ruin my career.

  I would have to move to China and play in their league over there. I didn’t want it. I really, really didn’t fucking want it, or I’d have to get a real job. The thought made me shudder. I wasn’t dumb. I just had never needed to be smart because that wasn’t the thing that was going to make me and the people around me rich.

  The thing they don’t tell you about sports scholarships in college was you only had to make a minimum GPA. Minimum. And that was a fucking 2.0. You could miss half your classes and still get that if you did the reading. Another thing they did was enroll you in easy courses so you would be able to pass. You were there to play your sport, but they had to justifiably show that you had a reason to be there besides your sport.

  It was stupid, but that was what had earned me both a college degree and a sports career. My degree was in communications. I had no fucking clue what I could even do with it if Quinn went through with ruining my career and I had to try and fall back on it.

  The Quinn thing was solved, or at least it was solved as far as it was going to get solved. I had to do damage control. I had to find out who the woman was and I had to make sure that nobody got to hear about this before Quinn had her little article or whatever ready. I was not looking forward to the interview. I didn’t even know what she would end up writing because I had told her all there was to tell about the woman and what was going on.

  She had so many rules and conditions and shit, I had one of my own. She did televised interviews, but the ones she wanted with me were apparently text. That was fine. I didn’t actually care if she wanted to take pictures or video, she just couldn’t do it without my permission first. No. That would be a problem.

  Chapter Seven

  Quinn

  Today was the day.

  I couldn’t wait to hear what he would have to tell me. He better be here. That was another thing I wasn’t willing to tolerate. Lateness. He was in demand and that meant he would have to put come concessions on his time to accommodate me. That would be another way to keep him on his toes. That was where he needed to be.

  I wasn’t going to take it.

  He wasn’t going to run around like a hoodlum if I had anything to say about it. What he did in his spare time was no longer his own business. It was mine. If I caught him slipping one time, there would be hell to pay. He had agreed so grudgingly to my terms like he was really mad about it. He was so used to being indulged and so used to getting to do whatever he wanted, without any real consequences.

  His talent was at that level that a lot of people had to train for years to attain. His genetics, aptitude, and skill in the sport that just came naturally to him was only made sharper by his training. Even at the man’s worst, when he was dulled by alcohol or whatever the hell else he took, he was still a better player than most people could ever hope to be.

  Didn’t he see I was doing him a favor? What would he do if he wasn’t a hooper? All that height? It was nearly the only job he could do.

  It was probably wrong for me to feel so good about having Dante in that compromising position. It was only after I had gone home and received a message from Dante telling me he was grateful that I was going to take the time to listen to him and expose the truth that I fully recognized how much power I had in this situation. The interview today and the piece I would be releasing would be about the woman, but who was to say I couldn’t get more out of him than just that?

  He was Dante Rock; the man behind the hooper persona was likely very interesting. I could ask the important questions that I had never heard anyone ask before. I could get him to open up about his past scandals, not the boring stuff like which socialite he was using or was being used by, but questions like, what did he plan on doing about his apparent anger issues that had gotten him in trouble in the past?

  That was good. He was a livewire. He flew off the handle, creating full on brawls on and off the court. Where did that come from and what had he done, if anything to control it? He should have done something. He needed to. Honestly, I wanted to know whether he knew what the consequences of his actions were, the real consequences, not just the suspensions and minor injuries he might get.

  Acting like that, with other players and with fans, was just inexcusable. He might have had a temper, but that wasn’t a good enough reason to act like that. His longevity in his career depended on people liking him and him showing that he was a person who you could depend on to not do stupid shit like that. When he acted like a wild hyena, it reflected badly on the Charlotte Yellow Jackets, and they would be held—at least to a certain degree—responsible for his actions. It had to be something. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. There weren’t real people who just acted crazy like that for no good reason. He was basically a brand, and I wanted to separate the man from the face. Who was Dante Rock, actually? Was that even his real name?

  He was in the locker room when I got there. He was sitting in front of his locker. Professional team locker rooms were nothing short of fantastic. They were massive, first and foremost, and emblazoned from the ceiling to the floor with the yellow and black of the Charlotte Yellow Jackets.

  “There you are, TMZ. Sexy as ever,” he said, grinning at me from his locker. I shook my head and walked up to him. I was wearing the same sort of thing I
had been the first time we had met. A pencil skirt and blouse with heels. It was not sexy; it was professional. The women who worked around him wore uniforms where their cleavage and half their asses were out. My get-up was practically nun-like. I looked like Sister Quinn of Our Lady’s Sacred Heart Convent next to those cheerleaders.

  We were not playing this game. He was not going to start this whole song and dance, not with me. He being as hot as he was, and me being a girl would have nothing to do with what would eventually transpire between us. There were the obvious reasons, like professionalism and the fact that having a romantic relationship with someone I was reporting on was the grossest misconduct imaginable.

  Romantic relationship. When was the last time Dante had had one of those? Did he have a romantic bone in his body? Did he know what that was? Was he familiar with the concept? I wanted to bet on no. If he took a quick click through TMZ, the only news outlet he seemed to know about, he would find out that his exploits with young women were very well and extensively documented.