“Dante. I’m sorry, but whatever I did I’m so sorry. Please tell me what I did wrong.”
“I don’t have time for this today. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He turned to start walking away from me. His face, his voice, his posture, everything was strong and hard. Did he really not care? Was he really unbothered by this, and was I the only one losing my mind, desperate and on the verge of begging?
“Dante—” I grabbed his arm, making him stop and turning him to me. I searched his green eyes for something. For anything, but there was nothing. They were empty. I didn’t see the warmth, the honesty, or the affection that I had seen in them before. Not even the lust. I wanted something. Anything from him, but he was giving me nothing. It hurt.
“Quinn. Stop. Okay. Just stop.” He gently moved my hand from his arm and walked away from me.
A part of me, the idiotic part that was hung up over Dante and wasn’t thinking straight, couldn’t process what he had done and said as an absolute rejection. I was hanging onto the hope that I would receive the text message directly from him.
I didn’t.
Just like he said. I got a message from a number I didn’t recognize, asking me to meet Dante at Republique at eight in the morning.
The restaurant opened for breakfast, but I didn’t think that he wanted a breakfast date with me. I was way too nervous to eat anything anyway. I made my way to the restaurant and scanned the room for Dante. He was nowhere to be found. I asked a waiter where I would be able to find him or where I could sit to wait for him since he didn’t seem to be there yet, and I was directed to a private room. I had no idea that the place even had private rooms.
It wasn’t dark or mysterious in the room when I walked in. It looked very much just like a regular room. It was probably very expensive to eat there, but it wasn’t as if Dante couldn’t cover the cost. There was one table in there and Dante was sitting at it.
I walked over to it suddenly feeling like I was going into an interrogation. He and I were alone once the waiter left. He was sitting, but I could tell he was dressed casually, jeans and a shirt. He didn’t say anything to me so I decided to start.
“Dante—”
“Do you want anything to eat? Drink?” he asked. Why was he cutting me off so much all of a sudden? I suppose I might have deserved it since I had made him so mad somehow, but I still had no clue what I had done to him.
“No. Dante—”
“Sit down, Quinn,” he said.
I sank into the seat. There was nothing on the table between us, but I wished suddenly that there was, then I would have something to do with my hands.
“Dante…” I waited for him to stop me, but he didn’t that time. “Dante, please tell me what I did wrong. I've been wracking my brain and I can’t come up with anything. It’s been killing me to think that I did something to you. Please tell me what it is.”
“I was wondering whether you were listening when I would talk. So you do only care about what I say when the recorder is out?”
“Dante, how could you say that? Don’t just say things to hurt me. You know that isn’t true.”
“Remember early on, when we were just beginning. Remember the agreements we made. You made me agree to not do any of the things I did usually for the sake of your story series.”
“I did. And you agreed to it. Those were the conditions of our professional agreement.”
“Wow. You really did forget.”
“Forget what?”
“I asked you one thing. One thing Quinn. What was the one thing I asked you not to do?”
I sat across from him looking into his eyes. They were hard and inscrutable. It finally hit me. The camera thing. He didn’t like being recorded without his consent.
“Oh my god,” I said to myself. “Oh my god,” I leaned forward on the table, putting my face in my hands. The camera. I hadn’t told him that I was taking my camera out and that I was filming him. He probably thought that I was trying something rotten. He probably thought I was trying to take advantage of him while he was sleeping.
“You got it now? I thought you were smart, Quinn,” he said.
“I had the camera out… Dante. I broke your one condition by doing that and I apologize. It was a mistake—and I can’t make excuses for myself. I just hope you can forgive me.”
“I can’t.”
“I would never disrespect you like that on purpose. It was wrong and I’m sorry.”
“I can’t trust you again, Quinn.”
“Dante—”
“No. I changed everything about my life for you, and you couldn’t do this one thing for me? It was all I fucking asked, Quinn. I changed everything for you.”
“Dante, I’m so sorry.”
“You can’t apologize and make it better.”
“Dante. I’m sorry I made you question whether you could trust me. It was a mistake. I would never use footage of you that I took for anything against you. I would never sell it or use it for anything gross.”
“It’s too late for all that, Quinn.”
“Can I at least ask you why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you so sensitive about being filmed?”
“I’m a public figure. Do you know how much footage of me would sell for?”
“Even if you won't forgive me, I know you know I would never use footage of you for anything shady. Why are you like this about being filmed?”
He sighed deeply.
“Remember what I told you about the bullies and the bottle?” he asked, “Of course you do, your recorder was out then.”
I ignored that jab though it hurt. I quietly nodded.
“The bully, Billy… sometimes he would have his friends videotape it. Billy would hit me with the bottle while one of the others filmed. They would hold me still so I couldn’t move. They would yell at me so I could look at the camera. When I cried… they would just laugh.”
Everything he had told me had been so hard to listen to. Every time I had tried my hardest to keep it together so I wouldn’t cry. It was a bad look, and it was unprofessional, even if the story was moving. I couldn’t that time. I didn’t even try. I felt the tear run down my cheek and silently brushed it away.
“Dante…. I didn’t know. I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
It made sense. It made sense why he was so camera shy. They had been used to intimidate and humiliate him in the past. Of course, he didn’t like being filmed when there was nothing he could do about it.
He shook his head.
“You didn’t know because I didn’t tell you. It wasn’t enough that I asked you not to do it?”
“I didn’t mean any harm,” I said to him. That didn’t excuse the action, but I had to let him know, let him hear from me that whatever he thought I wanted with the footage, it was not a plot against him or anything wild like that.
“It was one fucking thing, Quinn. Why couldn’t you do it?”
“Dante,” my voice cracked as I cried, “I’m so sorry. What I did was wrong, but you have to know that I would never do anything to hurt you. I would never knowingly do anything to hurt you.”
“I used to put a lot of stock in the things you told me, Quinn, but not anymore,” he said quietly.
“Dante—”
“I trusted you with things that I have never told anybody else. I put my entire career in your hands when that crazy woman was accusing me of hitting her. I trusted you with things that you could use against me, and I believed that you wouldn’t. When I asked you not to do something that I didn’t want done, you did it anyway.”
“I’m trying to apologize, Dante. I would never—”
“But you did. You did it anyway, and now, I can’t look at you the same way, Quinn. I can’t look at you and see the woman I trusted and thought wouldn’t do me wrong. It's too late. You’ve ruined it. I don’t care what you write in your stories. I don’t care whether or not you believe me anymore. I’m done. I felt… I felt something special with you,
Quinn. I did, but now… I feel nothing. I owe you nothing. The season is nearly over. You can have your interviews, but that’s it. I don’t want to see you without that recorder in your hand. I don’t want to talk to you unless it is for work. I don’t want to hear from you unless it is to ask where and when we should meet for work.”
“Dante… I’m not going to sit here and try to understand the trauma that seeing what I was doing must have brought up for you. I won't try and convince you of anything. All I can do is tell you the truth and hope you have it in yourself to believe me.”
I couldn’t imagine how my face must have looked. I had given up on wiping the tears and they were just flowing down my face.
“There's nothing to be sorry for, Quinn, because I can’t forgive you. I won't, and you can’t ask me to. If you want to talk to me, do it through your network rep. Don’t call me again.”
He got up and left the room without a look back in my direction.
I felt sick.
I hated that he was angry at me. I hated that I had done what I had to him. It was the one thing that he asked me to do—and I didn’t do it. It was all he asked. I had asked him to practically become a different person and all he had asked was I respect his one wish.
His anger hadn’t been explosive like it had been at the house, but the silent, stony anger that he had just now was almost worse. He looked at me like he hated me. He had good reason to, but when he was yelling, at the very least you could say that there was passion there and passion was something that was applied to both negative and positive emotion.
I couldn’t imagine what he was feeling. I couldn’t imagine being in that position as a child, overpowered and humiliated in that way. I felt like the worst piece of shit, having made him feel anything like the way he must have felt at the time. When he was angry at me in the house, it wasn’t just anger. It was terror—with trauma and fear mixed in with it, too. It was something he had probably fought for years to overcome back in his life again. And I was the one who did it to him.
I shattered like a mirror when the door closed. I put my head in my hands and I sobbed. Why did this feel so painful? Why did this feel like a loss? A real loss. There was the guilt that I was feeling over making him feel any of the pain from his past again, but there was something else. The only other time I had felt this way was when I was going through a breakup.
It just didn’t add up, though. It wasn’t a breakup. For it to be a breakup we would have to be… together.
It hit me, and when it did, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized. We were together. Dante and I were together. That was why this felt like a breakup. We had never stated it, but we were seeing each other exclusively. We were romantically intimate, and we were personally intimate, sharing our inner selves, him with me primarily.
I could only speak for myself. Dante Rock had me. He had me, and it was more than just the sex. I had fallen for the man he was when we were alone. He was always arrogant and pushy, but he was deep and insightful, too. He was fearlessly honest with me, and he had stood in the memories of things that were traumatic to relive.
I felt so stupid. I felt stupid because how many other people thought they loved Dante Rock, too. I felt it again because not only did I love him, I had him. I couldn’t speak for him, but I knew. I knew that what I felt was not just one sided. There was something there on his end, too. It might not be as strong as what I feel, or as deep, but there was something. If he tried to deny it, then I knew he would be lying.
Dante was mine…and I had lost him.
I had to get him back. I had to do something. Anything. I was ready. I was not too proud to beg him, but that would only make him mad. If nothing else, I had to make him see that it was nothing that I was trying to do to hurt him. My words weren’t going to cut it. He didn’t want to hear them. That was fine. I would just have to act.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Dante
My suspension was finally up.
I didn’t know what to think.
I was glad that I was finally playing again. There was a chance, there was always a chance with my fucking record that this time was going to be the time that they would just let me go completely. I was giving them a hell of a lot of reasons to do it, and they were probably being more patient with me than I deserved.
I know if I was them, I would have let my ass go long ago.
I was glad they hadn’t, however, and I was glad I could play again.
The air travel meant time on the road wasn’t all that long, especially since the games were scheduled in a way where there wasn’t too much time between them.
That was still time I got to spend in my house in LA, alone.
I hadn’t intended for the time to be spent alone. I had wanted to have some company. Specifically, the company of someone I had gotten pretty fond of lately, but she had fucked up and given me no choice but to kick her to the curb.
Fucking Quinn. Why did she have to go and do that?
I didn’t know what it was, the anger, or the fact that I didn’t hate her enough to disrespect her back, but I, in her absence, hadn’t had a single woman over.
Not one.
I was even shocked myself.
It had been righty and me every night—and I was getting sick of it.
Did I hate Quinn that much that I didn’t want to have her over, even for a fuck?
Okay, I didn’t hate her. That was saying a lot. I didn’t hate the woman. I was just mad. I couldn’t trust her. She had fucked up too badly for me to want to have her around anymore. Respecting me was never really something that I required of the women that I fucked, but Quinn…
I held her to a higher standard.
I held her to a standard higher than just the girl I was fucking.
She had to have known that it wasn’t just sex with us. It was a lot of sex… not nearly enough for my tastes or needs, but a lot regardless. I would make passes at her every opportunity I got because I liked to be inside of her, but that wasn’t all I liked or wanted.
If it was, I would never have asked her to dinner in Houston. If it was, I would never have asked her to come stay at the house with me.
I wanted her around because I liked having her around. I trusted her in my space. I trusted her with my secrets and my dark, sad, ugly past. Many times I had had to stop myself from thinking a person I heard in the house, Daniella or whoever, was her. I had to stop myself from picking the phone up and trying to call her.
The interviews were going to end soon. It felt weird because I had gotten so used to having Quinn around. She wasn’t going to be around that often anymore. I didn’t really know how I felt about it. I was so mad at what she had done. I didn’t want to see her again but then again, I did want to see her again. I wanted to see her every day if I could.
Was this what it was like to like someone?
She had tried the hell out of me when she started crying in the restaurant. First I wasn’t worried when I saw the tears well up because I had seen it before from her, and the last time, she hadn’t started crying. Not this time though. This time, she welled up and the tears ran over.
I nearly went around the table and hugged her. It nearly took me out. I couldn’t deal with women’s tears generally because of the pain I had seen from my mom and sister in the past, but this was different. It mattered less that she was a woman and more that she was Quinn. She was crying because of what I told her and probably also because I was so harsh.
Watching her cry, I knew I would lose my nerve if I went to her, so I didn’t. I just sat there like a bastard and let her cry. I let her believe that I didn’t care how much she was hurting.
She did me wrong, but she didn’t deserve that.
She didn’t deserve to think that I didn’t care about her at all.
For one thing, it wasn’t even fucking true. I did care about her. I cared about her a lot. Maybe too much.
I didn’t love her. Or maybe I did. I didn’t know. How would I know? I
didn’t know how that felt. I knew what it was like to love a parent, to love a sibling, but I didn’t do romantic relationships with women. That wasn’t me. I didn’t love women like that.
Quinn… I just, I don’t know. I just liked spending time with her. I liked to talk to her and to listen to her talk. I liked to look at her because I thought she was gorgeous. I liked to touch her. I liked to fuck her. I didn’t like what I was feeling now, which was… what, sad?
Second Chance: A Dark Bad Boy Romance Page 60