The Game of Love: (BWWM Romance)

by K. Alex Walker

  Arielle began to move forward again, but Austin held her tighter.

  Wendy turned to Emma. “Mrs. Riley—”

  “Emma,” she cut off. “Please call me Emma.”

  Wendy nodded. She completely understood the need to not be associated with a man as vile and contemptible as William Riley.

  “Emma, how did you stay married to this man?”

  Emma smirked. “The minute I found out who this man really was, I immediately divorced him. I was not content living with a man with Mr. Riley’s predilections, especially when I raised my children to love whoever they wanted to love, as long as that person genuinely loves them back.”

  William leaned forward. “She put me out as soon as she found out about that Black kid in Alabama. I couldn’t even get a word in edgewise. Couldn’t even explain myself.”

  “For god sakes, William, the boy’s name was Henry Cartwright!” Austin uncontrollably lashed out. “He’s not just some Black kid from Alabama! He was a precious child whose death you and your friends are responsible for. Don’t you think his family is watching right now? Don’t you have any respect for human life? Out of the four men responsible, you are the only one that’s still living. You could have taken this opportunity to give Henry and his family the sincere apology, which is the least, that they deserve.”

  Again, William acted as though he’d said nothing out of place. He was happy, however, that Austin had actually directed some sort of comment towards him.

  Wendy’s eyes darted between Austin and William. She’d come back to this later. Not only did she want to get to the bottom of what had happened that day in 1953, but she also wanted the people to witness Austin’s ire towards his father. She’d been mistaken. Austin was nothing like the old bigot sitting across from him.

  “I understand that you and Sommer’s mother were best friends,” she said, turning back to Emma. Her hand then lovingly covered Sommer’s wrist. “I’m so sorry about your loss.”

  Sommer’s smile revealed a woman that was still grieving, but was putting on a brave front for the sake of her family.

  “Sommer’s mother and I shared a love of helping people,” Emma answered. “We loved gardening, gabbing, and baking together. A lady couldn’t find a better friend than Caroline Hayes. She saw me through some very difficult times, and I was with her through both of her bouts with cancer, every step of the way. I saw her as a woman who was my best friend and nothing else, but it wasn’t until William’s past came out that I found out that he was always uncomfortable with having her in our house. Or that he threw out the cups she used.”

  Sommer’s eyes widened. “Come again?”

  “He threw out anything she ate from,” Emma reiterated, tears in her eyes. “I thought I was going crazy for a minute; losing cups, plates, and utensils. Then, when I found out, I just couldn’t believe it. I mean, she was my best friend and he knew that. I couldn’t understand how someone could be so depraved.”

  She hung her head and dabbed at the tears now flowing from the corners of her eyes.

  “You threw out my mother’s cups?” Sommer asked, anger scorching the back of her throat.

  “Yes, but it’s not what you think,” William attempted to justify. “I didn’t throw them out because she’s Black. That’s just ridiculous. I threw them out because she had cancer. I read somewhere online that cancer was contagious.”

  Sommer closed her eyes and said a silent prayer. Wendy, however, was looking at William with narrowed brows. She’d never come face to face with this kind of ignorance before and it was utterly repugnant. Her stomach was literally turning.

  Austin placed a kiss against Sommer’s temple and then whispered a few reassuring words in her ear. He wanted neither her nor Arielle’s anger to be bolstered by his father’s ignorance. He was going to take it all for them.

  “This is not fair,” William argued. “I agreed to come on here to see my kids and for you all to see that Austin’s just like me, not for you all to gang up on me like this.”

  “I’m nothing like you,” Austin shot back.

  “I want to switch gears here a minute,” Wendy interrupted, turning to face Austin. “Austin, I just have one question: Are you ashamed that you have a daughter with a Black woman?”

  Austin’s eyes squared on Wendy. “I’m not ashamed to say that I have a daughter with Black woman, that I’m in love with a Black woman, or that I’m marrying this Black woman.”

  A woman somewhere off of the set clapped her hands in support. Justin nodded in agreement.

  “Well, you could’ve fooled us,” Wendy came back. “You could barely turn a channel without seeing intimate video or photos of you and Jessica Costa when you two were together. Your relationship with her wasn’t hidden.”

  “And who took those videos and photos?” Austin asked.

  “Well, the paparazzi, I’m guessing,” Wendy replied.

  “So, I never actually plastered pictures of us all over the tabloids myself, did I?”

  Wendy attempted to respond, but couldn’t find the words.

  “How long did it take before your people found out that Jessica and I were together?” He added.

  Wendy shrugged. “Almost immediately.”

  “Jessica and I had been dating for three months before our relationship became the public’s business,” he corrected. “I didn’t want the cameras in the middle of it, but she claimed that she wanted everyone to know that she was in love.”

  Wendy shook her head. “Well, what about Victoria Ellington?”

  “I never dated Victoria.”

  She pointed to a photo that was now displayed on a large LED screen behind them.

  “Isn’t that you with Victoria at a formal, black-tie event?”

  “What other pictures of Victoria and I together do you have?”

  “None at this time.”

  “Because there aren’t any. I escorted her to the event and that was that. Stop trying to paint me out to be someone I’m not.”

  Even though she’d begun to doubt herself, Wendy was still determined to get to the bottom of Austin’s actions.

  “So, why not come forward with your relationship with Sommer?”

  “That was my doing,” Sommer spoke up. “I want to come clean and say that Austin never wanted our relationship hidden. He never had a problem with people knowing that we were together. I was the one who had the problem with it.”

  Wendy did her best to hide the surprise from her face. If she’d been dating Austin Riley, she’d tell everyone from Texas to Guam.

  “Why is that?” She prodded. “Were you afraid of how people would react when they found out that you were Black?”

  Sommer looked at Austin. “There wasn’t just one reason. Back home in Yearwood, I was mostly concerned with what people would say. You know, small town talk. Austin hadn’t been home in ten years and all of a sudden, I’m all over him? I was afraid that they would think that it was because of his money, which led me to be afraid that Austin would think the same thing.”

  William made a noise in the back of his throat which the room actively ignored.

  “But it wasn’t until a conversation that we’d had with Kyle Stallworth that I realized that here in Texas, Austin is pretty much revered,” Sommer continued. “He’s to Texas what Peyton Manning was, and still is, to the city of Indianapolis. That’s when I started thinking about how people would regard me. Here I was, just this ordinary girl from this speck of a town, and I wasn’t a redheaded, blue-eyed musician, a Brazilian model, or even the heir to some obscure fortune. And don’t get me wrong, I have had the opportunity to read some of the things that I already knew people would say about me, and even about Olivia. How much less the Championship meant to them when they found out about who I was, things like that.”

  She touched the side of Austin’s face, enjoying the way his rugged cheek felt against her palms. He smiled at her and held her gaze, the glowing eyes she loved more than life itself cocooning her in their b
lanket of warmth. In them, she could see it. He loved her just as much, and maybe even more.

  “That’s when I realized that I’d been worrying about the wrong thing.” She reluctantly tore her gaze away from Austin’s to settle them onto William. “What other people would think wasn’t as important as what I feel for this man.”

  William rolled his eyes, but Sommer’s gaze didn’t waver. Even though she was looking at him, her next statement was directed at all the viewers who’d been first in line to say that their relationship was a farce.

  “Ask yourselves what love can do. What it can conquer. What it can accomplish. Then, if you come up with an answer other than the word anything, you need to challenge your convictions.”

  Wendy felt a quake of guilt start as an unsettling tremor in her toes. There was something about the certainty in Sommer’s eyes that made her finally realize that she hadn’t been any different from the people who’d jumped to the internet to spread their disdain or ignorant accusations about the nature of Sommer and Austin’s relationship. She’d been so sure that she could get the truth out of him—the truth which she’d assumed was that Austin had been no different from some of the other ball players that she’d met who kept certain women under wraps; whether the woman was not from the best family, not the most attractive or physically fit, of a different ethnicity-she’d seen it all. But oh, how wrong she’d been. This wasn’t that. This was the complete opposite. Austin had wanted to sing his girlfriend’s praises and proverbially shout their love from a mountaintop, but it was Sommer who’d been reserved, calculated, and scared, not of what it would do to his career, but how people would view the man she loved.

  “Do you get it now?” Austin asked his father. “Arielle and Justin. Me and Sommer. Tons of couples around the world. Do you get it now? This isn’t the 1950s anymore, and while I will argue that there are still tensions from your time period festering away sixty years later, this is not the same world that you keep in your head.”

  “So you mean that this is not the same world where a man gets to go home after killing a kid?” William goaded with a smirk. “I beg to differ.”

  “So you admit that you killed Henry?” Austin asked. “This isn’t some photograph of four kids admitting to their guilt, William Riley. This is national TV. Millions of viewers. Are you finally admitting your guilt today?”

  When Austin grinned, William realized what was happening. His son hadn’t taken this interview solely to put the rumors about him and Sommer to rest. Austin intended to air out the dirty laundry that he’d kept hidden for the last six decades.

  Suddenly, a group of people arrived on set and William recognized one of them as the woman he’d spotted in Yearwood. The one who’d recognized him. Henry Cartwright’s cousin. It didn’t take much longer to figure out that the other people with her were also Henry’s relatives ranging from the old to the very young.

  “I’m not going to be a part of this,” he declared, standing and reaching around to detach his microphone. Austin stood and faced him.

  “You’re either going to sit or stand for it, but you’re not going anywhere,” he threatened. “Now, answer my question. You hide behind your double entendres and your moronic rants, but what happens when you have to face what you’ve done, William? When you’re forced to be a man for the very first time in your entire god damn life?”

  William’s face flushed and anger tugged the corners of his mouth south. His eyes darted around the studio only to find that all eyes were on him, and his chest heaved as his temper flared into a rumbling boil.

  “What did you expect me to do?” He yelled, tossing up his hands. “I was just a kid! A kid in the fifties! All sorts of tensions were high back then. I wasn’t old enough to discern what was right from what was wrong. So, when Charlie suggested that we trick this little Black boy into coming into the woods with us and leave him there, I had no choice but to go along with it.”

  He jerked his hand towards the family. “Is this what you want to hear? How Henry screamed for his mother while me, James, and John watched Charlie choke him to death? How Charlie’s father had seen the killing as a ‘rite of passage’ for his boy? Is that what you want to hear?”

  A woman placed a hand over her throat and the man standing next to her comforted her.

  “You still make me sick,” Austin told his father. “How could you, as a human being, see something so inhumane and then decide to live your life the way you did? Even going so far as trying to convince your children that they should be the same way too?”

  “To help you,” William growled. “Look at Arielle. With all of her smarts, she ended up with a nobody like this Justin kid. And you, Austin? Do you think that you and Sommer will still be together ten years from now? Do you really think that all of your sponsors and endorsement contracts will remain intact now that your little Black whore has been rev—”

  Austin’s fist went to his father’s face before he had a chance to finish his sentence, and William stumbled over his chair before he crashed to the floor. No one rushed forward to impede Austin’s path to his father, and even as Arielle moved forward to calm her brother, both Emma and Sommer stopped her. Sommer, remembering the look in Austin’s eyes when they first found out that they were having a little girl, knew that he needed this moment.

  “First of all, I let no one degrade Sommer. No one. It’s been that way since we were kids, and it’s always going to be that way. Secondly, Justin is a partner at a very prestigious law firm. His career would be an admirable success story for any lawyer, White or Black. He’s hardly a nobody. If you’d pick up a newspaper and read sometimes, you would know that. Lastly, I never want to see you again. Ever. Although people change every day, you’re not one of them. You never will be. So, I highly suggest that you no longer consider yourself tied to me, Ma, or Arielle in any way. Just as it has always been, I have no father. I despise you and have no respect for you.”

  William’s eyes widened and he touched his lip. He grimaced at the pain and drew back a finger dotted with blood. Yet, even though the pain was only increasing as the area swelled, Austin’s words had felt much worse. All this time, the image of the son he thought he had was wrong. He’d held out hope that Austin really had been just like him, cut from the same cloth, but the man standing in front of him wasn’t even an eighth of that. Austin really was more of a man than he could ever hope to have been, no thanks to him.

  “Are you okay, Austin?” Sommer asked, rising and walking over to where Austin stood. He nodded, pulled her into his arms, and kissed the top of her head.

  “I’m good, baby.” Then, he turned to Wendy. “Are we finished here?”

  Wendy motioned for someone to come and help William off of the set.

  “Not yet,” she replied. “I want to apologize to you two first. I want to also especially apologize to you, Austin, for the assumptions I made. I’m woman enough to admit when I’m wrong, and looking at the two of you gives me hope that my prince charming is still waiting for me somewhere out there.”

  Her eyes flicked up to Austin. As delicious as he was, and despite the seven years she’d spent trying to get him to creep between her sheets, this one was definitely off the market. Austin only had eyes for one woman.

  She motioned to the director. “I don’t want to edit any of that out. I want to do a final shot with Austin, Sommer, and Olivia, and then my closing remarks.”

  The director nodded and then signaled that everyone had a five-minute break. Austin made his way over to the Cartwright family.

  “Since my father won’t do it, I want to apologize for the grief that his maliciousness caused your family,” he expressed softly, but clearly. “He committed a horrible crime, and there are no words for how sorry I am.”

  The family members parted to reveal an elderly woman in a wheelchair, her face still moist from tears and holding a damp tissue. Austin offered her the linen handkerchief from his pocket, and she smiled as she motioned for him to come closer. He kn
elt next to the chair and she brushed a finger over his cheek.

  “Mrs. Cartwright?” Austin guessed.

  “Call me Helena,” she reassured. “And I just wanted to say thank you, young man, for what you did here today. It tormented me for years, wondering what was going through the minds of the boys who killed my son. I even found myself getting upset with Henry at times over the fact that he’d gone off with strangers, something that I was always sure to remind him not to do in New York. But he was just ten years old. All he saw were boys that wanted to play with him. He wasn’t privy to the things that were going on during that time. That’s just the kind of kid he was.”

  She called Sommer over.

  “You two may not realize it,” she continued, “But you set a precedent here today. And it’s not only because of the interracial couple that you are, but it’s because you asked people to challenge their convictions. To open their eyes and to look at love bare, stripped of the unsavory things we attach to it: jealousy, deceit, and lies. At its base, you’ll find unconditional and undying affection between two people, no matter their creed or origin. The world is a giant puzzle, children. Remember that. So, when you find that person who fits you, that piece of the world that makes life a little less jumbled and distorted, celebrate it. Dance to it. Never let it go.”

  She pulled Austin in for a loving hug, and then did the same for Sommer. “Those are my wishes for you as you embark on this journey together.”

  “Ten seconds everyone,” a man behind them shouted, and after another hug, Austin and Sommer took their place beside Wendy, and Emma brought out Olivia who was dressed in a pair of overalls and pink socks. When the cameras started rolling, Wendy flashed a grin.

  “There you have it, folks. Austin Riley and Sommer Hayes. Just another part of love…and the game.”

  She turned to Sommer. “So, tell us about those wedding plans, Future Mrs. Austin Riley.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The dense fog that Sommer and Austin had been living in for the past few weeks was finally starting to dissipate. After the interview, the support for their relationship increased ten-fold, along with nearly unanimous contempt for William Riley after seeing how deep the old man's prejudices went. A petition had even begun requesting that federal officials try his case in a higher court. And although garnering that support was exactly what they’d needed to ease their lives back into some sort of normalcy, Austin was just relieved to finally have the ability to share the woman that he loved with the world, and that people had a chance to witness the love that he had for his family. He was also relieved to know that when Olivia got older and was eventually exposed to what had happened, she'd be able to take pride in the way her parents had handled the situation, and the small step that they'd taken in creating a better world for her existence.