As the years went on, I tried to hold things down at home. But during the season, it seemed like he was barely home, and when he was, he was distant and short with me. I wanted to have another baby, but Marcus kept saying it wasn’t the right time. It seemed like what media thought of him meant more to him than what I or his son did. Sometimes when Marcus was on the road, I tried to call him in the middle of the night to make sure everything was OK. When I couldn’t reach him, I’d reach out to Kareem, who was always traveling with his one and only client, and then I’d get a call back from Marcus with some excuse about missing my call while in the shower. I didn’t want to believe what my instincts were trying to tell me, but when photos of Marcus and beautiful women at nightclubs began popping up on the gossip blogs, I knew I could no longer ignore what I felt. When I questioned what was going on, he denied he was having affairs. But when my husband stopped trying to have sex with me, especially after he’d been on the road, I knew he had to be getting it from somewhere.
I thought about hiring a private detective, but I was afraid the tabloids would find out, so I knew I had to figure it out on my own. My first stop was Marcus’s cell phone, which wasn’t easy to get because he kept it attached to his body like an extra kidney. He jumped whenever it buzzed with an incoming text message or ran across the room to retrieve it whenever it rang. He even took it into the bathroom with him when he showered, claiming he was expecting an important call from the coach or Kareem. So one night while he was sleeping, I went looking for his phone.
He had long since stopped charging it on the nightstand next to our bed, so the first place I looked was on top of the island dresser in his huge walk-in closet, but I didn’t see it. I didn’t think he would take a chance of it being too far away, so I took my own phone out of the pocket of my robe and dialed his number. When the call connected, I heard a faint buzzing sounding in the closet. I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from before his voice mail picked up, so I hung up and called again as I walked around the closet, pushing back the hundreds of shirts, jackets, and suits hanging along the walls. The buzzing was getting louder, so I knew I was close. As I made my way to the very back of his walk-in closet, the noise seemed to come from the ground. Pushing my way through a wall of heavy suits and pushing aside rows of pristine size-sixteen sneakers, I found the phone stuffed into the toe of one of his Nikes. The cord to the charger snaked out of the side of the phone and plugged into an outlet on the bottom of the wall. He must have just had that installed, as I didn’t remember there being outlets in the back of the closet.
Shaking and fearful of what I might find, I began my search. His phone was locked, so I tried a bunch of codes: his birthday, Damon’s birthday, my birthday, and our wedding anniversary. On the last try before the phone locked, I input his team number twice: 2323—after all, life had been all about him for quite some time. The phone unlocked.
I scrolled through his text messages and saw that most of his correspondence with his teammates, Kareem, and family members was fine. A number I didn’t recognize appeared in his phone log and text screen, but the messages were deleted. With no way to retrieve the deleted messages, I decided I had no choice but to call the number. I pushed the button to dial the unfamiliar number and held my breath as I put the phone to my ear. It rang twice, and then a woman’s husky voice answered. The voice was low and sexy, and I doubted it was because she had been sleeping; this was probably how she sounded every time my husband called her.
“Hey, baby. Did you wake up in the middle of the night thinking about me?”
I could barely catch my breath as I clutched the phone to my ear.
“Baby, are you there?” she asked. “Marcus, you woke me up, so I hope you’re going to at least give me some hot phone sex to hold me over until Miami.”
I clutched my stomach, which was suddenly tied in knots. Hot tears streamed down my face. Marcus was scheduled to leave for a game against Miami the next day.
“Bitch, who is this?” I screamed into the phone. “Who are you? Are you fucking my husband?”
The woman laughed and then hung up the phone. Blind with rage, I punched desperately at the buttons and redialed the number. This time her voice mail picked up, and I continued to scream into the receiver.
“You fucking bitch! You stay away from my family!” My screams must have awakened Marcus, because just as I was redialing the number, he ran into the closet and grabbed the phone from me. The panic on his face let me know immediately that he knew he was caught.
The next six months of our marriage were a nightmare. We went to counseling, and we talked to our pastor. Marcus swore he would stop seeing other women, and I spiraled downward into a deep depression. From the outside, we looked like the happy NBA couple. I continued my duties as president of the National Basketball Association wives organization, and Marcus continued to play the best season of his career. The only people I confided in were Nia and another NBA wife I had grown close to, Jacqueline Herman. I could tell Nia wanted me to leave Marcus, because she said just that at the end of all our calls, but Jacqueline encouraged me to stay. Married for ten years to Michael Herman, Marcus’s closest teammate, Jacqueline was far more pragmatic. She shared her own stories of betrayal and how she and Michael somehow made it work. One such story left me breathless. A famous Hollywood actress that I loved in all her romantic comedies had showed up at their kids’ holiday program demanding that Michael come out and leave his family and be with her. Humiliated in front of the other parents, Jacqueline had demanded Michael have the woman removed from their school by the police and that he take out a restraining order. Jacqueline was uncertain at that point if they could ever work things out, but somehow she said they did.
That’s when I learned about the Road Code that some of the basketball wives and their husbands adopt. This rule essentially meant that what happened on the road stayed on the road, and that part of their lives never entered into the family home. No phone calls, text messages, accidental pregnancies, no STDs, no gossip on the blogs, and absolutely no falling in love. When the players were home with their families, they devoted their attention to their wives and kids. Some wives, she told me, had even gone as far as to create legal agreements that triggered steep financial penalties if the Road Code was broken. I told Jacqueline I didn’t think I could live like that and knowingly share my man with other women.
“First of all, you’re not sharing your man,” Jacqueline told me. “You’re protecting your family. If you wanted a faithful husband, you should have married Joe Postal Worker instead of a fine-ass basketball player worth millions of dollars. That man’s walking around with a target on his back, and these scandalous chicks, who are throwing panties at him left and right, will stop at nothing to get him. And because he’s a man who thinks with the wrong head, sometimes he’s going to slip up. It’s just sex with them, and it doesn’t have to mean anything more. Your husband loves you, but at the end of the day, he’s a man—and being a man who’s a professional athlete takes it to a whole new level.”
I didn’t know if I could accept the Code and that Kareem could be the one facilitating these hookups as they traveled around the country. Marcus and I continued to go to counseling and meet with our pastor to discuss our problems. We took a vacation to Fiji, and things seemed to get better. I saw that Marcus was really trying and he was sorry he had hurt me. But last year I started to get that nagging feeling again that something was going on. The blogs were littered with pics of him at nightclubs while on the road, and there were always groups of women hanging in the background. He always reassured me that nothing was going on and that the women were just hoping to catch the eye of one of the single players.
Yeah, right. How dumb do I look? I wanted to say to him.
I managed to sneak a look at his cell phone again but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. I told Jacqueline about my suspicions. That’s when she told me that Marcus likely had
a second phone.
“After they get caught the first time, that’s what they do,” she said, chuckling. “They’ll get a second phone and only take it out when they are outside the home or completely away from you. He might keep it in his car, in a bag, or even have a friend or his agent carry it. If you happen to come around when he has it on him, he’ll pass it off to one of his boys or Kareem. Part of the Road Code is that you never have to see the calls or text messages. He’ll never put it in your face, so maybe he’s living by the Code and you don’t even know it.”
I thought about confronting Marcus but couldn’t bring myself to hear the truth. I buried my anger and focused on my charity work with the Wives Association and raising our son while Marcus burned up the courts and took his team to the play-offs. New endorsement offers came in, and his star was burning brighter than ever. A nasty divorce could possibly put that all in jeopardy. And as Jacqueline pointed out, half that money was mine, so I needed to protect it in case at some point I decided to leave.
Then the dead cheerleader turned up in the desert, and everything changed.
One girl in particular had begun to show up in the background of the photos of Marcus on the road. Her name was Kalinda Walters, and she was one of the new Phoenix Lasers dancers. And while the team organization had very strict rules about players and dancers interacting (mostly driven by jealous wives trying to protect their territory and frustrated coaches trying to keep their players focused on the court), this twenty-something firecracker seemed to play by her own rules.
Marcus assured me nothing was going on with the nubile dark-haired beauty with the green eyes and DD breasts, but I felt like something wasn’t right.
One of the reports contained gruesome details about the dancer’s murder and the state her body was in when she was discovered: her cinnamon-brown skin had been carved up with jagged knife wounds, indicating that she had been tortured before a single gunshot to the head had ended her life, her long black hair was matted with dried blood, huge black flies swarmed the body, and maggots had started to harvest their eggs in the open wounds.
The Phoenix media jumped all over the murder of the sexy young dancer. Although there wasn’t any hard evidence, they really worked themselves into a frenzy when they found out that detectives had questioned several of the Laser players, including Marcus, after finding their numbers in her cell phone logs.
Marcus denied any involvement with the girl, but the whispers persisted and swirled for months, both in the papers and online about a possible affair with Kalinda. Marcus assured me that nothing had happened between them.
The case went unsolved for several months with the police at a dead end. That’s when the trade talks began. Marcus’s free-agency contract was up, and everyone knew New York wanted him badly, but the team owner, Davis Jennings, was an ultraconservative business tycoon who abhorred scandal. Kareem and Marcus’s publicist, Desiree Deevers, worked overtime squashing anything linking the dead dancer to their multimillion-dollar client. Nothing could be allowed to kill this deal. Marcus had always talked about playing for New York and wanted to get this deal done quickly. There was no more talk of the cheerleader. But in checking Marcus’s history on his laptop, I saw that several times over the past few days he had logged onto GoldenGoddess, the personal website of a popular Los Angeles groupie Jacqueline had told me to watch out for.
We both couldn’t wait to get to New York.
But for very different reasons.
No more cheerleader.
And no more threats.
The press conference finally ended. After answering questions for more than an hour, Marcus was exhausted but kept his smile bright as we left the stifling room of reporters. He confidently answered all of ESPN’s questions about how he planned to lead the team to a championship, artfully spoke to Sports Illustrated about how excited he was to work with Coach Townsend and the current team roster, and he deftly avoided any questions from Deadspin about the “drama” he was leaving behind in Arizona. I saw Desiree in the corner jotting down the names of reporters bold enough to try to bring their questions around to that dead whore, and I knew she would have them banned from any future interviews with Marcus and the franchise.
Marcus and I were escorted out by a security team through the bowels of Madison Square Garden to the loading dock where we slipped into the back of the waiting limousine.
“Congratulations, my darling,” I said as I relaxed my jaw, which ached from having a fake smile plastered on my face for the past hour, and sank into the soft buttery black leather seats. I turned to Marcus to kiss him on his cheek as the car pulled out from the underground garage and began to make its way through the heavy city traffic. “You’ve always wanted to play in New York, and now it’s official.”
“Thank you, baby,” Marcus said, taking my hand and absentmindedly kissing it as he looked out the car window. “We’ve got a lot to do to get settled. You ready to look for a house?”
“Not really, but we have to get settled and get Damon in school.”
“Yeah, little man’s got to get into school, and we don’t want to live in the apartment forever. At least we’re out of the hotel, though.”
When we first got to New York, we stayed at the Four Seasons hotel for several weeks, but as part of Marcus’s deal with the Gladiators, we were offered a penthouse loft in Tribeca to live in until we found a home. It was beautiful space fully furnished, and I, too, was glad to be out of the Four Seasons—but it wasn’t home.
“I’m going to start looking next week,” I said, taking in the scene outside the tinted windows as a bike messenger whizzed by, nearly clipping the limousine driver’s side mirror. Marcus picked up the interior phone to speak to the driver, Alex, and told him to drop him at the Four Seasons and then to take me home.
“Aren’t we both going back to the apartment?” I asked. I had hoped the three of us would spend the day together, exploring the neighborhood and perhaps taking Damon to the Natural History Museum to see the dinosaurs.
“Uh, sorry, babe. Kareem set up this meeting with these guys from China who want to discuss some business opportunities for my brand overseas,” he answered quickly. “They are going back tomorrow, so we have to meet today.”
“Oh, OK. I guess we’ll see you later, then.”
“Yeah, hopefully not too late. These cats might want to have dinner though, so I’ll let you know.”
As the car pulled up at the door of the hotel, I grabbed Marcus’s arm before he could step out of the car.
“Try not to be too late, honey. We want to see you, too.” I looked into his dark eyes as if they could show me if he was telling me the truth. But I could no longer read his eyes.
“I’ll try, baby,” he said as he leaned in and kissed me quickly on the cheek before stepping out of the car. I saw Kareem grinning, at the curb, as he walked over to clap his boy on the back.
“Hey, V.,” he said as he leaned down to speak to me. “Don’t worry, I’ll have your boy home soon. Unless he wants to go out and celebrate that big fat Gladiators contract I got for him!”
Marcus and Kareem dapped each other up with broad smiles across all of their features.
“I know that’s right, man. You did the damn thing on that big fat contract,” Marcus said to Kareem. “We did it, baby. We in New York!”
Before I could tell Marcus again that Damon and I really wanted him to come home early tonight so that we could celebrate as a family, he and Kareem turned away to walk into the hotel. As I pushed the button to raise the car window, I saw Kareem slip something in Marcus’s hand as they walked through the door of the hotel. A phone. My stomach sank.
Suddenly I got that all-too-familiar feeling in my stomach as Alex began to steer the car downtown. It was a pain that seemed to indicate that our fresh start might be turning into the same old thing, and I wasn’t willing to let that happen. Pulling out my
cell phone from my cherry-red Dior handbag, I dialed the only number that could help get my marriage back on the right track.
CHAPTER 3
Laila
Damn, I’m a sexy bitch.
Naked except for a thin lacy wisp of a black Agent Provocateur thong covering my freshly waxed kitty, a matching demi-cut bra, and six-inch fire-red studded Christian Louboutin suede platform pumps, I finished rubbing in the Carol’s Daughter Sparkling Body Butter on my toffee-brown body before I prepared to position my glistening self for my camera phone. Slipping one of the satin bra straps off my shoulder, I pinched my dark cocoa nipples so that they stood at attention through the delicate French lace as if they were waiting for his hungry lips. I ran my hands through my dark brown curls, causing the long layers to frame my face with the amber and blond highlights my hairdresser put in this morning. I let the left side of my hair fall sexily over one of my hazel-green eyes.
Wearing the New York Gladiator colors of black and red, I was officially ready for my close-up. I grabbed my phone from the bathroom counter, placed one hand on my hip, and with my pinky finger, pulled up the side of my thong and positioned the camera to shoot. After reviewing the shot, I clicked forward, found Marcus’s number, and typed: Your “Welcome to New York” Present and pressed “Send.”
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