Baller: A Bad Boy Romance (13 page)

“No. Even if I was, I wouldn’t be looking in a place like this.”

I took a sip of the champagne and looked at him.

Either one of two things was going on.

One, the man was playing me for a fool and having his fun because I wasn’t letting him, or two, he was really just being honest with me. I didn’t know which one I preferred more. Of course, I
wanted
him to be honest, but the tape recorder wasn’t out. This wasn’t an interview. I was babysitting him because I had prohibited this sort of behavior. It was nice if he was being honest, but if he
was
, it wasn’t because I was making him, it was because he wanted to be.

“I might have underestimated you, Dante,” I said to him.

“Oh yeah? How?”

“I didn’t think the conversations we have had would be half as interesting as they have turned out to be.”

“You thought I’d be
boring
?”

“I didn’t think you could have
that
face, be
that
talented,
and
be interesting to talk to on top of that,” I said, teasing him.

“I have never met a woman with a lower opinion of me than you have,” he said, smirking. “I’m glad I finally won you over.”

“Who said you won me over?” I said to him.

I felt his hand on my thigh under the table.

“Are you saying I have to work harder?” he asked. His hand crept up slowly, barely an inch. “Because I’m willing to do
whatever
it takes.”

I was speechless. I had nothing to say to that. I closed my eyes because I had thought about this before. Ever since the last time we’d had sex…I’d wanted to feel him on my skin again. His hand moved up my leg.

“Dante—” I said to him. I looked at him and saw he was looking at me, staring at me. His eyes, green and intense, were boring into me. His hand continued up my thigh. I loved the way his callused skin felt on the soft skin there.

“What’s wrong?” he asked me innocently.

What was wrong
? He
knew
what the fuck was wrong. It wasn’t wrong at all. It was
right
. It was right, and it was driving me crazy. It was just like the time before. We were out in public. If someone really wanted to know what was going on, they would have been able to find out if they just got close enough.

“Don’t stop,” I whispered. I had said it so quietly that I thought he might not have heard me, but oh no, he did. He heard me loud and clear. His hand went all the way up this time—only stopped by the barrier of my panties. His fingers ran over the thin fabric, and I knew he could feel how wet I was getting, how wet he was
making
me. I shifted my hips forward and wished I wasn’t wearing the stupid underwear. I wanted to feel him on my skin. I wanted to feel him rubbing my clit in public, in plain view of anyone who wanted to see in this crowded club.

I felt him shift a little closer to me, and his skin suddenly made contact with my bare clit. I jumped feeling the sudden sensation. He had pushed my panties out of the way. He moved his fingers in slow circles, making me shudder with pleasure. The noises of the club blurred into each other until it all just faded into a garbled din. I couldn’t concentrate on anything other than what his hand was doing between my legs.

I wanted him to bend me over and do me right there on the table that was in front of us, but I knew that it wasn’t an option. If he had tried, I knew I wouldn’t have been able to stop him. I was aching for more. What he was doing to me felt amazing, but I had seen what
else
he could do. I had
felt
what else he could do—and that was what I wanted. I wanted him the way we were in the locker room, deep and completely bare.

“Dante, Dante
stop
,” I said to him. His hand stopped and rested on the inside of my thigh.

“Did I do something wrong?”

“No.
I want you
,” I said. He smirked and leaned into me, our lips touching briefly in a small kiss. “I want you to get us a private room.”

“Oh yeah? Why?”

“Join me there in ten minutes, and I’ll show you.”

Dante

I felt cheated.

Nothing about Quinn said that she was like this. She had been willing to have sex in the locker room, and she had let me hit it raw, but I didn’t know she was
that
kind of girl. It wasn’t a bad thing. It was a great thing. She was the sort of girl who looked like she had attended
all
her tutorials in college. A brain. She was smart, and she was good at her job. I couldn’t believe she had just asked me to meet her upstairs.

My mind raced with all the shit that we could do when we were alone. She had
already
let me finger her under the table. We would be alone in that room, and I could pay extra to make sure we stayed alone. We wouldn’t need a private waiter or bottles brought up or anything. The only reason they would have to come get us would be if the club caught fire and we had to evacuate. I saw how she was when we were in public. I wanted to see her in private.

We’d had sex before, and I had still not seen the girl naked. Those tits, round and big and nice… I
still
didn’t know what they looked like. I didn’t know if the nipples were brown or pink. Brown, pink, bright orange, or blue I would still suck them till she begged me to stop. Some girls could get off on just that—and I needed to find out whether she was one of them. I was so excited to get to the room upstairs where she had gone to wait that I was sure I had about a semi already. A waiter led me up to the room, opened it, and left quietly without a word. He was unobtrusive. I liked it.

I found her sitting there in one of the seats.

She was still in her clothes, which was a little disappointing, I couldn’t lie. I wanted to come up and find her waiting naked, or pleasuring herself while moaning my name. Maybe all that was going to come. Maybe she was just waiting for me to get there for the show to begin. I walked up to her and noticed what was sitting on the table.

Her recorder.

I went from one hundred to zero in a fucking second. Just like that, all that desire and anticipation I had felt dried up and died. She wanted to
work
? She called me upstairs to have a fucking
interview
? I had just fingered her in public. Anyone who was watching us closely enough would have been able to tell what the fuck was happening under the table.

“Why do you have your recorder out?” I asked her.

“I want to ask you some questions.”

She was joking. She
had
to be. I didn’t rent out a private room to have a fucking interview. Did she just want somewhere quiet to talk? The car was available, and it wouldn’t have cost me five hundred dollars to rent out.

“You’re
not
serious,” I said to her.

“All I want is a couple honest answers.”

She really
did
want an interview. I didn’t know if I was mad or just really amused. Maybe I had gotten ahead of myself. There was no reason why she should have offered me
anything
. I would have liked it if she
had,
but apparently she didn’t think I
deserved
anything. I sighed. Was I wrong to think that after what had happened in the booth downstairs that I was
not
wrong thinking that she had had something else in mind asking me to come here? I thought she wanted me to finish her off, and then since we were alone, she would maybe finish that little blow job she had started that day in the locker room.

“Do we really have to do it now, and here?” I asked.

“I am a reporter. I have to conduct interviews if I want to get a story written.”

“I was just thinking that maybe you had something a little more
interesting
than interviews in mind when you asked me to get this place for us.”

She smiled and scooted down the couch making room for me.

“If you answer some questions for me, I’ll make it worth your while,” she said.

“Oh yeah?” I asked, approaching.

“Just a few.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“A surprise,” she said sweetly.

I sank onto the couch next to her. Her body was turned so that she was facing me. One of her legs was tucked underneath her, and I could see a bit of her thigh the way she was sat. I reached out and ran a finger along the exposed skin.

“It better be good, TMZ,” I said to her.

“Tell me about the fight,” she said after she had turned the recorder on.

“Ha.
Which one?”
I asked.

“The first one. The one that led to your suspension.”

I sighed and looked at her. We were really doing
this
, huh? I didn’t want to bring up the past, not
that
part of the past at least. That fight had nearly ended my career, and it was all my fucking fault. I knew that. I could own up to it. There was no good reason why the guy should have been chucking bottles onto the court, but then again, it was
I
who had gone after
him
.

That was a mistake that I seemed to just keep making because it had happened
again
, and that time Quinn had been there to see it.

“What do you want to know? I know you couldn’t have missed the coverage.”

“You were responsible for beginning a brawl that could have ended in multiple casualties, both for the league and for the fans,” she said.

“I
know
what I did.”

“You could have lost your job. A lot of people thought they let you off easy with the suspension. If the league didn’t need you so much, you would have been history,” she said.

Did she
really
just want to lecture me? Was that it? Was I really going to sit here and listen to this? What the hell was the surprise anyway? Was it truly worth being chewed out like a kid?

“I could have, but I didn’t. They gave me a long year and a half to think about what I had done and make changes,” I said. That was just about maybe half true. In actual fact, I hadn’t made that many changes at all. I had gone after another guy not that long ago for the same reason. That
first
motherfucker though… I wasn’t sorry about that.

“Why did you go after the guy who threw the bottle at you?”

“Because he threw a fucking bottle at me. Who the hell does that? What was he trying to do? The bottle was glass; he could have really hurt someone.”

She leaned back a little and looked at me.

“Is that it? You were just mad?”

“I wanted to beat the shit out of him,” I said.

“That isn’t a good enough reason.
Honest
, Dante. I want you to be honest. We talked about this. I want you to feel like you can tell me these things.”

These things
? What… there was no way she knew. Nobody knew, so why was she talking like she knew? I had never told anybody, and I wasn’t about to tell her. I wanted to though. I really,
really
wanted to just tell her. I wasn’t a wild animal. I wasn’t some untamed beast who all you had to do was look at me wrong for me to come after you. There was more, and she knew there was. Was that why she was so good at her job?

“Have you ever been hit with a glass bottle, Quinn?” I asked. She looked a little surprised.

“No. Never.”

“It’s not like in the movies where the bottles immediately smash and the guy who got hit passes out. Prop bottles for movies are made of sugar. Real bottles are made of glass, heavy, hard glass, and they’re round, which means they have a strong shape.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“You have to hit someone really, really
hard
with a bottle in order for it to actually break. Usually, they—and you—end up getting cut on the broken glass in the process.”

“You didn’t get cut on the glass that day. The bottle smashed when it hit the ground.”

“When I was a kid… I was bullied for most of elementary school,” I said to her. I watched her face to see her reaction to the news. She looked surprised. Was it
that
hard to believe? It wasn’t something I talked about, or something I ever brought up willingly, but was it that far-fetched to believe that I had been bullied in the past? I hadn’t been six foot seven and over two hundred pounds
all
my life. I had been a kid once and not at a nice, cushy elementary school either. Gabbie and I went to school one city over because there was literally no elementary school where we lived, it was such a dump.

“What happened?”

“It was this older kid. I’ll never forget his name. It was William Pullman. Everyone called him Billy. He used to pick on me, probably because I was poor or something.”

“Did he take your money?”

“Nope. He would hit me. I was too small to put up a fight, and he always had his goons with him. He used to use a bottle.”

Quinn looked like she was going to cry again. Fuck. I hoped she wouldn’t. I didn’t need to see her cry just then, especially if it was because she was feeling sorry for me. I didn’t
want
her to feel sorry for me. It made me feel weak and that was how I had felt practically all my life.

“Did you ever tell anyone?”

“No way. He would have just done something worse. I was embarrassed; I didn’t want all the other kids getting ideas, too. It was bad enough that I was poor; I didn’t need to be the guy who couldn’t defend himself, too.”

“How long did it go on?”

“
Years
. He had to get creative with his tactics. Usually, it was a plastic bottle, but sometimes he would get his hands on a glass one and just hit me with it as many times as it would take for it to smash. He moved away before I got the chance to get him back.”

“So when that guy threw that bottle at you…?”

“It was like it was happening all over again.”

“Why haven’t you told anyone before now?”

“I haven’t
wanted
to tell anyone all that. I knew where my actions were coming from, but they didn’t need all that information. It would just lead to more questions.”

“There are a lot of kids who could benefit from hearing that you managed to overcome bullying and make yourself into the person you are today.”

“I don’t
want
to be a role model. I just want to play ball.”

“Nobody gets to choose whether or not they want to be a role model. Most times, the public makes the decision for you.”

I sighed.

“They made the
wrong
decision.”

“I think they made a good one,” she said.

Was she just saying that? My immediate thought was that, of course, she was just saying that. Her job with me was to make me talk to her, and I was more likely to do that when I was comfortable and liked her. That was what she was doing. She was just buttering me up, like the rest of them… but… but did it
matter
?

It mattered. I didn’t like to feel like I was being used, but I didn’t feel like that was what she was doing. If she actually didn’t care, she was doing a fantastic job of pretending that she did.