RHINO: A Bad Boy Sports Romance (With FREE Bonus Novel OFFSIDE!) Read online

  I guess you could call it prophetic. Maybe you could even say I willed it into existence. Whatever it is, when I see the photo, the accompanying article underneath, the scandal that hits the front page of every national newspaper from here to Alaska, my heart sinks so hard I have to pick it out of my boots.

  My yo-yo life. One moment I’m at the top of the mountain looking at a perfect sunset, the next I’m tumbling down the rocky face of it, into a chasm so deep it doesn’t appear to have an end.

  One minute I’m fucking Alex, the next my father dies. One minute I’m fucking Alex, the next he’s apparently fucking someone else.

  I don’t want to jump to conclusions, especially because I know how all of this works, but right now it doesn’t look good. Right now I’m scared. Right now I’m looking at fuzzy cell phone footage, the confession of a call girl and indications of the existence of a sex tape that may or may not be released.

  I’m scared of getting close, only to have the carpet pulled out from underneath my feet, because life sucks, leopards don’t change their spots, and Alex Vann Haden may just have broken my heart into a million pieces once again.

  I don’t call. He calls me instead like he usually does but I don’t answer it. Instead, I wait for him to get home and explain. I trust him, I just don’t like what I’m seeing, and I definitely don’t trust the girl that’s spread over four pages, her tits practically hanging out all over the place, her hair tied up like mine and a tattoo across her arm that looks like a stamp of stupidity.

  It’s not the first time in Alex’s career a call girl has called him out. That time we never heard Alex’s side of the story, only an update from his lawyer that the girl had been taken to court and charged with slander. The newspapers that printed that story ran apologies and were fined for printing something that not only wasn’t true, but had the potential to be defamatory. You’d think they’d have learned their lessons, right? You’d think Alex would have done too.

  It could be that I’ve had a shit weekend already. It could be that I’ve just found out I’m on my last warning at work, but that’s another story entirely. It could be that my self-confidence is at an all-time low and there’s no reason I can think of that makes me wonder why he wouldn’t do it anyway and why it’s taken him so long in the first place, and then it could just be because I’m used to being hurt. By men, by the world, by everything that stands in my way of happiness.

  Either I’m paranoid and I’m more depressed than I thought, or Alex has got some serious explaining to do.

  He finds me in the bedroom when he gets back, covered in pages of different editorials, hidden in a blanket of accusations and buried deep in what I hope is nothing but newsprint lies.

  I’ve been crying but that’s nothing new. I cry for Dad still and I cry because I feel alone on the weekends that Alex leaves me and I can’t or won’t go with him.

  He stands in the doorway, filling it almost entirely, a bag of something that looks like presents under his arm that give the impression of a bribe ready to be gifted apologetically.

  “You’ve seen it?” he says.

  “Who is she?”

  “Someone from my past.”

  I raise the page that has been stuck in my hand since I first read it to my eyes and begin to read for him.

  “Alex is dynamite in the sack, like you wouldn’t believe-.”

  “Lucy.”

  I hold my hand up to stop him coming in and continue to read, my eyes wet with tears.

  “So careful and considerate, I can’t tell you how many times I came-.”

  “You know-”, he begins to say.

  I ignore him and continue. “But right afterward, talk about cold. He was out of there before we even had time for a cuddle. There’s more.”

  “It’s bullshit.”

  “This what you get up to when you go away?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  “How many more are there?”

  “Lucy, listen to me. She’s lying.”

  “This is you and her, isn’t it?”

  “It is, but not from when she says it’s from. Look at my hair, look at my face, it’s an old picture. It’s from last season, almost a year ago.”

  I look at the picture but I can’t see it.

  “Don’t lie to me, Alex”, I say.

  “I promise you, Lucy. I don’t know why she’s saying what she’s saying now, someone must have put her up to it, but that is not from when she says it is.”

  Alex tries to come into the bedroom again, but I’m still not ready to let him.

  “I thought you trusted me”, he says.

  “I thought I did too.”

  “That’s not me, you know that's not me. We talked that night for over an hour. What do you think I did afterward, go out looking for call girls I could sleep with?”

  “What did you do?”

  “I don’t know. Watch TV, sleep, the usual.”

  “On your own?”

  “Of course on my own.”

  “So nobody can say.”

  “Lucy.”

  “It’s here, Alex. It’s all over the fucking newspapers. Ten of them, at least. I’ve had people calling me. Mom called me. She says there’s a sex tape.”

  “There isn’t a sex tape.”

  “Why would she say this if it wasn’t true?”

  “Listen to me, Lucy. I know this looks bad, but it’s not at all what you think it is. You work in this industry, you know the kind of unforgivable shit that goes on behind the scenes. She’s doing this on purpose to get at me, to get at us both perhaps. I wouldn’t be surprised if a rival team put her up to this.”

  “I need to know I can trust you.”

  “You can trust me”, he says.

  I’m crying again and this time, Alex makes it into the room before I can get the words out to stop him.

  “How long have you been like this, thinking like this?”

  I shake my head but still the words don’t come. Alex takes my hand in his.

  “Look at me”, he says.

  I look at him, my eyes wells of tears.

  “I love you. I’ve loved you for ever and a day and I will always love you. I am never going to do anything to jeopardize that, I promise you. You’ve got to believe me.”

  “It’s just.”

  “What will it take for you to believe me?”

  I hold up pages of the newspaper feebly.

  “If you need me to, I’ll find her and you can ask her. I’ll take her to court and get her to say when this happened, under oath. Look at my hair, Lucy. I haven’t had it that short for a year. I’m not that person anymore, you’ve got to believe me. You’ve got to believe I’d never do anything like this to you.”

  “I don’t know what to believe. I’m sorry, Alex. I’m-. Right now, I don’t know. All these social events, the modeling, and now this. It just. It looks so real.”

  “It is real. It just isn’t from when she says it is. The papers have jumped on it like they always do. Print the story, check the facts later. No one asked my side of it. This shit is going to happen, now I’m back in the public eye, you’ve got to realize that. It’s why I took myself away from it in the first place.”

  “I think I liked it better when you did”, I say.

  “Then maybe we’ll have to do it again because if this is what happens if I don’t, I don’t even want to know.”

  I don’t know what to think. That shadow of doubt in my head isn’t going away and it’s so hard to work out whether it’s just me and my paranoia or something else entirely. I’ve known Alex intimately for a month and two days. Do I really know him well enough to trust him over something like this? Do I have a choice? Looking at the photos again his hair does look different, but I don’t know whether there’s enough of a difference in the graininess of the image to convince me. It could be the light. It could be the angle. It could even be the way he’s lying beneath her. The cocky smile is the same after all. The fucking twinkle in his eye
I thought he reserved especially for me. That even comes across in monochrome.

  “I’ll run a counter article and get onto my lawyer”, he says.

  “Ok.”

  “I don’t want this to come between us.”

  “Nor do I, Alex. This is just so fucking typical.”

  “They want to see me fall, Lucy. They always have. It’s what happens to people like me. We get built up and then chopped down and smashed into the ground until there is nothing left. You have to trust me to tell you the truth because if I don’t have your trust, a hole is going to open up between us neither one of us will be able to stop getting so big we each end up on either side of it. I love you. I will not let anything come between us.”

  “I love you too. Fuck, Alex, I love you so much. I don’t know. Maybe all this, it’s made me realize it. Fuck, maybe it’s because I can’t bear to think about losing you.”

  “You’re not going to lose me”, he says.

  “I’m not the prettiest girl in the world, you know. I’m aware of that. I’m not even sure why you like me. I’m not like the supermodels all of the other players seem to go for, I’m not even all that normal. What if you fall in love with someone at one of your exclusive post-match parties, or an underwear model? What have I got against them?”

  “What you’ve got is that you are you, specifically that. I don’t want anyone else, I want you, and I’m not sure what more I can do to convince you.”

  “The papers don’t help”, I say.

  “Just ignore the papers and listen to what I’m telling you. I know it’s difficult but it’s the truth. I love you. If you want, I’ll scream it across New York. I’ll print an entire newspaper to distribute across the fifty states just with that message.”

  “You’d do that for me?”

  “I would do absolutely anything to make you happy.”

  “Anything?”

  “Name it.”

  I give him the look and he smiles.

  “Oh no, no, no, no, no, no.”

  “You said anything.”

  “I didn’t think you meant that. What if you take photos and they end up in the newspaper, and besides which they cut into my balls so much before I thought I was going to lose them.”

  I give him my sad face, which isn’t too hard considering what I’m trying to deal with right now.

  “Fuck, alright. I promise I’ll even do that for you”, he says.

  “Ok.”

  “Ok?”

  I shake my head. “It’s going to take a while.”

  “I understand completely. Take as long as you want. Ask me whatever you need to. I want there to be complete and utter honesty between us. I will do absolutely anything to show that you can trust me.”

  “I’m fragile”, I say.

  “You already said.”

  “I guess it’s why. I don’t know. I just feared the worst.”

  “You want me to get in alongside you?”

  I nod. “Let’s get rid of this horrible woman first. What were you even thinking?”

  “I know right.”

  I hold up one of the newspaper pages so we can both see a picture of her, a gratuitous shot of her semi-naked from one of the lowbrow editorials. “Her tits are enormous.”

  “That was a different life entirely”, he says.

  “You don’t want that really do you?”

  His look tells me everything I need to know. We clear the pages from the bed, screwing some up into tiny balls to throw indiscriminately at the wall, tearing up others into as many pieces as I still feel like my heart has broken into.

  I know Alex wants to fuck to make me feel better, but I’m just not in the mood right now. I hug him and hope for all the world he isn’t lying to me. Like I say, that shadow at the back of my brain has always been there, ever since the first time I found out someone had let me down, so it’s going to take a long time to get rid of it entirely. If indeed that’s at all possible.

  Thirteen.

  Alex

  Past life and newspapers. Turns out you can’t avoid the wrath of either one of them. It takes a lot to convince Lucy that story is bullshit, and even though she says I don’t need to do half the stuff I do to prove it, I can tell that deep down she still has her doubts.

  I don’t blame her either. I don’t cheat and I never have, not even way back when I would hold hands with a girl during recess and think the world couldn’t get any better, but I’ve done a lot of shit in the past I know full well is going to come back and haunt me, and, unfortunately, it turns out that this was just the first part of that.

  It was exactly this kind of shit that got me in trouble with the press before, but this time around I go through the right channels to dismiss it, which includes contacting my legal team, building up a bulletproof PR campaign and approaching the same newspapers that publish the story in the first place to give my version of it. The version that also happens to be the truth.

  Yes, we fucked. No, it wasn’t this season, and no there isn’t a sex tape, unless she pulled some hidden camera bullshit on my ass I didn’t know about. The girl comes to me afterward and asks for money, and then when I refuse to give it to her she threatens to release the tape to the internet. This goes on for about a week until it’s clear beyond doubt she’s made the whole thing up and most of the papers are forced to issue a retraction and a subsequent groveling apology. The sex tape never surfaces, no matter how much she crows on about releasing it, while she takes the whole bullshit confession thing online to a tiny corner of the internet nobody pays attention to.

  That’s not the only scandal that hits me this month either. After that stuff with the big titted call girl from Cincinnati, two other stories come out about me sleeping with women while on the road. This time they don’t make the papers, instead they end up all over social media, which is almost even worse, because what follows is an endless gossip thread questioning my loyalty, with people making up all kinds of crazy stuff left, right and center about how I’ve cheated on them in the past, or done something to wrong them, or how basically I’m just a love rat.

  It takes a while to adjust to, and even though this apparently happens as much to other players as it does to me, depending on who happens to be popular that month for a public airing, whether the story is true or not, it still has a massive impact on my life.

  I get called into the team’s office to defend myself, twice in a matter of weeks, while Lucy doesn’t know what the hell to think, one moment getting over one story, while reading another about something a girl and I did together over three years ago. It’s a difficult time, and one in which I do everything I can to prove to my coach I haven’t suddenly slipped back into old ways and to Lucy that I love her.

  The old me isn’t the me I am now, and it’s unfair for people to judge me on past actions. That sounds reasonable to me, but I understand how difficult it is for other people to understand, especially if they come from a completely different world. Lucy’s been on the receiving end of cheating men more than once, and I know if she thought I was doing the same to her, especially after everything I’ve told her to the contrary, it would break her into a million pieces.

  It’s hard for me to convince her I’m not, even more so when the evidence against me looks overwhelming - call girls changing dates, doctored photos, women paid to lie through their teeth - but there is nothing else I can do that I’m not doing already and hope she comes around.

  We’re only two months into a relationship, a month of which has basically been spent trying to quash rumors and convince her I’m for real, so I know it’s going to take time. Hopefully, we’ve got that, though. Hopefully, Lucy will finally come round, that niggling doubt she’s got about us will eventually fade away into nothing, and we’ll be so strong that not even a seemingly infallible made up story will be able to get between us.

  And if she’s still in doubt about my intentions, I’ve got a foolproof plan to make absolutely sure she knows how I truly feel about her, sh
e’s going to find impossible to refuse.

  That’ll all come later, though. That’s my trump card in a perfect hand, and I’m not going to do it until the moment is right.

  For now, while all of this bubbles away in the background, and Lucy and I jackknife from one made up scandal to the next, from old stories I thought were dead and buried to new ones we’re trying to create between us ourselves, I have a commitment to maintain a new image I’m desperately trying to hold onto for myself. The Giants have gone 7-0, which is even better than our start to the campaign last season. I’m excelling in almost every aspect of my game, despite what’s happening off the field, and I’ve never felt as close to perfection as I do right now. I’m leading the stats board, I’ve broken more records than I knew existed and this year could be the year they finally put me in the hall of fame. In short, life does not get much better than this.

  Alright, Lucy and I have been put through the mill over the last few weeks, but that hasn’t pulled us apart. If anything, it’s only made us stronger. The whole world knows about us, which is exactly what I always wanted, and even though gossip columns lament the loss of a bad boy quarterback to an ordinary looking, normal-in-every-way girl from Boston, I couldn’t be happier.

  That’s part of the reason for me doing this. I’ve managed to change my image and finally get at least a portion of the PR machine working in my favor, so I want to do the same for Lucy. I want to introduce the girl I know intimately to the world properly, so they stop assuming stuff about her that isn’t true. Lucy, however, is naturally skeptical.

  “Another interview?” she asks.

  “For both of us.”

  “I don’t know, Alex. That’s kind of your world.”

  I turn the magazine to a page about her titled What do we know about Lucy Parker, the girl that’s got Alex Vann Haden’s attention?

  I read: “Lucy is atypical for Alex. Lacking appeal in almost every department, we just can’t see what’s got the quarterback so worked up.”

  “At least they’re not printing stories about you anymore”, she says.

  “Doesn’t this stuff bother you?”

  “You know that isn’t true.”