Chapter 16 – Brad
My phone rang shrilly and incessantly until I rolled over and snatched it off the nightstand. I lay on my stomach, my face in the pillows, and pressed the phone against my ear.
“Do you get a kick out of doing exactly what I asked you not to do?” Kina’s voice asked, and she sounded pissed.
“What?” I asked, trying to figure out what she was talking about. My head was still foggy with sleep.
“Is this some kind of joke to you? I’m helping you out, free of charge, and you’re throwing it back in my face.”
I sat up, rubbing my eyes. “Kina, slow down,” I said. “What happened?”
She laughed sarcastically. “It has to be nice living in the land of oblivion.”
I heard Jacob in the background, telling Kina to calm down.
“The hell I’m going to calm down. If he wants to be a dick, fine, but this comes back to me. And I’m not even getting paid for it.”
She was talking to Jacob, but she hadn’t taken the phone away from her ear, and I heard every word of it loud and clear.
“Still here,” I said, getting out of bed.
“Good, so you heard it,” she snapped. “I’m curious, why did you bother to call me about your image back in Laramie if you don’t care at all?”
I shook my head. “What are you talking about? Of course, I care. I’ve been trying my best to defuse the situation here.”
Kina laughed again, and I was starting to get irritated with it.
“Yeah, sure. You defused it perfectly. Having a date with a local is exactly what you need to do to get the press off your case. Well done, Brad.”
God, she was bitchy when she was angry. How did Jacob deal with this? I heard him plead with her to calm down in the background, but I had a feeling it wasn’t going to happen. She was angry, and if she knew I’d seen Carly last night, she had found out somewhere else because I hadn’t told Jacob that I was going to see Carly. Unless she was referring to our drinks together, which was where the press must have seen us in the first place.
“I’m allowed to go out with people,” I said.
“Sure, you are,” Kina said. “But you can’t do what everyone else does when you’re being watched like a hawk. You can’t mess around like that.”
I shook my head. “It was just a date, Kina. Surely that’s not a crime, even when the world watches me?”
“Yeah, well a date is fine, but getting naked in public isn’t quite what the world had in mind.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked, but the moment I asked it, last night rushed back to me. The photo that they had gotten, the flash, the man on the motorcycle.
“Just hold on,” I said to Kina.
I walked into the living room, picked up the remote, and switched on the television. I flipped to the news channel. And there it was. The reason Kina was so mad at me. Photos of me and Carly on the blanket last night were scattered all over the show. Our bodies were blurred out in all the right places, but it wasn’t hard to guess what we’d been doing.
“Shit,” I said.
“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Kina said coldly. I could understand why she was so angry now. I had done exactly what she’d asked me not to do. It hadn’t been on purpose, but there it was.
The whole thing last night had felt like a bad dream. I’d found out the hard way that my attempts to shake the press hadn’t worked. I’d been so proud of myself that I’d gotten away from them, believing that my car had been fast enough, that my driving had been skilled enough.
Like an idiot, I had believed I’d won. As if there was ever winning against the paparazzi. They always knew how to find someone, how to get to the bottom of a story, no matter how invasive they had to be.
I should have known better. Instead, I was plastered all over the news with Carly, and we were both naked. I had subjected her to the side effects of being with someone famous in a way much worse than it would have been if we’d gone dancing together.
There was so much that needed to be done now to clear this up. It was so much harder to get rid of bad publicity than to earn good publicity, and this was very bad.
For a moment, I wondered if I should get a PR Manager of my own, someone that could help me out the way Kina had helped Jacob when he’d been transferred from Texas with an assault charge on his name and very few fans that cared about him.
“I’ll call you back, Kina,” I said. “I’m sorry about this.”
“Don’t be sorry, be careful,” she said. “We’ll have to fix this.”
“I’ll figure something out.”
I hung up. I wondered how this would impact me. It put me in a bad light, sure. There would be gossip for months, not to mention that they would hunt Carly down now to find out who she was and where she fit into the picture.
The upside was that it had nothing to do with alcohol or drugs, so it wouldn’t directly affect my game, but Coach Rudi wasn’t happy with his players being on the news for anything. Even scandals with women, which was what the Sharks seemed to be infamous for most of the time. At least three of my teammates had been involved in scandals with women that I knew about.
What bothered me the most was how this would affect Carly. Her life would never be the same again. If this blew over— and that might take time— she would always be marked as the woman who was caught sleeping with Brad Williams, famous football player. She would carry this with her for a long time to come, and that was what I’d hoped to avoid. God, what a mess.
I dialed her number and waited for it to ring. I hoped she would answer. I needed to talk to her. I needed to find out if she was okay. No doubt, she had seen the news already. She had been frantic last night about the photo, horrified that she had been caught in such a compromising position.
She wasn’t answering her phone. I had half expected it, although it pissed me off. I needed to talk to her. When something like this happened, we had to stick together, not ignore each other.
When I got her voicemail, I hung up without leaving a message and dialed again. If I kept ringing her, she had to answer. She had to pick up the phone and talk to me. I hated it when she was ignoring me like this. It wasn’t the first time. Lately, it seemed like it was all she did.
When I’d tried a few times, I decided to stop. It was no use if she wasn’t going to answer. Maybe she wasn’t with her phone, and I would end up looking like a creeper. I doubted she wasn’t near her phone, though.
My phone beeped with a text message a few minutes later.
I don’t want to talk to you. You’ve ruined my life.
I was suddenly furious. Who the hell did she think she was, blaming me for this? If she didn’t want to talk, we could text.
It takes two to tango, sweetheart. I wasn’t naked and willing all by myself.
Maybe it was a little snappy for me, but I was angry that she was blaming me for this. It wasn’t my fault. I had tried to protect her, after all. I had thought our spot would be secluded enough. I had thought that nothing would go wrong. Everything I had done was to protect her. Turned out that I had thought wrong.
That’s rich, Brad. Leave me alone.
She wasn’t even going to fight with me. I wanted something— anything— from her. I needed to talk to her, so we could sort it out. At least that, if nothing else. I sent more messages, but she stopped replying. This was what she did best, I realized. She withdrew.
When her dad had dragged her away all those years ago, I had felt guilty for not fighting enough for her. When I’d walked away from her on graduation day, I had felt like a fool for leaving the girl I loved. This time, it was all her. She was walking away from this. She wasn’t fighting for it.
But why should she? What were we? I had no idea where we stood, and whatever we might have been before was over now. I was sure of it.
I sank down onto the couch, my head in my hands. I knew this feeling too well. The feeling of losing Carly. The feeling of being talked about and judged by people who didn’t know me.
I hated it when something like this happened. Until now, I had been lucky. I hadn’t been involved in any scandals. That had mainly been because I hadn’t been interested in much, other than playing my game and doing my training and spending time with the few friends I had. Since Carly, I even been with any other women. I couldn’t get her out of my head for all these years and now that I’d been able to be with her again, I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of my life with that same issue.
Was this what it had been like for Jacob, as well as for Hanson and Brian? My three closest friends on my team had all been through scandals with women.
A knock on the front door pulled me out of the spiral of my thoughts. My mom wasn’t home, it seemed, so I got up and walked to the door.
When I opened it, Charles Donovan stood in front of me. He was seething with rage, and I had seen this look on him before. He had that same look in his eyes that he’d had when he’d pinned me against the wall and threatened me, telling me to stay away from Carly. I was pretty sure he probably brought a gun again.
I opened my mouth to speak, but he didn’t let me get that far. His fist shot out, and he punched me in the nose with a force that made my head snap back. I staggered to keep my balance.
“I told you not to come around here,” he said, sneering at me.
I pressed my hand against my nose, and it came away red and wet. I was gushing blood onto my shirt. My nose ached, and my head throbbed. Charles turned around and stormed away.
Maybe I deserved that. I closed the front door and walked to the bathroom, my shirt pressed against my nose. It was full of blood, anyway. I tried to get the bleeding to stop with tissues and a cold, wet washcloth. Still, it took a while for the bleeding to stop.
When I finally managed it, I turned and inspected my face in the mirror. I had blood on my upper lip and chin, and my shirt was stained with so much blood it looked like I’d been shot. My head still ached, but it was no match for how horrid I felt.
I was reliving that day, six years ago, all over again. He hadn’t assaulted me then, not like this. It had been scary, but it hadn’t hurt. This time, it hurt like a bitch. Not only physically, but my ego was pretty damn dented.
I didn’t blame him for hitting me, though. Not this time. His daughter was naked, all over the news, and it was all my fault. This time, he was within his right to tell me to stay away from her. What was worse was that he hadn’t even needed to tell me to stay away from her. She was enforcing that all by herself, telling me to leave her alone.
I picked up my phone and tried to call her again. It was like Kina said: I did exactly what I was told not to do. Pity that Carly still didn’t answer. Not that I’d expected her to. I’m just not the type of guy to give up.