Chapter Nine
Heidi
I slammed the door to my apartment, my eyes burning and my throat clogged with tears. Never in my life had I felt such humiliation, and it made me clench my teeth against the scream. Then I realized it was Saturday night and in this complex, I could scream all I wanted and no one would care. My next-door neighbor was playing techno loud enough to aggravate my headache. Even so, I buried my face into a pillow before I howled until I was hoarse.
And then—eventually—I stopped. It wasn’t as fast as turning off a faucet, but a girl can only scream so long until she starts searching for a weapon. Question was, what exactly was I going to grab? And how should I wield it?
I chose my phone. I wasn’t really feeling violent. I just wanted to talk to my best friend. Seconds later, she answered the phone with a sleepy, “Yeah?”
I glanced at the clock. It wasn’t even midnight and I’d woken her up? “Sam? Are you okay?”
“Hmm? Oh yeah. Just fell asleep watching something. Movie, I think.”
“Wow. What happened to my party-girl, best friend?”
“School loans happened. And Janet just moved in with her boyfriend, so I’ve got to cover all the rent. Why the hell didn’t I go to bartender school? At least I would have something to do on a Saturday night.”
“Because you work ninety hours a week in real estate and will start making billions any second now.”
“Turns out it’s not so easy to make billions. And just because I got my Realtor’s license doesn’t mean I can close a sale.”
I winced. Of the two of us, I thought she’d be rolling in the dough way sooner than me. We both thought that her looks and personality would bring in the male clients. Add in her smarts and she ought to be closing deals left and right. Apparently, not so much.
“You’ll figure it out. I believe in you.”
She chuckled. “God, I love you. Now give. Why’d you really call? You’ve got that I’ve-been-screaming-into-a-pillow hoarseness.”
Did I? Yeah, well maybe my throat was a little raw. I got up to get some water while I explained. “I did something stupid. Really stupid. I even knew it was stupid, but I did it anyway.”
“Oh, those are the best mistakes.”
“They are not!”
“Did it involve blood? Brain damage?”
“No!”
“Then they’re the best mistakes.”
“Career suicide isn’t good in any way.”
She snorted. “You don’t have a career. You got laid off, remember?” I could hear her open up a soda can, and I wished I was sitting right beside her making popcorn while she poured the diet sodas. Two years ago, we would have sat facing each other on the couch, doing each other’s toenails while dishing about life. Now we had to settle for late-night phone calls to a muffled techno beat.
It totally sucked, and my misery deepened by another fathom.
“I wish you were here,” I moaned.
“Quit whining and tell me who you slept with.”
I jolted. “How do you know I slept with someone?”
“Because you always say that’s a huge, stupid mistake. Did you use a condom?”
Did I mention that she was smart? And way too perceptive. “Of course, we did.”
“It didn’t break, did it?”
I shuddered. That would just put icing on the humiliation cake. “No. I’m good in that department.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“It got recorded.”
A moment of stunned silence, and then a squeal. “You bad girl, you! Oh my God, was it hot? Can I have a copy?”
“No!” I took a breath. “Though if things go badly, I’m sure anyone with internet access will get a copy.”
She blew out a slow breath. “Ouch. Well that sucks, but you’d hardly be the first or the last. So give me the details. Slowly. Take all night if you need to. Paint a really good picture.”
I chuckled despite my misery. “I’m beginning to regret calling you.”
“Liar. Come on. Let me live vicariously through you. Because, sad to say, I’m not getting any, and I miss it.”
“It’s not so much what I did as much as with whom.”
“Yeah? Who?”
I pulled the phone away from my ear knowing that a squeal was about to come. Then I took a deep breath and confessed. “Rob Lee. We did it twice in the press booth at the stadium. The security cams got it all.”
The squeal didn’t come. In fact, it was quiet enough that I thought we’d been disconnected. But after a moment, I heard a low whistle.
“This is why I advocate regular sex. Otherwise, you build up until you seriously explode.” Then she paused a moment. “Was it good?”
“The best.” In fact, as miserable as I felt right then, parts of me were practically buzzing with happiness.
And now she squealed. A happy high note that never failed to make me smile. “Hot, recorded sex with superstud Rob.”
I groaned.
“Okay, okay,” she said, returning to her serious voice, though I could tell it was a struggle for her. “Tell me everything. Exactly.”
I took a deep breath as I went into the kitchen to get some water. And when I had hot tea brewing, I started the tale. Everything from becoming a stringer at the paper—which she already knew—to the moment I’d stomped my Louboutins right out of the stadium. And at the end of the tale, my tea was cold, my face was hot from humiliation, and Samantha had stopped making gasps and had headed into grumbles of rage. It was part of why I loved her so much. She exactly echoed my emotions when I needed her to.
Except when she spoke, it was with a delicate confusion. “So, um, is this a revenge call?”
I exhaled and tried to pull myself together. “Of course, it is.” Mentally I envisioned blowing up the entire stadium. And while I was at it, I’d obliterate the Indianapolis Sun, too.
“You know it’s not Rob’s fault, right?”
Of course I did. He’d been as outraged as I was. More even. And he’d broken that phone, which had been really satisfying to watch. “This always happens with him. He sucks me in, we have a great time, and then I end up feeling humiliated.”
Samantha made soothing sounds that were completely incoherent. Which meant she was thinking hard and not telling me what she really thought.
“Spill it,” I ordered.
She took a moment, but finally talked in an überrational tone that would annoy me if she weren’t my best friend. “First, nobody cares about an internet sex tape.”
“My parents will kill me. My brothers will never let me forget it. And we’re not even going to talk about the prayers I’ll have to do at the ancestral shrine.”
“Oh, right. You have family who cares.” That was one of the things that separated us. My family scrutinized everything I did, every moment. It’s the reason I went to school out of state: to try to get some distance between us. Sam’s family had tons of money but none of the caring that should happen with loving parents. I longed for my relatives to butt out. She longed for someone to show interest in anything she did.
Which meant that she had no understanding of what a family drama like this could do to me.
“Everyone will see it, Sam. My cousins in Hong Kong will see it and talk to my aunts about it who will be shamed, and they’ll scream at my mother. She’ll be mortified, and that’s nothing compared to what those biddies at mah-jongg are going to say to her at home.” I shuddered at the thought. “It’s not just me who’ll twist on the damaged family-honor spit. It’s everyone related to me. And even if I could ignore it, they can’t. It’s too important to them.”
She sighed. “Just how long will the shaming last?”
“Forever. Stuff like this doesn’t go away.” It’d be brought up at every family gathering for generations. I still heard about my great-uncle who was caught urinating in a public fountain and he’d been dead for thirty years. “I’d been doing so well, Sam, and now it’s all gone. A sex tape is proof that I can’t make it on my own. God only knows what will happen if I have to head back to Chicago because I can’t pay my bills.”
“Oh shit.”
“And if I ever confess I don’t want to go to law school, then I might as well step in front of a moving train.”
She took a deep breath. “Let’s not get hasty here.”
I wasn’t being hasty. I was being real. She had no idea the pressure on Chinese girls to perform. Good job, good husband, good face that showed respect to the elders at every turn. I never spoke out, never did anything for myself. Except for that one time on spring break. And again this afternoon in the press box.
And both had ended in disaster.
I flopped backward onto the couch. “What am I going to do?”
“Simple. Go write the story.”
“What?” The word came out more like a squeak.
“Look, everybody has a sex story. And those who don’t, wish they had.” I heard the rustle as she dug into her cabinets, probably for popcorn. “So you had hot sex with a superstar. Who hasn’t had that fantasy?”
“Me.”
“You lived it. And wow, I am never going to look at the announcer booth again without thinking of this.”
Me, neither.
“So write the article. Whatever article you want. Show them that they can’t control you with fear.”
I shook my head. “I’d lose my job as a stringer for sure. And can kiss goodbye any paper wanting to hire me again.”
“Not if the article was really good.”
Not true. Plenty of great articles made zero public impact. Besides it didn’t matter. “Didn’t you hear what I said about my family? My parents would die—literally die—from the mortification.” That wasn’t an exaggeration. My cousin didn’t get into a single Ivy League college and her father had a stroke when he heard the news.
“Okay, that’s bad, but what happens if you cave now? If you give in and don’t write the article.”
I didn’t have to answer. Bills and more bills. Even with a food-service job, I wouldn’t be able to make my rent. And that didn’t even touch the reality of what it’d do to my dreams. If I couldn’t make a go of journalism, then I’d have to move home and face the daily pressure to go into law when I had zero desire to do it.
Then I heard Sam take a deep breath. “What do you want to do? Don’t think about the money or the family drama. Just close your eyes and think about what you want to do right now.”
“I want…” Rob. Well, duh. Even humiliated, I still flushed at the memory of what we’d done. And ached to do it again. But outside of that, what did I want? I picked the next best thing. “I want to write an article about Rob. I want to finish what I started and prove to myself, my jerk ex-boss, and everyone at the paper that I can do it.”
“There you go.”
“But I don’t want to get fired because of it.” And I didn’t want Rob to get fired, either.
I took a deep breath and thought about something Rob had said this afternoon. That even the superstar athletes couldn’t control what happened in their games. And that trying to cover every eventuality would make them crazy.
Could I follow his example? Could I just do what I wanted and pray that it didn’t destroy my life?
“I’m not this bold, Sam.”
“Bullshit. Come on, Heidi. It’s time to get fierce with your life. Are you going to let one asshole with access to security tapes control your life?”
“No.”
“So what are you going to do?”
I took a deep breath. I could do this. “I set out to write an article about Rob, and that’s what I’m going to do.” Saying it aloud made it more real. And me less able to back out.
Samantha cheered. “So what’s it going to be about? Are you going to smear him?”
“Smear Rob? God no! But I’m not going to sugarcoat anything, either. It has to be a real article about the real man.” I thought about his Clark Kent persona. The Bobcats had been working overtime to make him seem like an all-American clean-cut kid from Nebraska. But honestly, the press had known about his women for months and hadn’t really cared. Superstars got lots of women. Could I write about that? The very idea made my insides twist with jealousy. I didn’t want to know about Rob’s other women, which meant the article had to be something else.
“He had an injury at the beginning of the season,” I said. “It worries him.”
“But he’s been playing great.”
True. Besides, I’d have to get a doctor to confirm it anyway and I didn’t know how I’d do that. I tried something else.
“There’s something in his past. Back from high school.”
“Ooh, juicy!”
“It could be nothing.”
“You won’t know until you check it out.”
I struggled with my ethics. I’d promised Rob that everything we’d talked about was off the record. So was I really about to betray that promise? Because Nico was an asshole? The very idea made me sick to my stomach. There had to be some way to get an article without betraying him. One that showed the paper I was an asset and didn’t hang Rob out to dry. I just had to find it.
I groaned. “Why am I working so hard at a stringer job? No one cares if I ask if they want fries with their burger.”
“Exactly,” Sam answered. “No one cares. You want to make a difference.”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Hell, no,” she laughed. “I just want to make a ton of money.”
I laughed at that because I knew she wasn’t nearly as shallow as she pretended. We talked for a while longer, catching up on the week’s events. And then we reluctantly said goodbye. Because first thing in the morning, I was heading out to Nebraska, to learn the truth about Rob Lee and dig up the dirty secret in his past. Then all I had to do was figure out what to do with it.