Hook Shot (Hoops 3)

“Lotus, is it true what Bridget said?” another tosses out. “About you and Chase Montclair?”

Lotus’s head jerks around in the direction of the question the reporter hurled at her. “What are they talking about?”

she asks, looking up at me with wide, angry eyes.

“Ignore it, babe.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Don’t give them anything.” I spot the car service ahead. “Banner’s blowing my phone up. I’ll call her in a second. Let’s get out of here.”

I settle Lotus in the back seat and hand our bags to the driver so I can escape the glare of any cameras as soon as possible. It’s not the chaos that followed the scandal, with a hundred cameras and questions catapulted at my head every time I stepped outside, but if we don’t get this shit under control now, it could be.

I call Banner back as soon as we pull off.

“B, what the hell is going on?”

“Where are you?” Banner asks with that forced calm I’ve learned to see through over the years.

“Just landed in New York, but heading back to Cali day after tomorrow.” I frown and lean forward. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong, per se.”

“The hell, Banner. You don’t call me four times for some ‘per se’ shit, and reporters harassed me as soon as I stepped outside the airport doors. What’s going on?”

“You checked any TV, social media? That kind of thing?”

I stiffen. “No,” I say, dragging the word out. “Why?”

“I’m sending you a link. Don’t lose your temper. It’s nothing, but I wanted you prepared.” Banner hesitates. “Is Lotus with you?”

I told Banner about Lotus soon after we officially became “more than friends.” She represents me best when she knows what’s going on in my life and what’s important to me, so she definitely needed to know about my girl.

“Yeah, she’s here. They had questions for her, too.”

Lotus glances up at me, something that is concern, but not quite worry, in her expression. We’re both exhausted. Waking up in the middle of the night to some Angel Heart shit didn’t exactly make for a good night’s sleep. We haven’t discussed it further, thank God. Things have been relatively normal all day. Until all this not normal hit us.

“Watch the clip,” Banner says. “And let me know if you need anything.”

“Bye.” I hang up and grab the link from her text.

The preview of the video already has me gritting my teeth before I’ve even pressed play. It’s the Baller Bae logo and a still of Bridget at lunch with two other cast members in the sequence.

“I tried to make it work.” Bridget shakes her head, apparent sadness and regret on her face. “I know it wasn’t right, what I did, but Kenan abandoned me in the marriage. I was so BEEP lonely, and he didn’t care about anything but ball.”

A sheet of ice forms over my anger. I want to stop the video and not listen to the two minutes and forty-one seconds remaining, but I need to hear what else she has to say. Banner wouldn’t have asked about Lotus if she wasn’t involved in this nonsense somehow.

“And now he’s dating this child.” Bridget rolls her eyes, touching the hand of one castmate who murmurs something to commiserate. “She’s like fresh out of college. Not much older than our daughter. Can you believe that?”

“Girl, that’s how they do,” says a woman I recognize as the girlfriend of some guy in the league, but I can’t remember who. “He married you right out of college. You raised his baby, kept his house, stood by him while he built his career, and now he wants some fresh snatch.”

“That’s why we gotta revaginate, honey,” the other cast member says. “Keep it tight or they stray like that.”

Stray? As in I strayed? In what alternate reality has Bridget existed where I’m the villain in our story?

“And he was so mad that I had one little indiscretion,” Bridget says. “But I heard she’s going behind his back with this photographer she was BEEP before he found her.”

I press the screen to stop the clip. I can’t hear anymore right now. My temples literally throb with suppressed rage.