Player (A Secret Baby Sports Romance)(2)

“Yes Vince, I’m going to leave.” I say it mechanically, reaching down to get my clutch from where it dropped to the ground when I walked in.

“Oh, like you’ve got any capacity to be on your own, sweetheart,” Vince hurls at me. But I’m already walking out of the office.

“I hope you realize you’re making a big mistake!” he hollers after me.

“And I hope you catch something from your little office slut that makes your dick fall off,” I hurl over my shoulder.

“Least I’m letting him use it, bitch!” I barely catch as I slam the door to his office shut and run for the elevators.





2





Natalie




Tires squeal as I peel out of the office parking lot, away from the life that up until this very moment was ours. ‘Ours’ until I leave it shattered like that picture on the floor of Vince’s office.

And despite living it for the last two years, it’s never actually been ‘my’ life, anyways. It’s always been Vince’s life, with me as a permanent guest. One more piece of art or famous guitar bought at a charity auction to decorate the walls and corners of his life.

That feeling has always been a lingering, nagging thought in the back of my mind - one that’s always dug at me in a subtle way like a seed caught in the back of your teeth.

I’m furious as I roar down the LA freeway - at my fiancé of course, but mostly at myself. The betrayal hurts, but I have to wonder how I even got to this place, where I’m engaged to man like Vince Capra in the first place. I’m pissed because I know I should be pissed, but that’s the extent of the emotional response to walking in on him fucking his secretary. I’m mad, and I feel slighted, and cheated.

But I’m not heartbroken.

I know I should be - I know any woman in my situation should feel that wrenching pain in her chest after seeing that. But instead, I just feel like I lost something somehow. I feel like I lost my pride somewhere along the way. It’s like the final nail in the coffin of what my life was growing up into what it is now.

Because the truth is, I know exactly how I got to a place where I’m engaged to marry a man like Vince. I can literally hear my mother’s voice from all those years ago, when it all came crashing down. That voice, masked and dimmed by gin martinis and valium in the stuffy lawyer’s offices in the aftermath of my father’s sentencing.

“I told you you’d thank me for all of it someday, Natalie.”

Her pupils are out of focus as she fingers the row of white pearls around her neck like some sort of Tiffany’s rosary. They’re new, of course. The identical ones she wore before have long since been seized by the FBI as collateral evidence, along with the Malibu house, the Manhattan penthouse, both yachts, and the bank accounts, of course. Luckily for her and her predilection towards strands of expensive pearls and the lifestyle she’s become accustomed to, my mother has already been shacking up with Dad’s VP since week two of the trial.

Money does NOT buy class, by the way.

By “all of it”, she of course means all the grooming - all the “finishing classes”, all the private tutoring in everything from polite conversation to classical piano. The diet I’ve been on since I was twelve; the nose-job I had when I was sixteen.

And by “thanking” her for it, she means that I’m “prepared” now. I’m groomed, primped, and ready to marry off to some other reckless man with money, like her to my father, or his vice president after the arrest.

So, yes, that’s how I get to a place where I’m of course saying yes to a slick, moneyed, philandering, and lying prick like Vince Capra when he asked me to marry him. Because my life has been determined for me before I was old enough to know any better. Because my place as arm candy - as an accessory - has been predestined from three or four generations back of prim, shrewd, demure women of high birth.

My hands tighten to white knuckles on the steering wheel of the Bentley - Vince’s Bentley, that I’m allowed to drive - as the thought of my pre-determined fate gets my blood boiling. My mother would push this aside if she were in my shoes, I know that. She’d pour an extra finger of gin, maybe go on a shopping spree, and then compartmentalize the whole thing away. In fact, she did exactly that - many times, actually - when my father’s indiscretions with a secretary, or the nanny, or whoever else came to light.

“It’s different for men, honey,” she’d say, straightening her shoulders and holding her neck high. “It’s just different.”

Bullshit.

And it’s there in that car, roaring into downtown LA with the anger billowing up inside of me, that I know unequivocally that I am not my mother. I am not going to just push this aside, or tuck it away, or shrug and let it slide. I’m not going to “let it go” because “men will be men” and somehow fucking his secretary is Vince’s Goddamn birthright or something for being born rich and a guy.