“I’m playing, Billy, dang. I just…I don’t even know. My head is all fucked up.”
“I know it is, Money, but let me do my job.” Her voice had softened and I knew she was feeling sympathetic. It wasn’t pity because Billy didn’t do pity.
“Your job isn’t coming to save the day with some shit like this.” I closed my eyes as the realization that the next eighteen years meant I was going to be dealing with this crazy ass bird. And what kind of mother would she be to my kid?
“My job is to protect your brand. You are your brand. And I love you like the little brother I never got the chance to have. I have to trust my gut and you don’t lie. Your Black ass told me all about the strippers you had in your hotel room like somehow just going to a club was too much.”
I grinned thinking about the lunch where she grilled me about some photos that leaked from that night. “There were too many people around that night and I didn’t want them in my business. Besides, I got a room.”
“Yeah well it leaked anyway. And that was TMI but like I said, you don’t lie. I’m having her checked out. According to her, y’all hooked up at your place and now you’re just trying to cover it up. The next thing she’ll be saying is that she’s got pictures or something like that. We need to get a gag order on her before she can do any further damage.”
I rubbed my eyes and kept my head bent almost afraid to ask her the next question that needed to come out. “How bad is it right now?”
“Money, you know there are people in this league doing far worse. Relax, Bobby, Bryan and I will handle this and tell you how to move. It’s April and you’ve got to start conditioning. She’s supposedly due in May so that gives us like a month or so to figure something out.”
I nodded my head despite no one being able to see me. “Appreciate you, Billy.”
“The last thing I will ever do is let some raggedy bitch take down a member of my family. We can talk about everything else later, okay?” Billy was a girl’s girl so if she was talking cash shit about this girl, she had a feeling something wasn’t right. I prayed she found out so that I could get out of this mess.
“Yeah.”
“Take a deep breath and call Sonya. Tell her we’re trying to figure shit out and she can reach out to me if you need a minute to process all of this, okay?”
I laughed because while I appreciated Billy trying to stand in the gap, my mama wasn’t going to take secondhand information. “You know she isn’t going for that.”
Billy chuckled because she knew my mama well. “I know, but I had to say it just in case you were going to take me up on it.”
The call that I had to place with my mother was something that I never wanted to experience again. She was just as shocked as I had been but the thing she didn’t do was question me. And I wasn’t sure why that fucked me up even more. I wanted someone to tell me that I was crazy, that I had been lying because if that wasn’t the case then the DNA test was lying. I’d told Billy to get the best person she had and I knew this crazy stalker girl’s money wasn’t longer than mine. So whoever she’d bribed to make those results show me as the father was doing something for chump change. I wanted to find the office and interrogate everyone who worked there but my mama told me that was out of the question. Instead, she prayed over me saying that something was attacking me and going after the one thing I held in the highest regard: my name. Calling me a liar and going after my public image was a shitty thing for anyone to doespecially when I didn’t have any idea who this girl was. I was thankful that I had people on my side who would go to bat for me. But that didn’t mean I was going to just sit around while they fought my battles for me.
My eyes were tired and I knew I needed to give this a rest but something Billy said had been plaguing me for hours. I’d been scrolling through my emails, DMs, fan chats and the spam folder of my website to see if I had missed something coming from this girl. She said her name was Marley and her social media before she started this campaign against me was mostly normal shit about her life. According to the flags in her bio, she was Moroccan and Saudi Arabian and grew up in Michigan. We didn’t go to the same college and I was trying to find some hint as to when she decided to fuck up my life. So far, I couldn’t even see when we’d crossed paths.
Billy was messaging me with questions and helping me track my movements back to when I could have potentially met her. Her face had been vaguely familiar to me but I saw so many people it was impossible for me to remember who they all were. The body modifications and the work she had done made her look so much like thousands of other women who seem to desire the same face so I was sure I was confusing her with someone else.
On a hunch, I started to look through one more thing and that’s when I felt like my world was crashing down around me.
I shoved back from the computer and the room suddenly felt like the walls were caving in. My body felt overheated and I had to get out of here. I glanced at my bed and started to strip the covers off of it. I was about to get all this shit out of here today. Shit, I needed to get myself the fuck out of here as soon as possible. My stomach was churning hard as I piled the sheets on the ground and I wasn’t sure which end it was about to come out of but I felt like I was going to be sick.
My chest was heaving when I got done not from the exertion but from the attempts of trying to keep myself together.
Looking around my room I picked up the phone and called a number I knew could help me as quickly as possible. I wasn’t thinking logically about what I should be doing. My fight or flight was kicking it and it was telling me to do both. I was making moves to run the fuck away.
“Rachelle?”
“Money? Are you okay?” I could hear her shuffling around and I knew that Coach Stew was gonna kill my ass for waking up his wife.
“The fuck Money’s ass calling you for, Puddin’?” I heard Coach Stew’s voice get closer to the phone and I knew he’d probably rolled over to see what was wrong.
I glanced at the clock on my nightstand and saw that it was after one in the morning. Fuck. This should’ve waited until morning. I gripped my scalp trying to will myself to calm down.
“That’s my fault, Rachelle. Tell Stew I’m sorry. I just got a lot going on and I needed a favor.” I walked into my closet and pulled down my duffle bag as I tried to figure out what hotel I was going to check into for the night on short notice. Doing so at this time of night might call more attention to me but I wasn’t sure I cared.
“Ignore him, Money. Are you okay?”
Rachelle was cool as hell and I loved hanging out with her two boys so I knew her question was genuine. Despite being the head coach’s wife, she still worked within the organization because she said she would never be a woman who just ate off what her husband killed. Stew loved it cause that meant he had his wife in the building with him and he could see her whenever he needed to. The long hours he often put in would’ve put a strain on any relationship but he said their proximity to the team and to one another helped a lot.
“I will be. But um, do you think you can help me find a house?” I dropped my duffle and the clothes I was about to pull down off their hangers. It seemed like I was now frozen instead of running around panicking.
“You putting down roots or are you looking to rent?” She sounded more alert than before, which only made me feel worse.
