1
“Niko,how was the threesome in Park City?!”
A flurry of flashes went off as Niko Costas walked at a brisk pace, head down, glasses on, with the brim of his hat covering most of his face.
The volley of shouts assaulted him before the glare of bright lights did, the staccato bursts popping off one after another as he hustled through the terminal concourse. Niko had the athlete’s walk—shoulders forward, head down, purposeful as a linebacker on a blitz—but even with the bill of the hat dipped low and the mirrored aviators, he was recognizable as the tabloid headline they’d all been paid to conjure. In his experience, airports were the new Roman Colosseum, a place for blood sport, with the gladiators traded out for celebrities with emotional soft underbellies, and the crowd’s roar replaced by the barking of freelance predators with iPhones and zoom lenses.
“Niko! What were you doing in Park City? Is it true that you’re dating Andrada? Did you know Camille was going to be there, too?”
He didn’t lift his head. He knew the layout by muscle memory. He could count the terminal’s mosaic floor tiles in hissleep and sensed the executive lounge five yards ahead by the subtle shift in air conditioning and the percussive click of rolling suitcases transitioning to plush carpet.
“How are your teammates going to feel about you sleeping with their wives?”
Ex-teammate, singular, and they were never married, but tomayto, tomahto. He could have corrected them, but he’d learned that the truth meant nothing in the feedback loop of clicks and hashtags. Accuracy was collateral damage. He also knew the best defense was a strong offense, and the best offense was not to play.
“Did you sleep with Andrada because of what happened in game six?”
He nearly laughed. These people imagined a world where every professional rivalry ended in revenge sex. This was real life, notHeated Rivalry, and if that was the case it wouldn’t have been Andrada who was in his bed.
Andrada was a super model who happened to be dating Carlos Cabrera when he got a safe when he was clearly out in game six of the World Series that caused his team to come back and win the game and the championship. Niko hadn’t slept with her out of any revenge. He slept with her because she was hot and he was upset about his life. Carlos was just collateral damage.
“Is it true you’re a sex addict? Is that where you’ve been? Were you at rehab?”
Sex addict?!
That was a first. He’d never heard that one before. He wished that he’d been in recovery for a sex addiction for the past eight weeks. It would have been a hell of a lot better than where he’d actually been. Not that a sex addiction wasn’t serious. He knew it was. But the stakes of dealing with a sex addiction most likely wouldn’t mean his career was over.
More flashes. More shouting. More keeping his head down and walking, not allowing the vultures to bait him.
He could hear his publicist’s voice in his head: “When you react, you are putting food on their table and money in their bank accounts.”
Niko thought about the other lessons he’d learned from Jessie. Like how to navigate through crowds so your face was always partially in shadow, how to use the reflective surfaces of airport display cases to check for tails, and how to memorize the first names of airline desk attendants so you could get through security twice as fast. He’d gotten so good at the game that sometimes he forgot there even was a game, that he could just live for a minute without anticipating the next ambush or social media landmine.
But he couldn’t forget his screw-ups, and there were plenty. And every time another infraction occurred, each and every bar fight, paparazzi punch, and physical altercation was resurrected as evidence of what a fuckup he was and played on TMZ, SportsCenter, Access Hollywood, and other online celebrity gossip sites. He was still the same kid who got in twenty-two fights between second grade and eighth. The one who couldn’t stop himself when someone needed shutting up, who’d been suspended twice for punching kids who made fun of his brother’s “robot talk.” The one who, on the first night of sleepaway baseball camp, called the assistant coach a “dickless donkey” to his face because he was bullying kids about their weight. And when Dickless Donkey thought he could intimidate Niko by grabbing him by the shirt collar and shoving him up against the wall because he was twice his size and five years older than him, Niko kneed him in the balls and socked him in the Adam’s apple, causing the assistant coach to fall to the floor in a fetal position gasping for air.
Twenty years later, Niko still had a short fuse and a zero tolerance for assholes, which made him a ticking time bomb always willing to blow up his own life with no regard for consequences. He practically gift-wrapped headlines, soundbites, and thirty-second shock-value clips for media.
There were reasons why he was the way he was. He’d gone to see more than one psychologist who told him that his behavior was linked to the trauma of his dad dying suddenly when he was a child. Overnight his entire world imploded. His twin brother, AJ, who was later diagnosed with level 1 autism and retroactively with selective mutism, just stopped speaking for an entire school year after their father passed. Niko, AJ, and his little sister Frankie moved from their three-bedroom home into a caretaker’s cottage, sharing a cramped one-bedroom, one-bath, five hundred square foot space on the grounds with his mom, who worked as a glorified housekeeper/personal assistant to a rich doctor and his family, who had two sons, Liam and Tristan. Liam was a couple of years older than the twins, but Tristan was their age. They became like brothers, brothers who lived in a mansion with both parents and who didn’t have a mom who was grieving, depressed, and drinking every day.
So yeah, that kid was still inside the thirty-two year old man he was today.
“Are the rumors true? Are you a deadbeat dad? The stripper from Vegas says she has a paternity test that proves you are the father. Is that why you’ve been hiding out?”
Deadbeat dad?
What the fuck?
He stopped for a half-second. Not enough time for anyone to notice, but enough for him to take a beat because that was the one that landed. Bringing up anything paternal hit a nerve with Niko. When he was alive, his dad was his hero, his best friend, his everything. He was a firefighter, and one day he left for work,the next thing Niko knew, the fire captain was knocking on their door, and his mom was collapsing on the floor.
It wasn’t the first time a woman had claimed Niko had gotten her pregnant, which was why, contrary to popular belief, he was actually particular about the women he slept with. He hadn’t fucked a stripper from Vegas, so he knew they were again just trying to bait him.
Niko bit his tongue so hard he was surprised blood didn’t gush out as he kept his stride in motion. He was feet away from the entrance to the lounge. He could count it down.Ten, nine, eight, seven…
“Are you coming back to the Waves next season? Are we going to see you back on the mound?”
…three, two—fuck. Niko looked up at the exact moment that question was fired at him. The hostess was standing at the entrance of the lounge.
“Is it true you were in Munich for surgery?”
