Free Baller: A Bad Boy Romance by Amy Love

hard for me. So he didn’t do it. Fine. He didn’t do it. I believed him, but that wasn’t enough. There were more people who would want to believe that he had done it rather than he hadn’t. There had to be more to the story than just a denial.
     
    “Do you realize how bad it looks when you choose not to comment?” she asked me. “It makes it look like the woman is right. That might as well be your comment if you aren’t going to defend yourself. Telling me you have no comment is the same as saying you did something.”
     
    “I didn’t do anything.”
     
    “I believe you, but a lot of people will not unless you can tell then what actually happened.”
     
    “I can’t tell you anything, Quinn, because I haven’t seen that lady in my life. I have no idea who the hell she is.”
     
    “Think…because that answer is not going to cut it for a lot of people, especially coming from you.”
     
    “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
     
    “It means, people know about you, Dante. They know that you aren’t a family and church man. They know you party, and they know you chase skirts. This isn’t that big of a mental jump for a lot of people to make.”
     
    He rubbed his hands over his face and looked down.
     
    “Quinn… you might think or want to think that, but I swear, on my mother’s life , on my sister that I have never hit a woman. Not that one and not anybody else. I would die before I hurt a woman. I swear it to you, Quinn.”
     
    I looked at him. He was visibly agitated. The tension ran through his long limbs and his jaw ticked.
     
    “I’m just trying to tell you the kind of impression that other people are going to have. Why do you look so shaken if you aren’t guilty?”
     
    “It’s just… it’s just …”
     
    “It’s just what? This is a safe space, Dante. I know I’m a reporter, but I don’t want to say anything that isn’t true. I would never use anything you say to me against you.”
     
    He looked at me.
     
    “My dad… my father, for most of the time that I knew him before he finally walked out on us, used to beat my mom,” he said.
     
    I felt all the air get sucked out of the room. For a second, I had no idea what to say to that. What did you say to that?
     
    “Did he ever hurt you ?”
     
    “No. She never let him.”
     
    “When did it start?”
     
    “My sister was just a baby. She was like…two, and I was six. It went on until I was twelve.” I knew he had a sister. There weren’t stories on her the way there were about him, but there were some pictures because they had been photographed together. She was beautiful. They had the same light features. Her name was Gabrielle Rock, and if she was two when he was six, then she was the same age as I was.
     
    “I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”
     
    “He used to yell at her. He used to call her a whore and a slut, and I never knew what those words meant at the time, but I knew they weren’t good. Gabbie would cry and I would hold her and tell her to keep her hands over her ears so she didn’t hear the thumping and screaming.”
     
    Thumping and screaming . I cringed, as I imagined hearing that.
     
    “Was he ever charged with domestic abuse?”
     
    “No. Never . I didn’t see him for years, but he came out of the woodwork when I started in the league, demanding money for all the trouble I apparently caused him when I was a kid. I give it to him because I know he isn't above coming after my mom again, or Gabbie.”
     
    “He sounds like a monster.”
     
    “He was. He is . It took mom years to get over what he did to her for all those years. Me and Gabbie, we were scared shitless of him. We couldn't do anything, if it wasn’t his threats that scared us, it was the fact that mom worked so hard to keep him away from us.”
     
    “You were just kids. It doesn't matter if he never touched you…he abused you, too.”
     
    “The way my mom used to cry, the way she would scream when he