Free Homecourt Advantage by Rita Ewing

better.” Michael reached down and embraced Dawn.
    Dawn quickly closed and locked the bathroom door after Michael left, as if he were there to see the steady flow of tears. Dawn stared at her clear eyes in the mirror and wondered if Michael had seen through her charade. He was right; for her, everything did come back to when they were going to get married. She wanted to share the rest of her life with Michael and she was tired of waiting around for him to decide that he wanted to make that commitment. When he’d told her that things would get better once the season was over, she’d been hoping he would follow that up by saying they could start planning their wedding. It seemed as if he had one foot in the door of their relationship and one foot out.
    They had dated for three years at Stanford, and right before he graduated and was drafted, he had proposed to her. That was over a year ago. He’d promised that they’d get married before the season was over. Somehow, right before training camp began last October, Michael had managed to give Dawn a lame excuse about Coach not thinking it was a good time to plan a wedding. Since that time, Dawn had gottenan assortment of reasons why they had not gotten married: from Michael and his procrastinating, to his sports agent, Jake Schneider, who never thought marriage should be on any of his client’s list of priorities, to the groupies sitting in the stands at the Mecca Arena who said that rookies never got married during their first year in the NBA. She surmised that Michael’s real reason for not having married her was a combination of everything.
    Dawn hated that she was feeling so needy. Before Michael, she never questioned her complete independence and relied on no one. Now she wondered if loving someone as much as she loved Michael brought out her insecurities. Her father had run off and married his twenty-two-year-old secretary the day before Dawn’s third birthday.
    Dawn was not interested in history repeating itself in her relationship. She saw the debilitating effect her father’s walking out on them had on her mother. After he left, Dawn’s mother was never the same person. Feelings of failure and inadequacy tainted the rest of her stressful life. Watching her mother year after year in such a self-pitying state made Dawn determined not to go down that same path. Ironically, it made Dawn fiercely independent yet so needy at the same time.
    Two years ago, her mother had died of breast cancer. Dawn was left financially independent. Her mother would have been proud of the strong, self-contained young woman she’d become. In seven years Dawn had completed Stanford’s accelerated joint degree program and received a bachelor of science degree in biology and her doctorate of medicine. Her life was almost complete.
    Now Dawn was prepared to do just about anything to ensure that her relationship with Michael worked out. She was even willing to put aside pressuring him about marriage so that he could concentrate. He was, after all, a twenty-two-year-old multimillionaire with a mission to win an NBA championship and Rookie of the Year award. She knew the last thing he needed right now was her nagging him about marriage, or anything else for that matter. What he needed was her unconditional love and support. She thought again of Alexis’s edict. Yes, Dawn decided, she’d just have to put her selfish interests on hold for a while.

Chapter 8
    Trina Belleville smoothed her graying hair self consciously as she sat at a corner table in the Mecca’s Family Lounge. She was waiting to see a welcoming or even familiar face, but thus far, no luck. Looking down sourly at her second empty plate, she used her plastic fork to fiddle with the remains of shrimp tails. She fantasized about getting up and walking around the busy room, going from table to table, holding court, as she used to do when Rick played for the Charlotte Hornets. That was North Carolina, with different people and a