Quarterback's Secret Baby (Bad Boy Ballers) (23 page)

"So you weren't into the long-distance thing?"

"Actually, she wasn't into it."

There were noises of general disbelief all around me. It was Rob Jabowsky, another huge linebacker and not a guy I knew very well, who spoke up first.

"Really? She wasn't into it? You're one of the most famous guys in America, Kaden. You know how many chicks would claw each other's eyes out to get ten minutes with you?"

"Tasha's, uh, she's not like that. She's kind of a hard-ass, actually. Always has been, even back in high school."

"Ha, yeah, I hear that," Adam said. "There aren't many hard-assed women out there but those that are, man you cannot make them do shit they do not wanna do. I feel you, man."

There was general agreement that women like Tasha did exist, that they were rare, and that attempting to convince them to do things they weren't into was an exercise in futility. It was an odd feeling, talking about it - about her. I'd taken so much shit over my relationships with her, stretching all the way back to high school, really, that it surprised me to be shown so much understanding from a group of huge, overpaid, over-privileged jocks, just like me.

"Does she know how you feel?" Someone asked.

"I - I don't know. I think so. I mean, I told her a few times that I wanted her to come live with me but she always shot it down right away. Her family and everything."

"Yeah," Jimmy replied. "But does she know how you
feel
?"

That question took me back a little. "Well, I assume she does. I mean, you don't just invite someone to come live with you, or offer to pay off her family's debts, if you don't feel strongly about them, right?"

"I don't know, man. That's the thing about those hard-ass women. They're hardasses for a reason. They're covering something up, you know? They're scared of letting anyone in. I used to know a girl like that - pretty similar situation, actually. Most of the time it seemed like she didn't give a shit about me, but she admitted it to me once that she only acted like that because she was actually totally in love with me and it scared the shit out of her. And believe me, I went above and beyond for this girl. Bought her a car, took her on vacations, even offered to set her up in her own place when she said she didn't want to live with anyone. Turns out she never even realized how I felt. Not until it was too late, anyway."

"What do you mean?" I asked. "Too late how?"

"She got married last year - even invited me to the wedding. Everyone got a little tipsy and she basically told me everything. Because she could by then, you know? She wasn't in love with me anymore - not that I ever knew she was - she'd just gotten married. She was safe. She only told me the truth because she was safe. It's weird, I wanted to be pissed at her, you know? Like, how could she not know? But she didn't. She's not a bad person - she never once asked me for money, I did all that shit myself - she was just super-protective of her heart. Hard childhood, you know? Fucked her up a little, made it almost impossible to believe that anyone could truly love for her. Honestly, man, sometimes it's the people who seem the most together who are just a big mess of emotions on the inside."

I grabbed a beer bottle off the table and took a long, hard swig as my mind reeled. I didn't know if I wanted to believe what Jimmy was saying or not. On the one hand, if that was Tasha's deal, then there was still - maybe - some hope, right? On the other hand, he didn't know Tasha. Nothing about her said 'vulnerable.' Even in the NFL, it was rare to meet people as absolutely focused and responsible as her. And my friends were trying to make me feel better, weren't they? Maybe Jimmy was embellishing a little, to that end.

"You should at least talk to her, man. Just call her up, tell her how you feel." Adam said, to general nods of approval from the rest of them.

"Yeah," Jimmy agreed. "If you lay your cards out on the table and she tells you to fuck off, at least you know. Then you can move on. Because that's what you have to do at some point. Move on. You've got the whole smorgasbord of primo American babes who would kill to get with you, Barlow. If you waste your time pining away for some chick who doesn't even want to, you're gonna regret it."

That night, I went home and stared at Tasha's number on my cell phone for a long time. I didn't call her, because I'd had too many beers and even I knew calling her up and slurring down the phone about how I felt wasn't going to go down well. But a little Google wouldn't hurt, I told myself. There was basically nothing to be found, though. She wasn't too active on social media, never had been - too busy. All I could find was a comment she'd left on a friend's Facebook page over a year previously and a photo of her on the website of the law office where she worked. I stared at that photo for a long time, softened by the alcohol into allowing myself to really experience how much I missed her.

But I didn't call her. It was late summer, the new season started in September. And why didn't I call her? Cowardice, probably. If you tell someone how you feel, they might tell you they don't feel the same way. As far as I was concerned, that was exactly what would happen. But my friends were right - I didn't know. I had to know. If I did, even if it was bad news, then maybe, maybe, I could finally put Natasha Greeley into that box in my head marked 'the past' and move on. I'd have to go see her.

Training was intense by then - daily - often two or three sessions with different coaches and trainers. I did have a block of three days, though, right before our first game. It had to be then. I booked the flight online, before I had time to pussy out, and then sat back, staring the receipt in my inbox. No backing down now.

On September seventh, less than a week before I was due to fly back to Little Falls, Barry called. I was sitting out in my yard enjoying a single beer - we'd been told to cut out alcohol consumption entirely by that close to the season beginning - as the sun set, thinking to myself that maybe, maybe I could get used to life in Texas.

"Hey, Barry."

"Kaden."

I sat up a little straighter, taking note of the sharp tone in Barry's voice. "Is something wrong?"

"You tell me, Barlow."

I looked out across the park-like backyard and mentally ran through my to-do list, which as far as I knew I'd been keeping up with. "Nothing wrong here, Barry. Just relaxing with a beer. Only one beer, don't freak out."

"Maybe I should have had Hal Johnson call you."

"Who's Hal Johnson?" I asked, surmising that this call was probably just another small matter that Barry the control-freak was blowing up into a big deal.

"Your lawyer, Kaden. The head of your legal team. Remember him, the big guy with the crazy hair?"

I did not remember Hal Johnson, although apparently, we'd met before. "Nope," I told Barry. "I'm always meeting new people in suits, I can't keep track of them all. Why, what's the problem?"

"Seems you're not such a choirboy after all, Kaden. I wish you'd mentioned this to someone. This has the potential to become a rather large headache. For me, for the lawyers, but mostly, my man, for you."

"Jesus, Barry, can we not speak in riddles? Just tell me what's going on."

I heard Barry sigh on the other end. "Look, nothing's confirmed yet, Kaden, so don't...don't lose your mind just yet, OK?"

"If nothing's confirmed, why the fuck are you even calling me?" I snapped, annoyed by that point. Barry's idea of earth-shattering news always turned out to be something like a website saying a slightly critical thing about me. Small potatoes.

"Because if this does get confirmed, you're in very deep shit, Kaden."

"I am going to hang up in ten seconds if you don't just spill it," I replied. "Come on, man. I'm trying to have a relaxing evening here."

"One of those shitty tabloids has a story that some girl had your baby. They intend to publish it."

I shook my head and laughed. "Fuuuuck, Barry. I didn't knock anyone up, OK? I haven't so much as laid a finger on a woman since I got here. Just, I don't know, get the lawyers to threaten to sue or something. Can I go now?"

"It's not someone here, Kaden."

"It's not someone at Brooks, either," I said, just wanting to get back to the sunset and the sense of peace that Barry's grating voice was draining out of me. "Seriously, this is just-"

"You're right," he cut me off. "It's not someone at Brooks. It's someone back in Little River or Little Falls or wherever it is you went to high school. Natasha Greeley? That ring any bells?"

Everything suddenly became dreamlike. I dropped my phone in what felt like slow-motion and sat there for a few minutes, staring at it as Barry's irritated voice came out of it, seemingly from a long distance away. The dots were there, but my brain had decided to take a few minutes off from connecting them and I was struggling with what I'd just heard. Eventually, the feeling of being in a dream started to fade and I reached down to pick the phone back up. I put it to my ear and said one word:

"What?"

"So you do know this girl? I can tell from your voice. Kaden, you absolute moron. What part of you thought it was a bad idea to go barebacking randoms?"

When I answered, my voice seemed to be coming from someone else. "She's not a random."

"I don't care what she is. I mean, we need to get Hal involved, OK? Let me get him on the call, give me a sec."

"No."

"What?"

"No."

"No what, Kaden? Do you realize how much trouble you're in if this is true? We need Hal on this right now, do you hear me?
Right now
."

"Why?" I asked, my voice sounding much, much calmer than the whirling storm of confusion in my head.

"Because this can't be published! We need to pay this girl off, that's why! And first, we need to get a court order to have the baby DNA tested. I'll get Hal to send one of his attack dogs out there and deal with that, then we-"

"No."

"JESUS CHRIST, KADEN!" Barry yelled, loud enough to make me jerk the phone away from my ear. "Are you even listening to me? What the fuck do you even mean 'no'? This is happening, OK? This is happening and we need to deal with it. The way we do that it is by informing this girl that her life is going to be a living fucking hell if she so much as whispers-"

"NO!" I bellowed, suddenly enraged. "No, Barry. Listen to what I'm telling you: no. Do not call Hal. Do not call anyone. I'm serious right now, man. If you set your dogs on this girl without my permission, you are fired. All of you are fired."

"Now, Kaden, we can talk about-"

I looked at the phone. I didn't have a single clue what was going on but I knew I couldn't talk to Barry for one more second. I clicked the screen to end the call and then turned the phone off. The I lay back in my chair and put my hands over my face, hoping I could force the thoughts in my mind to slow down enough to get a grip on them.

A baby. Natasha had a baby!?
My
baby?

I tried to do the math but I couldn't concentrate for long enough. But I knew more than nine months had passed since the night we spent together at my parent's house. I stayed out there in the yard for over two hours, literally disbelieving. It couldn't be true. Tasha would have told me. Wouldn't she? Did she think so little of me that she would have my baby without saying a word?

The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. I almost wanted to call Barry back for more details but I knew he'd just try to suck me into letting Hal sic the lawyers onto her, which I definitely didn't want. My flight to Little Falls was in three days. I was going to get on that flight and I was going to insist Tasha saw me. And then I was going to ask her what the hell was going on. There was still a small chance it was all just a huge misunderstanding. Mostly because no matter how hard I tried to figure it out it just did not seem possible that she would have neglected to tell me. Family was everything to her. If she had my baby, then I was family.

And the tabloid angle? That I knew wouldn't have been her doing. I've never met a human being more diffident than Tasha Greeley. If someone was trying to sell a story to the tabloids, it wasn't her, that I knew with one-hundred percent certainty. She also didn't want money - not from me and not from the media. Little Falls was a small town and I was its most famous former resident - if what Barry said was true and Tasha had given birth to my baby, it wasn't too hard to believe that someone would have seen an angle there to be exploited.

I spent the next three days in torment, going back and forth on whether or not I believed that Tasha had really had my child and struggling with the thought that if she had, she hadn't seen fit to tell me. By the time I was sitting on the plane, looking down as the dusty flatlands of Texas turned into the greener pastures of the Midwest, I was almost relieved. Either way, I would know soon.

I gave birth to Kaden Barlow's son on the day of a full moon . I'd woken up a few times during the night, dazzled by the moonlight coming in the window and assuming the discomfort in my belly was period cramps. I wasn't awake enough to register that they couldn't be. By the time morning came the pain was worse. I ripped the covers off myself and looked down at my belly only to see it visibly tightening in front of my eyes, hard enough to push the breath out of my lungs when the pain hit.

"Ooooh..." I moaned, closing my eyes and leaning my head back on the pillow. There was an immediate knock at the door.

"Tash?"

It was Ray. "Everything OK? Can I come in?"

As soon as he saw my face, Ray disappeared back out the door. When he came back, Alisha was with him. She gently pulled the covers the rest of the way off me and all three of us looked down at the wet, pink spot on the bed.

Alisha smiled at me. "It's time, Tash. Is your bag still by the front door? How do you feel?"

I looked up at Ray and Alisha as a surge of adrenaline rushed through my veins. Was it happening? Finally? "I feel fine," I told her. "I mean, right now I feel fine, but the cramps are painful."

"Alright," she told me, taking immediate charge of the situation. "Ray, you go make sure the bag is by the front door and tell your mother it's happening. I'll call the hospital and see if we should go in yet."

A nurse at the hospital asked for Alisha to hold the phone near my mouth so she could hear me breathing, asked how much liquid there seemed to be on the bed and then told me it was probably time to come in. So me, my mother and Alisha - both of whom were to be my birthing partners - all managed to get ourselves into the car to drive to the hospital. The pains seemed to get worse after standing up and walking around, even if it was only briefly. By the time we pulled up outside they were bad enough to have me convinced something was seriously wrong.

"This is - Alisha, this is bad," I panted as two orderlies rushed out with two wheelchairs - one for me, one for my mother. "I feel like I can't breathe. I think something, oh God, I think something's wrong."

I was starting to panic. My mother reached out and took one of my hands as we were pushed into the reception area. "Nothing's wrong, Tash," she said. "It hurts like hell, but nothing's wrong. You're just having a baby."

Alisha bent down. "And we're here now, anyway. If something's wrong, people here are trained to deal with it."

It took me a long time to fill out all the forms at the front desk, what with having to pause and groan like a cow every few minutes, but we got it done and then were led to an examination room where I was subjected to an internal examination that had me grinding my teeth so hard I was surprised they didn't break.

"You're seven centimeters!" The nurse announced, pulling off her rubber gloves and smiling. "That's excellent! Most first time moms aren't even two when they come in - you're already more than halfway there."

Alisha and my mother arranged themselves so there was one of them sitting on each side of me, close to my head. They took turns feeding me ice chips and letting me squeeze their hands as hard as I could whenever a contraction hit. The pain was so all-encompassing that it felt, at times, like a kind of unconsciousness. I could hear their gentle, encouraging voices, though, even if they seemed to be coming from very far away.

Everything moved very quickly. By the time I was settled in and starting to beg for painkillers it was too late for an epidural.

"I can't do this," I wailed, looking at my mother and then at Alisha. "I can't do this. It's too much. I want to go home."

My mom smiled while Alisha ran a cool, damp cloth over my forehead. "We can go home, sweetie, but first, we have to get that baby out."

Images of Kaden flickered through my mind. The smile he used to give me - not the cool-guy smile he gave his friends but the open, guileless smile he seemed to reserve only for me. Could he sense what was happening? Was he thinking of me as I lay in that hospital bed out of my mind with pain? There was no reason he would be, but in that state, it didn't matter.

After what felt like hours - it turned out to be forty minutes - of pushing, a nurse placed a tiny, slippery thing on my chest and Alisha and my mother started to cry. I looked down and heard my breath catch in my throat.

"It's a boy!" A nurse told us, as I stared deep into a pair of dark blue eyes and knew that everything was suddenly and profoundly different.

"Oh my God," Alisha whispered, "Tash, he's so beautiful. Look at him! He knows you're his mom."

Neither of them said it, the thing we were all thinking - not Alisha, not my mother. They left it to me. A few minutes later, when the sudden rush of the birth had calmed down and we were left alone with our new family member, I caught a glimpse of my son's face at a certain angle.

"He looks just like Kaden," I gasped, shocked at the resemblance.

"He does," my mom replied, running one finger down my baby's impossibly soft, newborn cheek. "He looks just like his daddy. He has your chin, though."

Alisha and my mom - and Ray - wanted me to tell Kaden. They were respectful about it, sensing that it was a sensitive issue for me, and they didn't push me or nag me, but I knew how they felt, even if none of them mentioned it in the immediate aftermath of the birth.

We didn't stay in the hospital for very long. I was discharged about five hours later and sent home with a pack of diapers, a doughnut pillow and a box of what appeared to be gigantic maxi pads. The doughnut pillow made me laugh at first, but Alisha gave me a look.

"You won't be laughing later," she said, "believe me."

I named my son Henry after my mother, Henrietta. If he had been a girl, Henrietta it would have been. There was never any doubt in my mind. Actually, I named him Henry Kaden, but I didn't mention his second name to my family, not right away, anyway, when my body and mind were still reeling from what I'd just been through, surfing waves of hormones I seemed to be in no control of.

And everyone was in love with Henry - not least his besotted, emotional mother. I have never been more prone to bursting into tears than I was during those first few weeks after his arrival. One time it was a diaper commercial on TV, another time the image of Rosa reaching into his bassinet and whispering a nursery rhyme that Ray and Alisha sang to her at bedtime.

The office hired a temporary replacement for three months - something they didn't have to do - and those three months went by in a blur of sleepless nights, tears (from Henry and from me) and love so fierce and pure it changed who I was. I've always been proud of my toughness, maybe stupidly so, but the arrival of Henry with his long eyelashes and his fat cheeks brought a fragility to me and the world that terrified me. Everything suddenly seemed so fraught, so precious. My mother caught me one evening in the kitchen, sobbing.

"Tash," she whispered, holding my head against her bosom, "now you know."

"Now I know what?" I asked, crying even harder at the thought that one day, I wouldn't have my mother there to hold me against her chest and make it seem like everything was going to be OK.

"Now you know what it is to love someone so much it breaks you in two."

And that's exactly what it was. Henry didn't just break me two, he smashed me into pieces, and then the love I had for him put me back together again, still me but sensitive now to all the dangers lurking in the world, more aware of how special my family and our interconnected bonds truly were.

I brought my son into the office when he was ten weeks old and the fear that he was going to catch some dread disease if I stepped outside of the house with him for even a second had dissipated - mostly. The women passed him around, cooing and squealing with delight when he offered up on of his wide, dimpled smiles. The men did their thing, too, commenting on how strong he looked, joking that they were going to have to be nicer to me now because Henry was clearly going to be able to beat them all up by the time he was two.

A couple of weeks after that, I went back to work. Alisha and Ray had taken on extra duties at their own jobs during the three months I had off and I knew I couldn't ask for any more. They pulled Rosa out of daycare and Alisha stayed home during the days to look after both her own daughter and my son. I split night duties with CeeCee when Alisha worked the night shift at her job. It was incredibly hard, but it was only temporary. When Henry was six months old he would go to the same daycare as Rosa and I would figure out my final schedule at work when the time came.

I was preparing dinner in the kitchen one night with Henry in his bouncy seat on the table, watching my every move with fascination, when CeeCee walked in and told me there was a phone call for me.

"For me?" I asked, confused because she was holding the landline phone in her hand, the one we barely used but that my mother insisted on having. CeeCee put her hand over the receiver and stage-whispered:

"It sounds like someone important."

I grabbed a kitchen towel and wiped off my hands before taking the phone.

"Hello?"

"Is this Natasha Greeley?"

"Who - who may I ask is calling?" I asked, flustered by the business-like tone of the man on the other end.

"I'm a reporter with TKZ in Los Angeles and I'm wondering if you have any comment on the allegations that you recently gave birth to Kaden Barlow's baby?"

Pins and needles shot out from the center of my body to the tips of my fingers and toes. I jerked the phone away from my ear and pressed the hang-up button without responding.

"Don't answer that number again," I said breathlessly to CeeCee, "don't-"

"Why?"

"Just don't answer it. Look at me." I waited until I had my little sister's full attention. "Don't answer it. And if someone calls the landline again asking for me tell them they have the wrong number. OK?"

"But-"

"CeeCee!" I snapped, trying to slow down my breathing before the shock of getting the call turned into a full-blown panic attack. "Just don't take it!"

"OK," she replied, seeing how upset I was. "I won't." She went back to the living room to hang the phone up and I stumbled to the kitchen table and sat down in one of the chairs, pressing my hand against my chest in a futile attempt to slow down my hammering heart.

How could anyone know? How could a
tabloid reporter
know? No one knew - no one except my family and Jen and Lena. And I knew with one-hundred percent certainty that not one of those people would even think about calling the tabloids, let alone go ahead and do it.

The reporter called again the next day and then next and the next. He started calling during the day and then again at night, around nine o'clock. It didn't take long for everyone to figure out that something was going on, so one night after dinner I sat Ray and Alisha down and told them who was making the calls.

I watched them exchange worried looks before Ray spoke up. "Do you have any idea who told them? I thought it was just us and Jen and Lena who knew?"

"It is," I told him. "I have no idea how they found out - it seems impossible."

"Well," Alisha commented, "he looks
just
like Kaden and a lot of people know you were with him. Didn't he show up at work one day? It wouldn't be too hard to put two and two together, I don't think."

"Either way, next time they call, let me take it." Ray said.

"What are you going to say?" I asked, hopeful that there was still some way we could make the whole issue go away.

"I'll tell them they're harassing you and if they keep it up I'll call the police."

The very next day, exactly that happened. Ray took the call and told the reporter he would call the police if the calls continued. They stopped for three days before starting up again. The reporter told Ray that they were going to publish the story with or without comment from me. I lay in bed that night with Henry sleeping peacefully beside me and tried to figure out whether it would be a good idea to make a comment or just to continue to ignore it. Alisha was probably right that it was someone making assumptions who'd called the tabloid in the first place. There had been no DNA tests because Henry's paternity wasn't in question, but no one except me and those closest to me actually had proof of anything. Perhaps I could just simply tell the reporter that it was a mistake?

Just as I was about to drift off to sleep my cell phone vibrated and, half-asleep, I answered it without checking to see who it was.

"Tasha?"

I froze. It was Kaden. The day where I wouldn't recognize that deep voice was never going to come.

"Tasha?" He asked again when I failed to respond.

"Uh, hi, yes," I stammered, keeping my voice quiet so Henry wouldn't wake up. "Hi Kaden. How are you? Is everything OK?"

"Things are - well, things are mostly fine," he replied. "I'm in Little Falls, by the way - at my parent's house right now. I'd like to see you tomorrow, if possible."