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But if he hadn’t done the shit that he did, Rori wouldn’t be feeling as sensitive as she was, and there wouldn’t have been any room for misunderstanding around my statement in that interview.
No opportunity for her to have me as fucked up as she had me.
I couldn’t wait to hit the showers after practice and get back to my vehicle, so it would be a decent time for me to call Kev. It had been too late last night, and too early this morning.
Yes, they were in the playoffs, and his mental place was probably far removed from any drama that only very, very tangentially involved him, but still.
I made that call.
“What part of do not put me in the middle of this shit did you not understand four months ago, nigga?” he said as soon as he answered, no hello or nothing.
“My bad,” I told him. “This will be the last time, for real, but I need you to throw me one more favor, man.”
“That’s gonna have to be one heck of a lifeline,” he said. “I have been explicitly banned from telling you anything about the date Rori is going on tonight.”
“Banned?”
“Banned. Prohibited. Forbidden, if you will.”
“That’s messed up.”
“I don’t disagree,” Kev said. “Which is why I will say this: I, meaning myself, and the woman I married, meaning my wife, will be on a dinner date tonight at eight, in the private area at Honeybee. We will be joined by a certain very good friend of hers, and a certain inexplicably appealing to women cornball-ass teammate of mine that I would rather not spend any time off the court with. But this is the situation a certain football player has put me in.”
“What?” I asked, frowning. “What are you talking about?”
Kev huffed. “I ain’t repeating none of that shit, man. Either you caught on or you didn’t, and I sure hope you did. ’Cause I’m gonna tell you this too; your situation is dire. There was a lot of back and forth out of my wife’s mouth over whether or not your ass was dumb. I defended you exactly once. Nah, Tatum ain’t dumb, he was just trying to blah blah blah. And what I got back was, Well, why the fuck is he acting dumb, doing dumb shit?’ So, man, actually, I gotta ask: are you dumb?”
I sucked my teeth. “No, I’m not fucking dumb.”
“Well then, alright, that’s settled. See you tonight.”
I heard a little chime and then looked at my phone again, and sure enough, the call had ended.
I frowned again, wondering what the hell had just happened, but because I, indeed, was not dumb. I only had to think back over what Kevion had said for a moment before I realized what he had been communicating to me.
He and Sierra were gonna be on a double date with Rori and some unknown Blackwood Brawler .
And me, apparently.
Cause they had me fucked up.
I should have driven.
If I had, I wouldn’t have been at the mercy of the airline for a last-minute flight that was first delayed for a couple hours, then sat on the tarmac for damn near an extra two hours before actually taking off.
By the time I made it to Blackwood, it was damn near ten at night, and it took another hour to get off the plane and into a car. With dinner at eight, I really was not trying to hear that there was any date left for me to interrupt.
And yet, there was, as confirmed by Kev.
At this point, I felt like the date had me fucked up.
Because what do you mean you’re skinning and grinning in the face of a woman I was skinning and grinning in the face of a week ago?
Was this how Monty felt?
’Cause if so goddamn, no wonder he wanted my head.
The Wi-Fi hadn’t been working on the plane, so I’d touched down to a barrage of texts from Kevion wondering where the hell I was and updating me on where they were.