Block Shot (Hoops #2)(71)

“Zo, lo siento mucho!”

I’m so sorry.

“Sorry?” His harsh laugh mangles the air. “You’re sorry?”

His face twists into a mask of his fury. With a roar, he grabs the snow globe and hurls it across the room. The heavy marble base dents the wall, and the dome shatters, an explosion of glass and liquid and snow splattering the surface. I flinch and draw in a sharp, shocked breath. I know Zo won’t hurt me, but it’s an act of violence, killing the tenderness that has existed between us for a decade.

No, Zo didn’t kill it. I did. With my selfishness. With my weakness.

“You fuck someone else,” he rasps, breathing heavily like his rage is wearing him out. “And you offer me an apology? You share your body, share your . . .”

His words falter, and there’s a question in his voice. In the tortured lines of his face. “Share your heart? Do you . . . you love this man, Banner?”

“No,” I say it even as my heart asks if I’m sure. Is love more powerful than the pull between Jared and me? The one that endured for years? Is it more real than what I feel when he’s near? When he’s inside me? Have I ever felt a more powerful emotion? “It was just once. A mistake . . . I knew it was wrong. It just happened.”

God, everything coming out of my mouth is a platitude, the pat phrases people reach for to excuse the inexcusable.

“It just happened?” he asks, his expression lit with outrage. “Do you know how much co?o I turn down? How the guys tease me for being faithful to one woman when I could have four every night? In every city? But I didn’t. I wouldn’t ever do that to you. To my best friend. To the woman I . . .”

He cuts himself off, biting back the word he’s said to me so many times.

“So do not tell me this just happens, Banner. It never happened to me.”

“I k-know,” I stutter, eyes so blurred with tears I can barely see him. “I promise I had never done anything like this before. I wouldn’t. You know that. You know me. I would never . . .”

Only I did. My voice trails away with that realization. There are no words I can say to make this better; to make it right. My inadequacy and shame meet his fury and disappointment head on, across the room. The only thing that could make this right, could make it better, is if it had never happened.

But it did.

“?Con quién?” Zo’s demand is a growl, his narrow-eyed stare promising retribution.

I was a fool not to have anticipated this, that he would want to know who. Of course, he does. They always do. I would want to know, but I can’t tell him. He and Jared move in the same circles. It will only make things more awkward. Worse.

“I . . . It’s not important who,” I say lamely, fixing my puffy-eyed stare on the hands twisting in my lap. “It was . . . someone from my past.”

“From your past?” A heavy frown hangs between his thick, dark brows. “What? From college? From business? I know all your friends. I know everything about you.”

A scowl and cynical twist of his lips mock me.

“At least I thought I did,” he says. “I didn’t know you were a cheat who could not be trusted.”

I don’t reply but take every word like a lash on my back, a verbal flogging tearing at my dignity and my pride.

“Fuck, Banner!” He detonates the expletive. Frustration tenses the powerful lines of his huge body. “You’ve ruined everything. My entire life is intertwined with yours.”

“I know.” I sniff and swipe at the tears leaking from the corners of my eyes.

“Your family is my family. Your career is my career.”

The emotion hardens like cement on his face.

“If I can’t trust you to keep your legs closed,” he says, deliberately coarse in a way he has never been with me, “I certainly can’t trust you with my career.”

I anticipated that, of course, but to hear him voice it . . . the dissolution of a years-long partnership breaks my heart. Not because I’ll lose his business, but because no one else will take better care of his career than I will. He won’t be in better hands. He can’t be. No one else will care about, not just the player or the bottom line, but about the man, the way I do.

He strides back to the door, grabs the bag he dropped what seems like hours ago but was only a few minutes, and turns to give me one more disparaging look.

“I’ll send for my things,” he spits. “And start looking for a new agent.”

“But your contract,” I protest. “I’m so close to getting you the supermax deal you deserve. If you’d let me—”

“You think I care about that when you’ve . . .” He shakes his head and adjusts the bag on his shoulder. “Once I put my career in the hands of an inexperienced girl who knew next to nothing, and I’ve made millions. I thought it was because you were special, but you’re not. So I’m sure someone else can do just as good.”

I nod, biting my lip to choke back another sob. Losing my best friend, the man who has been with me—and I have been with him—through ten years of triumph and pain and success and failure feels like I’m losing a part of me.

“Zo, you have to know I’m so very ashamed of myself,” I tell him, not bothering to dry the tears coursing down my cheeks.