Lowell, the Titans’ president of basketball operations, is a tough customer. He’ll play hard ball because Zo’s numbers are down, and it’s bad timing. Right at the end of the regular season, going into post, his performance started suffering, but Zo has almost a decade of outstanding performance in this league. He’s eligible for a supermax contract, the designated veteran player extension, which can be up to thirty-five percent of a team’s cap space but can only be given by the team that drafted the player. He’s earned it, and I plan to get it for him.

“Hey.” I put my dryer on the counter and turn to face the shower, propping my butt against the counter and meeting the concern I anticipated in his eyes. “You know I got you.”

“En las buenas,” he says, our private message of loyalty through the years.

Through thick.

“En las malas,” I reply.

Through thin.

I’m reassured by the warm feeling of contentment his smile brings. The trepidation I haven’t been able to shake, my fear that our relationship will somehow ruin our friendship is unfounded. We’ve been too close for too long.

En las buenas y en las malas.

What could possibly come between us?

11

Jared

“Do not live someone else's life and someone else's idea of what womanhood is. Womanhood is you."

-Viola Davis, Oscar-Winning Actress

I don’t believe in fate.

“The universe” is not some omnipotent force moving us around like chess pieces, manipulating us or protecting us or colliding us. Work hard, good things happen.

Or not.

It’s life. A cosmic crapshoot in which odds don’t mean shit. I’m more fatalism, less fate. With that said, I do believe circumstances happen in a certain order at a certain time. And for a certain reason. That does sound suspiciously like fate, but I dwell less on the why things happen and more on how I should respond when they do.

I sense storms coming, things shifting in the air. That helps me plan. It’s helped me in every area of my life, especially the market. I have my own money, nothing compared to Bent’s generational coffers. His mother traces her roots back to the Mayflower. Several times Bent has tipped me off, gotten me in on the ground floor of something big, but it’s my gut that tells me when to play. An intuition. I just know.

I’ve seen Banner Morales more in the last two weeks than I have in the last ten years, and I “just know” something’s shifting. When we literally ran into each other at the gym, the scent of those dryer sheets transported me back to late nights in Sudz. Before we worked for rival firms. Before Prescott’s stupid prank broke the fragile connection between us. Back to a time of discovery. Deciding what I felt for her. Figuring out how she felt about me when all I had to go on were the shifting winds.

Something’s shifting.

I stand outside the ballroom where Banner’s doing her talk on women in sports management. I finished my presentation for this convention in Denver a little early and found my feet bringing me here. I’m not a woman in sports management. I could lie to myself and say I’m coming to meet Iris. We’d arranged to connect after our respective sessions. She’s in here. Knowing her hero worship for Banner, she’s in the front row capturing every word as soon as it leaves Banner’s mouth.

I may be a ruthless son of a bitch, but I don’t lie. Especially not to myself.

I’m not here for Iris. I’m here for Banner.

I push the door open, hoping I can, even as the only male in the room—and six-three to boot—go unnoticed. I stand at the very back, pressed into a corner. At some point there was probably standing room only in here, but they’ve all sat down in seats and on the floor. There’s a growing number of women in sports management, and they all seem to be squeezed into Banner’s session.

“I’m not here to talk to you about sports,” Banner says from the small stage. “We all specialize in various sports or fields. Some are agents. Some are in sports broadcasting. Some marketing. We could be here all day talking about the ways we’re different in our focus.”

She takes a sip from a nearby water bottle and spreads a smile around the room.

“I’m here to talk about how we are the same. Our common challenges and possibilities,” Banner says. “For example, women only make eighty cents on the dollar to what men make. That’s white women. Black women, not so fast. You’re only at sixty-three cents on the dollar. And my Latina sisters, lo siento. We average only fifty-four percent of every dollar men make. “

Banner pauses, giving the discouraging numbers space to sink in. I haven’t seen her hair down much in the past, but it’s loose around her shoulders today, thick and dark and shiny. She wears a narrow black leather skirt and a red silk blouse. The front view shows a breakneck curve from waist to hip. She turns to the side, and I see the diabolical dip from back to ass. Her only accessories are simple gold earrings and her confidence, which drapes her from head to toe.

Damn, she looks good. Like the girl I knew, the one I saw even back then. The girl I saw inside has taken over the outside, too. Banner slowly scans the crowd from left to right. It feels like she’s meeting every eye even though that’s impossible. Dr. Albright taught us that trick in our Debate & Public Speaking class.

Convince me.

Our old professor’s mantra pops in my head, and, inevitably, I recall the night I asked Banner to convince me she was a good kisser. It was too much at first, that kiss. I was too much. Too hungry and deprived after a semester wanting something I knew would be devastatingly sweet.

And it was. Sweeter, better than I thought it would be. She was better. She was sweeter. I literally stole her breath with that kiss.

She stole mine, too.

“The truth is in the numbers,” Banner continues. “We make less than men do, but the future isn’t in the numbers. What’s true today won’t be in a hundred years. In ten years. It was held as fact that the Earth was flat until it was proven otherwise. It was true that women couldn’t vote a hundred years ago. But the Earth is round and now we vote. Now we speak and are heard. We re-made truth. We re-shaped fact.”

Banner is lit from the inside by her passion, and her convictions stand her up straight and proud.

“Our field is male-dominated,” she says. “We are a minority, some of us a few times over, but we have a voice. You have your talent. You have determination. I was doubted in every boardroom I walked into, but I never doubted myself because I knew what I was capable of. Do you know what you’re capable of? Because if you don’t, they’ll never know either. You are your greatest natural resource and don’t let anyone strip you of that or tell you it’s not enough. We are making the future, defying the odds just being in this room right now.”

Banner swings a look over the crowd.

“I don’t give a damn about odds,” she says. “Odds don’t tell me what I can’t do. Odds just tell me how hard I’ll have to work to get what I want. Don’t allow anyone to make you feel less.”

A wry smile quirks the mouth that so captivated me ten years ago.

“Let me get even more personal for a minute.” She swallows, glances at the floor and then back up to meet the crowd’s attentiveness head-on. “I’ve always struggled with my weight. For most of my life I compared myself to my sister, who was naturally slim. I compared myself to women in magazines, who looked nothing like me. I let men determine how I felt about my body based on how they saw me. I allowed those things to make me feel smaller than I was. Not on the outside, on the inside. On the inside I was a highly intelligent woman who spoke several languages, was the first in my family to go to college, and won full scholarships to the schools of my choice, but I hid that girl under bulky clothes.”

Banner disabuses me of the notion that I’ve gone undetected when she looks directly at me, finds me in the very back.

“I hid her in the dark,” she says more softly, holding my stare for a few seconds before moving past me, but even when she looks away, I feel seared. Like in one glance and with a few words she’s burned years away. She takes us back to a darkened laundromat. The bright swirl of whites flashing in the washing machine. The toss and slap of darks in the dryer. The thump-thump of my heart while I waited to kiss her again.

“I don’t hide anymore,” Banner continues. “Not in the dark. Not under bulky clothes. Not even behind my intelligence, which I sometimes used as a shield to keep people out. Whether I’m five pounds up or ten pounds down, I’m done hiding. I am done letting my waistline and other people define me.”

She shares her husky laugh with the crowd.

“Culture twists what it is to even be a feminist, tries to sort us into categories and force us to choose between being a good mother and being a successful businesswoman. I unabashedly want to rule every boardroom room I step into, and I unashamedly want at least four kids.”

She smiles and shrugs.

“What can I say? I’m Catholic.”

She pauses for her audience to laugh, wearing a small grin while she waits.

“What I’m saying is be unafraid to want it all and be disciplined enough to work hard to get it.” Her smile fades, replaced by a steely determination that radiates from her inside and glows out. “We can be fierce and feminine. Tenderhearted and tough as nails. Life is seldom binary. And I’ve talked a lot about patriarchy and living, working in a male-dominated culture, but men are not our enemies. Any force that would diminish us, pigeonhole us, would make us one thing instead of all that we are, that’s the enemy . . . even if it’s inside of you.

“There are some real jerks out there, especially in the locker rooms and boardrooms we frequent, but there are good men, too. I have good men in my life. My father, who’s been faithful to my mother for forty years. My boyfriend is a good man. Sometimes they feel more like exceptions than the rule, but they’re out there.”

Her expression softens and her smile grows wide.