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PLAYING DIRTY

One

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Summer found out she was trending the same way she found out she was pregnant.

Phone in her hand. Heart in her stomach. The world spinning a little too fast for her body to catch up with.

She was sitting on the side of her bed in nothing but one of Mowry’s old practice tees and a pair of leggings she’d been wearing for two days, hair pulled up in a silk scarf, breast milk soaking through the front of the shirt because Island had just unlatched and started snoring before Summer could even burp her. Her ankles were swollen. Her back was on fire. She hadn’t eaten since yesterday afternoon, and there was a cold Crumbl cookie on the nightstand that she’d been trying to get to for six hours.

Then her phone buzzed.

Then it buzzed again.

Then it didn’t stop.

She picked it up frowning, thinking maybe her mama was on one again, talking about how Brooklyn wasn’t safe and Atlanta wasn’t safe and the whole world wasn’t safe and the baby needed to be in church.

It wasn’t her mama.

It was a screenshot.

Sent by her cousin Nyla, with no caption. Just three emojis.

👀👀👀

Summer’s thumb hovered.

She already knew.

Before she even opened it. Before her brain caught up to her chest. Before her milk let down again from the stress, soaking the shirt darker. She knew. Because that’s how it always went with her. The universe didn’t warn Summer. It just showed up at her door with a U-Haul and started moving in.

She tapped the message.

And there she was.

Or, more accurately…there he was.

Maurice Johnson. Six-foot-five. Two hundred and twenty pounds of veteran-player calm. Walking out of her apartment building at 6:47 in the morning. Bass Pro hat low over his eyes. White tee. Gray sweats. Island’s pink car seat hanging from his left hand like it weighed nothing. A diaper bag. Her diaper bag, the cream-colored Fendi her sister had given her for the baby shower, slung over his shoulder. Coffee from the bodega on the corner in his right hand.

And the worst part?

The absolute worst part?

He looked good.

Not like he was sneaking. Not like he was hiding. Not like he was a man caught somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be.

He looked like a daddy.

Walking out the door, with his baby, to start the day.

Summer’s mouth went dry.

She scrolled.

The post had been up for forty-six minutes.

It had two hundred and thirty thousand likes.

The caption underneath read:

Wait… ain’t that Zion Cross baby mama???? Walking out her crib with MAURICE JOHNSON?? At SEVEN IN THE MORNING?? With the BABY???? Y’all this team finna FALL APART 😭😭😭

The comments were a war zone.

Nah cause she ain’t waste no time

Sis ate. She ate fr

Zion about to lose his shit. he bout to crash out on live

Y’all leave her alone he was cheating on her the WHOLE pregnancy

Maurice fine asf tho I’d let him take my baby anywhere

Imagine your baby mama and your teammate. couldn’t be me

They been smashing the WHOLE season trust me

Summer set the phone down face-up on the comforter.

Then face-down.

Then back face-up.

Then she got up, walked to the bathroom, and threw up the half of the Crumbl cookie she had actually managed to eat last night.

When she stood up at the sink to rinse her mouth, she caught her reflection in the mirror.

Twenty-three years old.

Eyes still smudged with yesterday’s makeup. Hair in a scarf. Milk-stained shirt. The little C-section pouch she was still hating herself for. Cheeks fuller than they used to be. Lips chapped. A baby crying softly in the next room because the sound of Summer running to the bathroom had stirred her.

She stared at herself for a long second.

Then she said, out loud, to no one, 

“Lord. I am too tired for this.”

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It wasn’t even like that.

The way the internet was portraying it. 

That was the part that was about to kill her.

Mowry came over the night before because she called him at 11:42 p.m. crying.

Not regular crying. Not pretty crying. The ugly, choking, can’t-breathe kind of crying that comes out of you when your body is two months postpartum and your hormones are still trying to murder you and your baby has been screaming for ninety straight minutes and you don’t know if she’s hungry or gassy or sick or possessed and you just buried your last clean pacifier under a pile of laundry you don’t have the energy to do.

She hadn’t meant to call him.

She’d meant to call Nyla. But Nyla had been ignoring calls since she got that little boyfriend with the dreads, and Summer’s mama was in Brooklyn, and her sister was at work, and Zion…

Zion was on Live with two girls in Miami.

Summer had checked. Twice.

So her thumb just slid down to M.

And M wasn’t Mama, because she had her mama saved as Mommy ❤️.

M was Mowry.

He picked up on the second ring.

She heard him sit up. She heard him say her name. Soft, the way he said it, like a question and a promise at the same time. 

Summer? 

And she opened her mouth to apologize, to say never mind, I’m okay, I shouldn’t have called, and instead what came out was a sob so loud Island stopped crying for a half a second to listen.

“I’m on my way.”

That was all he said.

He didn’t ask what was wrong. He didn’t make her explain. He didn’t make her perform a reason for needing somebody.

He just got dressed and drove the twenty-six minutes from his condo in Buckhead to her apartment in Vinings and let himself in with the spare key she had given him three weeks ago, just in case, and which she had been pretending wasn’t a big deal ever since.

He came in quiet.

He didn’t turn on the big light.

He walked into the living room where she was sitting on the floor in her bra and a pair of biker shorts, Island screaming on her chest, the bassinet on its side because Summer had pushed it in frustration an hour ago and hadn’t had the energy to pick it back up.

Mowry didn’t say anything.

He just walked over, took Island out of her arms…gently, and held her up against his shoulder. Big hand spread across her tiny back. He started bouncing. That slow, deep, two-step bounce that nobody teaches you, that you only know if your mama taught you, or if you’ve held a lot of babies, or if God just put the rhythm in you.

Island stopped crying in forty seconds.

Forty seconds.

After ninety minutes.

Summer didn’t even cry harder. She got quiet. The kind of quiet that’s worse than crying. She just sat there on the floor in her bra and stared at this six foot five man holding her two month old daughter against his neck, swaying like he had nowhere on Earth to be, and she thought…

Why couldn’t her daddy do this?

Mowry looked down at her.

“Go shower.” he said. Calm. No pity in his voice. That was the thing about Mowry. There was never any pity. “I got her.”

“She just ate like an hour ago, she’s probably gas—”

“Summer.”

She looked up.

“Go shower.”

She went and showered.

She cried in the shower for fifteen minutes. Then she got out, put lotion on, put a clean shirt on. One of his, because all of hers smelled like spit-up and she didn’t have it in her to do laundry and walked back into the living room expecting to find Island fussy again.

Island was asleep.

On Mowry’s chest.

He was on the couch with his shoes off, one big hand still spread across the baby’s back, the television on mute, watching highlights from the Lakers game he had missed because he was driving to her apartment. 

His Bass Pro hat was on the coffee table. His chain was off, set down next to it, because he knew it would scratch the baby’s cheek.

He looked up at Summer when she walked in.

She stopped in the doorway.

She didn’t know what her face was doing.

He said, “C’mere.”

That’s all.

C’mere.

She came.

She curled up on the couch next to him, not touching him, leaving a respectful six inches of space because she was Summer Moore and she had a man and she wasn’t about to be one of those bitches, the kind who let some other nigga slide in two months postpartum just because he was kind to her one time.

Mowry didn’t move closer.

He just shifted Island a little, freeing up his arm, and laid it across the back of the couch behind Summer’s head. Not touching her. Just there. Like permission to lean if she needed to.

She didn’t lean.

But she fell asleep there.

Twenty minutes later her head was on his shoulder anyway, and her hand was on Island’s foot, and Mowry was awake the whole night, holding the both of them, watching the muted television and not moving a single muscle so as not to wake them.

That was what had happened.

That.

Not the thing in the photo.

Not whatever the internet was painting it as.

He had slept upright on her couch like a bodyguard, gotten up at 6 a.m. when the baby started fussing, made Island a bottle from the fridge because Summer had pumped before bed, fed her, changed her, put her in the car seat because Summer had a 9:30 appointment at the pediatrician that Mowry knew about because she had told him a week ago in a passing sentence and he had remembered. He was going to drive Island to the bodega with him so Summer could sleep one more hour. He was going to bring back coffee. He was going to bring back a sausage egg and cheese because he had noticed last week that she ate them when she was tired.

That was all.

That was the whole crime.

A man being decent.

And the internet had taken that and turned it into a scandal.

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Summer rinsed her mouth.

Walked back to the bedroom.

Picked up her phone.

She had forty-seven missed calls.

Two were from Mowry. The rest were from people whose names she barely remembered. Old friends from high school suddenly checking on her, cousins from her daddy’s side she hadn’t talked to since the funeral, a girl named Tasha who used to bully her in eighth grade now sending a long voice note that started with Sis I just want you to know I been rooting for you.

There was a single text from Zion.

It said: call me. now.

The way he texted when he was about to lose it.

Summer looked at the message for a long time.

Then she put the phone facedown on the nightstand, walked over to the bassinet, and picked up her daughter. Island stretched in her arms, made that little baby-frog motion with her legs, opened her eyes for half a second, looked at her mama, and went back to sleep.

Summer pressed her face into the top of the baby’s head.

Island smelled like lavender lotion and milk and that powdery newborn smell that was already starting to fade, the one all the books said you should bottle it because by month four it was gone forever.

Summer breathed her in.

“It’s me and you, ladybug.” she whispered. “It’s always been me and you.”

The phone buzzed on the nightstand.

She didn’t look.

It buzzed again.

She didn’t look.

It buzzed again, and this time the screen lit up bright enough that the name flashed against the dark wood, and Summer caught it out the corner of her eye without meaning to.

Mowry 🤎

Her heart did something she didn’t have permission for.

She let it ring three times before she picked it up.

“Hello?”

“You seen it?”

His voice was the same as always. Low. Even. Not panicked. Mowry never panicked. That was one of the first things she had noticed about him. The way nothing seemed to make this man’s heart rate go up, ever, like the universe had given him an extra layer of calm at birth as a gift to everyone who would ever need to lean on him.

“Yeah” she said. “I seen it.”

A pause.

“You alright?”

She laughed. It came out broken in the middle. “No.”

“Where’s the baby?”

“Sleep. On my chest.”

“Aight.” Another pause. She heard him take a breath in. “Listen. I’m not gon’ say a word in public. I’m not finna address it. They wanna spin it, let ’em spin it. But I need you to know somethin’.”

“What?”

“I ain’t ashamed of nothin’ that picture showed.”

Summer closed her eyes.

She felt her milk let down again. Just at the sound of his voice.

She didn’t say anything for a long time.

“You there?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“You good?”

“Mowry —” Her voice cracked. She hated that it cracked. She had not given anybody permission to crack her voice. “You know I just got out of something. You know what he did to me. I can’t — I’m not in a place where —”

“I ain’t ask you for nothin’.”

She blinked.

“I ain’t ask you for nothin’, Summer. You hearin’ me? I came over last night ’cause you was cryin’. I held the baby ’cause she was cryin’. I left this mornin’ with her ’cause you was sleep and that doctor appointment was in three hours and you needed the rest. That’s it. I ain’t tryna be your man. I ain’t tryna replace nobody. I’m just tryna be useful to you, ’cause Lord knows that nigga ain’t been.”

Summer pressed her hand against her mouth.

“And as far as that picture,” he went on, “they ain’t catch nothin’ I’m finna lie about. So they can post whatever they wanna post. Long as you and that baby straight, it ain’t gon’ move me.”

She didn’t answer.

She couldn’t.

He waited.

Then he said, softer, “You want me to come back over?”

“Mowry —”

“Just to sit. You don’t gotta entertain me. I’ll bring food. You can sleep.”

She didn’t say yes.

She didn’t say no.

She said, “He texted me.”

Silence.

Then,”What he say?”

“Call me. Now.”

The silence on Mowry’s end got a little heavier.

“You gon’ call him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Aight.”

“Mowry?”

“Yeah.”

“What if he tries to take her?”

She heard him breathe out, long and slow.

“He ain’t takin’ that baby nowhere.” Mowry said.

It wasn’t a brag.

It wasn’t a threat.

It was just a sentence. A fact. Stated calmly. By a man who had never in his life needed to raise his voice in order to be believed.

Summer wiped her face.

“Okay.” she said.

“Okay?”

“Come over.”

“Aight.” She heard him grab his keys. “I’ll be there in thirty. You want anything from the spot on Howell Mill?”

“Sausage egg and cheese.”

“I know.”

He hung up.

Summer stood in the middle of her bedroom holding her sleeping baby and her phone. She stared at the ceiling for a full minute.

But she was smiling a little bit, this time.

Just a little bit.

She didn’t even realize it.

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Twenty-three miles away, in the visitors’ locker room at the practice facility off Northside Drive, Zion Cross was about to commit a felony.

He had just walked in. Bag still on his shoulder. AirPods still in. He was talking to his trainer about his hamstring — pulling it light yesterday in shootaround, nothing serious — when his phone went off.

Then went off again.

Then his trainer’s phone went off.

Then Coach’s phone went off, down the hall, and they could hear it from the locker room.

Zion frowned.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket.

It was his agent. Then his publicist. Then his mama. Then his ex-girlfriend Trinity who he hadn’t spoken to in eight months. Then a group chat from his cousins back home in Houston, blowing up so fast the notifications were stacking on top of themselves like Tetris pieces.

He opened the group chat first.

The first thing he saw was the photo.

He stopped breathing for a second.

Not for long. Just long enough that the trainer noticed, looked at him, said, “You aight, Z?”

Zion didn’t answer.

He was staring at the picture.

At his daughter’s car seat. The pink one he had bought, the Nuna one, the one that cost twelve hundred dollars and that he had picked out himself in the store with Summer when she was seven months pregnant and they had still been pretending to be a family. It was hanging from another man’s hand.

He stared at his daughter’s diaper bag.

At his daughter.

Being carried out of his baby mama’s apartment.

By Maurice Johnson.

His teammate.

The veteran.

The one whose locker was four down from his.

The one who never said much. The one Zion had been low-key sizing up since draft night because of how the older players all respected him in a way they didn’t respect Zion, even with all Zion’s money and all Zion’s stats and all Zion’s followers.

That Maurice.

Walking out his baby mama’s crib at sunrise.

With a coffee in his hand.

Zion’s jaw locked.

His vision did this thing where the edges went a little gray.

He looked up.

The locker room had gone quiet.

Not all the way — guys were still moving, still putting on their sneakers, still bumping music low from somebody’s speaker in the corner — but quiet in the way a room goes quiet when everybody is pretending not to look at one specific person.

Zion turned slow.

He scanned the room.

He clocked Brent in the corner, head down, pretending to be on his phone. He clocked Marcus, pretending to tie a shoe that was already tied. He clocked the rookie, J-Rock, looking at him with his mouth slightly open like he had popcorn but didn’t know if he was allowed to laugh.

They had seen it.

Every single one of them.

Of course they had.

The whole world had seen it.

Zion’s hand tightened around the phone.

“Where Maurice at?” he said.

It wasn’t loud.

It wasn’t a question, either.

The trainer, a forty-something white dude named Greg who had been with the team for fifteen years and had seen everything. He went very still.

“Z,” Greg said, “let’s get you in the cold tub —”

“Where Maurice at?”

“He ain’t here yet.” Brent said, from the corner, eyes still on his phone. “He texted Coach. Said he had something to handle. Be in for film.”

Zion let out a short, ugly laugh.

“Something to handle.”

He turned back to his locker.

He stood there for a second.

He grabbed his bag.

“Z.” Greg’s voice was a warning now. “Z. Don’t.”

“Tell Coach I’m sick.”

“Z —”

“Tell. Coach. I’m. Sick.”

He walked out.

The locker room stayed silent until the door closed behind him. Then somebody, J-Rock, probably, who was twenty years old and had no sense yet had let out a low “oh my GOD” and the whole room broke into a wave of bro, bro, bro, BRO and shaking heads and Brent finally looking up from his phone and saying, “Y’all. He really finna pull up.”

“He really finna pull up.”

“Maurice ain’t even there, where he goin’?”

“Where you think?”

Brent met Marcus’s eyes across the room.

Marcus shook his head.

“Aw, hell.” Marcus said. “Somebody call Summer.”

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Summer’s phone was charging on the nightstand, face down, on Do Not Disturb.

Island was asleep on her chest.

The shower was running because Summer had left it running on hot for the steam, the way her grandma used to do when Summer was little and stressed, the way her grandma used to say let the bathroom be a sanctuary, baby, ain’t nobody allowed to bring no devilment in here.

There was a sausage egg and cheese on its way.

There was a man on his way.

A different man than the one she’d been crying over for nine months.

And outside her apartment building, in the parking lot, the security cameras would later catch a black Wraith pulling up at 8:12 a.m. The engine still running, headlights still on, driver’s-side door swinging open hard enough to bang against the SUV parked next to it.

Zion Cross got out.

He looked up at her window.

He didn’t ring the buzzer.

He just stood there.

Waiting.