bookandnovel Chapter 137: The Repost
Chapter 137: The Repost
The night they beat the Krakens, Ryan left earlier than usual.
He’d checked out midway through the third quarter—by then he’d put up a sixteen-and-ten double-double, the game was long out of reach, and Crawford had waved him to the bench. Darius, though, stayed in, played the whole third, and ran his line up to thirty-two points and ten assists, the team high. So tonight the postgame mics belonged to Darius, naturally enough.
Ryan was glad for the quiet. He showered, changed, and slipped out through the players’ tunnel while the reporters were still swarming Darius.
The cherry-red K3 was already waiting outside.
"That was quick," Chloe said through the window, smiling. "They didn’t want you for interviews?"
"Tonight’s Darius’s night." Ryan pulled the door open and dropped in. "Man dropped thirty-two. I’m not about to go steal his mic."
"Humble." Chloe pulled out into the street. "Come on, then. I’m starving."
The car turned into that little diner. The red vinyl of the booths was split at the seams. Ryan ordered a burger and fries; Chloe got a salad, no onions—she’d been here enough times now that she knew even this place’s menu by heart.
The fries came out, and Ryan popped one into his mouth, hissing at the heat. Chloe watched him with that look and couldn’t help laughing, pulled a napkin loose, and wiped the ketchup off the corner of his mouth.
"Like a little kid," she muttered.
"I won tonight." Ryan said it like it settled everything. "Win a game, you get to be a kid."
"Beating the Krakens counts?"
"A win’s a win."
She rolled her eyes but let it go. She knew the truth, anyway—the guy played it off, but he’d sit and stare at a box score for half an hour after a game.
Halfway through the meal, something occurred to her. She set down her fork, fished out her phone, scrolled for a second, and slid it across to him.
"Selena made it official. The new single’s locked in."
Ryan leaned in.
On the screen was a post Selena had put up—a short video, with a single line of caption:
"My new single Unstoppable drops Friday, April 11th, written and composed by Ryan Carter. Ten days to go—and I hope that when it lands, you’ll love it as much as I do. 🤍"
You could practically feel the excitement bleeding through the words.
Ryan tapped the video.
The intro started, and he paused.
An airy pad, a few clean-tone drum hits laid underneath, building layer by layer—it carried a real echo of how that song had opened in his memory. Whoever arranged it had clearly gotten to the bones of the thing. What they’d made shared the same soul as the original.
Then Selena’s voice came in.
"All smiles, I know what it takes to fool this town..."
Just that one line.
The video cut off there—fifteen seconds, all told.
Ryan stared at the dimmed screen for a long moment, saying nothing.
One line, and the way Selena handled it landed something in his chest. Breath into the open, chest voice on the close, the emotion pressed down low and then nudged, bit by bit, upward—that I’m-smiling-while-I-carry-all-of-it quality, she’d found it. She held her own against the original.
The MV itself, though—painfully bare. A dim room, a standing mic, a slash of side-light across her face. No set, no effects, fifteen unbroken seconds, one take. The kind of thing you could tell had no money behind it.
And yet that bare little fifteen seconds, Ryan watched three times over.
"She’s really good," he said, meaning it.
"Right?" Chloe’s eyes brightened—then dimmed a touch. "Such a waste."
Ryan scrolled down. Likes in the double digits. Reposts in the single digits. A scattering of comments.
Up most of the day, and that was all it had stirred.
He frowned. "Why’s it so dead? This song... shouldn’t be getting this."
"Because nobody’s pushing it." Chloe sighed, stirring the ice in her glass. "Her label didn’t lift a finger."
She paused, then walked him through it.
"Selena’s contract is up next month. The label gave up on re-signing her a while ago—you know how it goes, all the good material goes to the A-listers, and she gets the scraps. Unstoppable, she fought for inch by inch. Went back and forth with the label until they let her keep the master on this one single and put it out herself. The label’s name is on it as the distributor, sure—they take a cut of that. But promo budget? Not a cent."
She shook her head.
"And she’s a third-tier artist anyway. Barely has a following. The people who listen to her, nine out of ten don’t watch basketball—Ryan Carter, big famous you, drop your name in front of her fans and they’ve got no clue who you are."
Ryan’s brow creased. "Then how’d her label just let the song go? There’s no way they don’t know I wrote Remember the Name—blew up the way it did."
"Selena played it smart." Chloe smiled. "When she talked to the label, she just said she’d ’bought a song.’ Never mentioned she bought it from you. How would they know it had anything to do with you? Far as they’re concerned, it’s some artist with a month left on her deal, on her way out, no future, putting out a little single she cobbled together on the way out the door. Not worth a dime to invest in. So they did her the favor, signed off, let it go."
She stirred the ice, indignant on her friend’s behalf.
"If the label knew you wrote it, they’d have never let it slip through their fingers."
Ryan looked down at the lifeless post again.
Fifteen seconds, and he’d listened three times. A girl a month away from being shown the door, putting her last shot on this.
And the song was one he’d "written."
"I’ll repost it," Ryan said.
"Really?" Chloe’s eyes lit up.
Ryan grabbed another fry. "It’s a good song," he said. "It deserves to be heard."
He didn’t do it right away, though.
First he made a call.
Ryan’s social accounts were run by Eddie’s side—what went out, when it went out, what the captions said, all of it managed by the team. Endorsements, appearances, official posts, every last detail; Eddie had never once let any of it slide. A pro athlete’s account got every move magnified, and Eddie had drilled it into him more than once: don’t go posting things yourself.
The phone rang twice before it picked up.
"Eddie, I want to repost something off my account. The teaser for Selena’s new song."
"Oh? It’s dropping?" Eddie’s voice warmed right up. "When?"
"April eleventh."
"Then we’ve gotta give it a hand." Eddie was all-in, easy about it. "You want, you can just leave the whole thing to me—"
Ryan smiled. He knew why Eddie was so keen on it. Unstoppable was a deal Eddie had personally negotiated, with songwriting royalties held back in their favor—every bit the song climbed, Ryan and Eddie both rode up with it. A whole different story from Remember the Name, the one Ryan had undersold on his own and gone around Eddie to sell.
But more than that, Ryan knew this was just how the man worked. Always this thorough.
"Nah," Ryan said. "I’ll do this one myself. It’s a one-liner."
"Alright." Eddie didn’t push. "Go ahead and post it, then."
Ryan hung up and opened his account.
He thought for a beat, then typed out a line and attached Selena’s teaser:
"New song from my friend @SelenaHartley, dropping April 11th. The words and music are something I messed around with—and she sings it way better than I wrote it. Go give it a listen when it’s out. 🎧"
His thumb hovered a second. Send.
Chloe leaned over to read it and snorted. "’Messed around with’? So humble."
"It’s the truth." Ryan set the phone face-down and grabbed another fry. "Sink or swim—that’s up to the heavens now."
Meanwhile, in Nova City, K-Vibe was sunk into the couch in his home studio, something sitting heavy on his mind.
Remember the Name had been out a month and was still parked at number one across the charts—but the steam was clearly bleeding off. It had never been the kind of once-in-a-generation monster that holds the top spot all year, and the new releases climbing up behind it were getting fiercer by the week. That number-two track especially—at this rate, the crown was probably changing hands next week.
He wasn’t ready to give it up. That crown—he wanted to keep wearing it himself. And he happened to be holding an ace: Who Let the Dogs Out. Get it out the door before Remember the Name slid off the top, one track right behind the other, and the number one stayed right here, in K-Vibe’s hands—a seamless handoff, nobody able to wrestle it away.
So he had to move fast—and he had to get out ahead of Selena’s Unstoppable, too. Both songs were Ryan’s work, and Ryan had told him this one might hit even bigger than Remember the Name. If Selena dropped first and got her claim on the charts in ahead of him, then when his own track came out it’d already be standing a head shorter—half the heat that should have been his, siphoned clean away.
But of all the rotten luck, nothing was going right.
The arrangement had come back three times and still wasn’t locked. His mix engineer was stuck—the rough cut he’d sent over yesterday had the low end smeared into mud, and K-Vibe had frowned through it and bounced it back to redo. Mastering was still sitting in a queue, its turn nowhere close. Every last piece was running half a beat behind where he needed it.
He was waiting on his mixer to get back to him, thumbing idly through his phone—
Ryan Carter posted a new update.
K-Vibe’s eyes flicked up. The kid’s account was usually nothing but team-posted endorsements and the official stuff—him speaking up himself was rare.
He tapped in, and his stomach dropped a little.
"New song from my friend @SelenaHartley, dropping April 11th... the words and music are something I messed around with... go give it a listen."
K-Vibe stared at the screen, frozen for a beat.
April eleventh. Ten days out.
He ran the math fast in his head, then let out a bitter laugh. Ten days—there was no way in hell his own track was getting finished in ten days.
So in the end, not only had he failed to beat Selena to the punch—over on her side, it was Ryan himself stepping in, reposting, driving traffic her way.
He muttered, sour, to no one: "...Beat to it again."
The more he chewed on it, the more it burned—and the funnier it got. Remember the Name—whose was that? His! When that one dropped, he’d been sitting there waiting, hoping Ryan might toss out a word on his account, give it a little push—and the kid hadn’t said a damn thing. Not half a sentence to help him out.
But for Selena, he’s reposting like it’s his job?
"Alright, Ryan," he grumbled at the empty studio. "Playing favorites, I see."
Gripe as he might, he still went ahead and tapped open the teaser under Ryan’s repost, and let those fifteen seconds play.
The intro. One line.
In this business, the ear doesn’t lie.
Just that one line—plain, an even start, nothing flashy—and K-Vibe sat bolt upright, his back coming off the couch.
The tone was clean. The breath control was unreal. That faint, held-back restraint between the words—the kind of restraint only a real voice can keep a lid on. And worse: when she sang those two words, All smiles, you could hear, plain as day, something laid underneath the smile—a little fatigue, a little stubborn refusal to go down, and something else he couldn’t name that brushed straight across some spot in his chest.
One line. A plain, even, undeveloped opening line.
And she already had you in the palm of her hand.
K-Vibe reached out and hit pause. The studio went so quiet he could hear himself breathe. He sat there, didn’t move for a long while.
Fifteen-plus years in this game, thousands of demos under his belt—the ones that blew up, the ones that sank without a trace, he’d seen it all. But being pinned in place like this, by a single line—a line that hadn’t even reached the chorus yet—it had been a long, long time.
And just like that, he understood the weight of what Ryan had said.
This girl’s voice had been buried too long.
How hard the real bones of the song were, he hadn’t even heard enough to know. But it was because he hadn’t heard enough that the thing in his chest—itching, burning—wouldn’t quit. He could almost already see it: come the eleventh, the second those fifteen seconds became a full three minutes, the wave it was going to throw.
He glanced down once more.
Thank god. Thank god his own track wasn’t out yet.
Because if it collided with this thing right now, it’d get slapped clean off the charts the moment it dropped.
And under Ryan’s repost—
That comment section was already starting to come alive.