by Maria Benson
Even though I had trashed his apartment a year earlier upon learning that he was seeing Nadine Prosser, the test-tube CNN beauty he had decided to marry instead of me, Ian sought me out amidst crisis. “It’s hurt not having you in my life,” he had said as we sat in a limo parked down the street from my building. “I’m not asking for anything, Aimee, but the joy of conversation with you. We don’t have to see each other again, but c-can we talk every couple of weeks?” My heart had raced at the scared look in Ian’s eyes, the uncharacteristic way in which he could barely make eye contact. “I’m just looking for people who can encourage me, just listen to me ramble a bit. Is that okay?”
The fact was, the year I had spent dulling the pain of my broken heart with random guys had failed to shake my feelings for Ian. That was all the more reason I should have run the other way, but my altruistic side granted Ian’s request with no expectation we would ever again be more than friends. That side of me was rewarded by the way that I seemed to play some small but measurable role in Ian’s ability to attack his cancer with determination and grit. Unfortunately, I hadn’t remained true to Aimee the Altruist once Ian’s health returned.
“You were such a key part of my recovery, Aimee,” Ian said. “I’ll never run Nadine down in front of you, you know that, but you gave me so much more emotionally, even over the phone. Comfort and inspiration that Nadine just couldn’t give while adjusting to motherhood.”
I laid my head against his chest again. The muckraking sports offshoot sites and blogs had long spread gossip about Nadine’s postpartum depression and inability to adjust to life as “The First Lady” of Ian’s league and stay-at-home mom. In her decade-long career at CNN, Nadine had been a capable, relatively intelligent (and, of course, breathtakingly beautiful) presence. As Ian’s wife, the multiplication of her wealth came at the apparent price of her ability to control her own destiny. It was enough to make me appreciate life as the other woman.
Staring up into Ian’s eyes, I was surprised to find myself mourning for his and Nadine’s marriage. They were a textbook case of a couple who had grown apart–Nadine due to the postpartum and loss of her career, Ian due to the transformative experience of beating cancer. At this point, the glue keeping them together was equal parts pride and parental obligation.
Ian’s eyes searched my face like a strobe light. “What are you thinking?”
I felt my body begin a slow recline, my temperature rising with each passing second. God, I wanted him inside me. “I don’t want to think anymore.”
He leaned over me, prompting me to lie back with both arms around his shoulders. “Me neither.”
There it was. The heat between us obliterated the moment of sympathy I had felt toward Nadine, setting the mood for what we both knew was coming. I had promised myself today’s visit would not end this way, but Ian’s clean, woodsy smell and the sinewy feel of his toned biceps through his shirt reminded me I had been kidding myself. No, this was exactly what Todd, Michael and my girlfriends would have predicted, but frankly it was none of their business.
Mouths pressed tightly together, tongues waged in erotic battle, we devoured each other for what felt like hours before Ian stripped me down to my panties. As words melted away, I climbed atop him and let him bury his face in my breasts and neck. As he sucked and licked me into submission, he slipped a hand into my panties and found my clit, expertly working that along with my nipples. The rumble of passion overtook me, banishing thoughts of Todd, Michael, and the troubles awaiting me on the other side of Ian’s well-secured office doors. By the time Ian slid my panties off and planted me atop his beautiful, raging cock, one face danced quickly across my mind, and my unspoken words to her came quick and fast. Sorry Nadine, he was mine first.
CHAPTER 10
Michael
I sat at a table in the main dining area of Brody and Tisha’s restaurant, a cedar-scented, high-ceilinged room still reeking of onion rings, chicken wings and beer suds. Surrounded by walls full of Chicago-area sports paraphernalia and photos of Brody and Tisha with celebs ranging from Derrick Rose to the late great Harry Caray, I hoisted a final beer toward my table-mates, Scott Dexter and Bobby Rashidi. “I appreciate your time, guys.”
“It’s your world,” Scott said, glancing his bottle against mine. “We just live in it.” He complimented my new pinstriped blazer, asked me where I had copped it. “So, you really want to follow through with learning the tricks of the trade?”
I sat up in my seat a bit, communicating resolve. “No doubt. It’s just a question of who’s got the best advice, I guess.” I reflected on the guys who’d been here with us earlier before being summoned by suspicious wives, jealous girlfriends, mistresses and early-evening booty calls.
Their number included sharp-dressed men; movie-star-good-looking guys who had hit the same lottery as the Rob Lowes, Chris Hemsworths and Will Smiths of the world; big-time jocks whose athletic pasts would pay off for a lifetime; and jug-eared, mashed-nose, or chubby men compensating with loads of charisma and unpredictable senses of humor. They all had one thing in common: more women than they could handle.
“Mikey, you gotta help a brother out here.” His head shaved bald and his face covered by long sideburns and a bushy goatee, Bobby had been the most intimidating-looking guy here tonight. He reminded me of the newly fit rapper Rick Ross reincarnated as a muscular Sindhi Hindu Indian: oversized jean jacket, loose-fitting, rumpled jeans exposing a large sheath of his plaid boxer shorts, and a pair of loudly laced Nike Kobe 9 Elites.
Most people I’ve known through the years have either loved Bobby or hated him, viewing him either as a “Wannabe” or as a homeboy who keeps it real. Never mind all that, though: women almost unanimously loved him. Judging by the number of multi-ethnic children whose mothers had taken him to court through the years, Bobby’s appeal to the ladies was unquestioned.
“You’ve been too good a friend to me over the years,” he said, pounding my back. “I know we ain’t talked that often since college, but you pulled my ass through one class after another, man. So tell me: if you want more ass from the ladies, why not just get on Tinder?”
I failed to hide a frown. “This isn’t about just grabbing the nearest warm body, Bobby. I want what you guys have–what all the guys who were here tonight have. When you want a specific woman, you have the moves to get with her.”
“Let me stipulate a little something here.” Scott, my former best friend from high school days, had a carefully managed ego that matched his status as CEO and founder of Insight Health, a small but highly profitable firm specializing in medical record software. When he stacked his first million, around the time I was graduating from American U., he became a little hard to take. We’d interacted just enough the past year, though, for me to confirm that he was no longer such an ass. I appreciated his taking the time to join tonight’s festivities.
Playing with his fat-knot designer tie, Scott chuckled. “I, for one, am so happy that this little party was not what I feared.”
My eyes narrowed. “Which was what, exactly?”
“Oh, I was sure you were pushing one of those damn network marketing pyramid schemes. I am not buying phone service, utilities, protein powder, or panties from you or anybody.”
“Well, now you can relax.”
Scott grinned, signaled for another beer. “Yeah, except now I have to help goody-two-shoes Mike put the moves on someone. Honestly, I thought you were too good to be bothered with all that.”
I turned a touch crimson at his accusation. When he and I first met freshman year at Kenwood, Scott was a short, skinny baby-face who dressed like a future computer hacker. He was as inept as me in the glare of a beautiful girl–sweaty-palmed, shaky-voiced, knock-kneed.
Scott, however, had one advantage over most of us, and he rode it hard. A stubbornly proud Michael Jackson fan, even though the guy was known more as a pervert than The King of Pop by the time we hit adolescence, Scott was the rare white kid who had moves on the dance fl
oor. After he’d endured a year or two of ridicule for his comfort mimicking M.J., Usher and his doppelganger Justin Timberlake, it seemed like a switch flipped with the teen girls of upper-middle-class South Side Chicago. Instead of sitting back and snickering as he hit the dance floor, they would sidle alongside him and dance for a bit. Most of them wouldn’t kiss him, mind you, but they stopped laughing.
While Scott took advantage of this sliver of an opening, I had a front row seat for the hard work he put in to make it count. As he’d intimated, I had the nerve to pity him throughout sophomore and junior year. The guy spent every waking minute either chasing ass or pretending he had landed some, and it wasn’t always a pretty sight. One girl after another would toy with him, maybe take his phone calls, but he got nowhere near the panties.
Then senior year, he got his break: he dug into the fertile ground of the barely attractive female. These were the girls that he would never have considered dating publicly. The girls with decent butts, nice breasts, or long legs, but questionable faces. The ones who were the constant subject of “Brown Bag” jokes. The term had been no joke for Scotty; the guy got more practice sex with “so-so” girls than anyone I’ve known.
By the time winter of our senior year rolled around, Scott’s escalated experience and confidence was matched by the kindness of time. He was still sleek, but no longer short; still youthful-looking, but no longer looking like a boy. Years later–from roughly 2008 to 2013–he would be constantly mistaken for Aaron Paul of “Breaking Bad.”
I watched in amazement as the women on Scotty’s arm grew more and more attractive. By the time he made that first million, it made very little impact on his social life; the guy already had plenty of beautiful women feeling him. While I had clung to the hope that I’d find more happiness than Scott by just being myself, the passage of time had proven me dead wrong.
“You need to hear it,” I said finally. “So here it is. You were right all along, Scott. Now can you help a guy out?”
Scott grinned, glancing between me and Bobby. “So is Mike choosing you and me as his instructors?”
Bobby shook his head, though his eyes glowed with humor. “I ain’t sure the boy’s ready.”
Scott pivoted squarely toward me. “I’ll make a suggestion, Mike. You probably need both Bobby and me. Maybe think of me as the coach and Bobby as player-coach?”
I glanced at Bobby before searching Scott’s eyes. “What, you’re not still chasing skirts?”
Scott leaned forward, elbows on the table. “I’m riding off into the sunset. I just proposed to Ava.” After accepting both Bobby’s and my hearty back slaps, he held up both hands playfully. “Hey, it’s just part of growing up. I’ve been pretty serious with Ava for nearly two years now, and after her latest news she and I had some decisions to make.” He let the beat pass. “We’re having a baby.”
I let Bobby mob Scott first with congrats, taking a second to process the relatively shocking news. Ava Deiss, a long-legged Swiss model with Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues among her credits, was quite a catch even for a multi-millionaire charmer, but I felt like I was watching Derek Jeter hang up his baseball cleats.
“I’ve had a good run,” Scott said after we all clinked beer bottles again. He didn’t need to elaborate; not two hours earlier I had overheard him talking to a fellow Kenwood alumnus about the number of Kenwood women he had hooked up with between 2005 and 2010. “I had already started to reform my ways even before Ava came up pregnant. I’m fully on the straight and narrow now–a one-woman man.”
Bobby harrumphed at that sentence. “So if you’re gonna help train Mikey, you’ll be relying solely on memory, huh?”
Scott held up a hand to silence him. “Mike, let me commend you. It took getting humiliated by Aimee, but you’ve finally decided to flip the script. Your determination to transform yourself into a man’s man is in the spirit of the American Dream. What is America, if it’s not the land where hope springs eternal that we can remake ourselves, the land where people born into poverty or other challenging circumstances create new lives out of the scraps of our failed ones?”
I blinked. “It’s like you read my mind.”
Scott tapped the table. “I want to be a part of this for you. I think you’ll gain from Bobby’s blunt, straight-from-the-front-lines guidance, mixed with my more nuanced life experience. Plus, I know where you’re really trying to go with this.” He smiled sheepishly. “You want to get to where I am, right? The beautiful wife, the two or three kids and white picket fence?”
I nodded. “Let’s do this.”
Grabbing up his vibrating phone, Scott frowned. “Count me in. This is my Board Chair, though. I have to take this.”
Tisha appeared at the table, a dishrag in one hand and a six-pack of Budweiser in the other. “If I give you lovely bastards this parting gift, will you get your asses outta the way?”
I stood and gave her a peck on the cheek. “I really appreciate you lending me your place.”
She rolled her eyes. “Whatever. The sooner you all get out, the sooner I can start charging market-price customers again.”
After setting the date for my first “class” with Scott and Bobby and settling the night’s bill with Brody and Tisha, I hopped into my Audi and was on Lake Shore Drive in minutes. I left the windows down so I could suck in the breezy air and the faint saltiness of Michigan. Now that the winter season was officially behind us for a few months, I could revel in the beauty of the city. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. People complained about the cost of living, an admittedly alarming murder rate, even the convenience of getting around, but in my mind, no price was too high.
No price was too high when it came to my love life, either. I’d be lying to say I was completely comfortable with my planned transformation. I knew I was no “Bad Boy Player” type and probably was never meant to be. That still didn’t change my pulsing realization that what came natural for me wasn’t working. I had accepted the reality of what women wanted, and I was ready to serve it up. I let my mind wander, imagining Aimee Chase’s reaction to Michael Blake 2.0.
CHAPTER 11
Aimee
My latest series of nightmares rattled around my head as I emerged from the Clark/Lake Metro station, headed to lunch with my mother at her favorite restaurant. The bizarro interview with Robin Roberts continued to morph in disturbing ways–in the latest one, after praising my career she had surprised me by calling out my “husband,” who emerged to take credit for my career success and for being the “man behind the woman.” The only problem: The loving husband was Chad Tucker himself, my first big mistake.
The Roberts interview montages had been book-ended by murky images of me wrestling with, of all people, my mother. Powerful in the moment, their details evaporated the moment I opened my eyes, but the impact echoed in my soul and still had me feeling queasy and confused.
A forced stop at a crowded corner, where everyone awaited the turning of the light like Boston Marathon runners, left me nothing to do but think. I tried to push past the thought of him, but my ruminations about my dreams brought Michael Blake back to mind. Long before we embarked on our first date, he had seen enough that he should have written me off when we were still kids.
I might be wrong, but I think even my father–had he cared enough to know–would have been horrified to see me lose my virginity, and general innocence, to a guy like Chad Tucker. Although our first few months were a literal blast–chock-full of weed-fueled bonding, high-energy sex and the adventures inherent in his many “untaxed” business activities–in the end we had been poorly matched.
Even as I helped him apply for Medicaid for his ailing grandmother, we began to argue increasingly over his future. Never being one to bite my tongue for long, I had insisted that I wanted him to get himself ready to follow me when I graduated Kenwood. “Whether I go to college locally or go away, I want you with me,” I had said one late night as we lay naked on his waterbed. “You can’t keep doing wha
t you’re doing, though.”
He raised up on an elbow, a smirk on his lips. “I can find new customers in any market, baby. Whatever the product they need, I can source.”
I had sighed as I turned toward him. “You need something sustainable, Chad. Something you can do without looking over your shoulder.”
He had shut down the discussion a few minutes after that, his smile growing increasingly tight and his phrases getting increasingly curt. “Drop it,” were his final words.
I let it go that day, but worked the topic into nearly every conversation we had the rest of that week. This mattered to me–at this point in our relationship, Chad had convinced me to limit contact with most of my girlfriends and pretty much forbade me to hang out with straight male friends. The myopic nature of our relationship irritated me at times, but I had decided I could bear it if Chad would just take a few steps in my direction, figure out how to build a life worth sharing. It was on a Saturday afternoon, as we rode in his car to grab lunch, that I opened up a new front. “Hey, baby, I read online about this cool veterinary training program–you don’t even have to do a four-year college first. As much as you love caring for your puppies–”
A flash, and I realized that my cheek stung and my lip was bleeding. “Shut the fuck up,” he said, eyes on the road as if I had been popped by a phantom.
I swallowed blood and complied, hoping this had been a hiccup, one that I had instigated by nagging one too many times.
It seemed that might be all it was at first; that same night, Chad apologized profusely, sewing together a narrative so smooth (“I was just scared that you’re thinking about leaving me for some nerd who’s already where you want me to be. I just don’t know what I’d do if you left me behind, Aimee. You’re all I got, baby”) that we ended the night in a fevered embrace. In the days to follow, though, it became clear that the hiccup was a volcanic eruption, one that had loosed a flow of lava building for days.