by Maria Benson
After I pulled Michael onto the loveseat for a make-out session, I endured his twenty questions about exactly what it had been like to interact with an American icon. As the high from the conversation receded, I cleared my throat reluctantly and grabbed my phone. “I have to show you something.”
As Michael frowned, I played a YouTube video that Helen had forwarded me just after I completed the interview. Michael didn’t flinch as we endured four minutes and twenty seconds of footage featuring women looking to cash in on their past associations with him and his present association with me. “Aimee Chase’s Man Didn’t Put Us First” was the title of the video, and it gave each of four women an opportunity to slam Michael for being a cad whose treatment of them should make him unworthy in the eyes of a self-help expert like me. “But then,” one of the final stars said, “we don’t all practice what we preach, do we, Aimee?”
Before I clicked to another page, Michael shook his head slowly. “That already has 98,000 hits?” He squeezed my knee. “You really are big time, you know that?”
I responded by punching his shoulder. “Look, you. I know you were a bit of a jack-rabbit just before we got serious, but how many hanging swords do you have out there?”
Michael was silent for a few seconds, a stricken look on his face. After shifting in his seat, he sat up. “Aimee, I’m not sure I know. I haven’t committed any crimes or started any secret families, if that’s what you’re asking.”
I play-slapped him. “I was just messing with you, ya know.”
Michael’s eyes glistened with sincerity and he pulled me close. “It’s really not a joking matter. Maybe the best thing is for us to do a mutual sexual partner inventory? You know, just put them all on the table, who they are, where we left things the last time we saw them, etc. That way, there’s no surprises of any type–”
I blew air through my lips and nearly collapsed against Michael’s shoulder. “There is no way I have the strength to go into that with you tonight. Don’t forget, Dr. Lott and I have that joint seminar tomorrow.”
Michael sighed, then stood. “Okay, but we should continue this line of discussion once you get through tomorrow. Let me scrub up and get some dinner prepared.”
“You do that,” I said, winking as I patted his cute butt. As he turned toward the kitchen, though, I felt my smile fade. I wasn’t so sure I liked the idea of his shared “inventory.” I loved Michael and had no present day secrets, but wasn’t so sure I wanted to go through my own exhaustive collection of “greatest hits.” Michael’s most ruthless dating games were fresh history, but I doubted they compared to the much more lengthy nature of mine.
The last thing I needed was to share everything with him, only to have him stare at me the same way he had after saving me from Chad Tucker.
CHAPTER 41
Michael
I awoke to immediate frustration. Lying there in Aimee’s bed, seeing her side was empty, I realized the night had gotten away without my getting the chance to come clean about everything with Olive.
Aimee had unwittingly cold-cocked me when asking if I had additional hanging swords out there. I had first fled the idea of warning her about my murky “Olive problem,” then tried to broach it before deciding it was just not the right time. She was tired from Oprah, and so tense about today’s seminar.
Over dinner, we had escaped our own troubles by discussing Scott’s news the other day that the paternity test showed him not to be the father of Ava’s baby. Everything was in disarray regarding the wedding, of course, but for reasons I couldn’t quite grasp Scott hadn’t called it off yet. Aimee and I got caught up dissecting the whole sad situation, and by the time we finished our grilled salmon, asparagus and half a bottle of wine, she had dozed off on me mid-sentence.
As I swung my bare feet onto the wooden floor, my phone pinged with a new text from her: 'Back by 9:30,' it said. 'Out for a morning run and coffee with Dr. Lott.' I sighed at the sight of the words; it was already going on eight AM, and I knew that Helen and the rest of the brain trust were due back here at ten to help Aimee prep for this evening’s seminar. My confession about Olive and the “maybe my baby” definitely had to wait another twenty-four hours.
As I headed to the bathroom for a shower and shave, I tried to convince myself this wasn’t a totally bad thing. Maybe by the time we had a real heart-to-heart, I would have enough information to tell Aimee something meaningful about the Olive situation.
Right now, all I had was a gooey ball of uncertainty.
CHAPTER 42
Aimee
Pacing in my dressing room, I grumbled under my breath at Michael’s text that he needed a few hours to go into work before joining me during preparation for tonight’s seminar. He was in a bit of denial about it, but I could see clearly that he would soon need to find a new job. His past with Beverly the boss was making for an increasingly hostile work environment. The fear of him getting fired suddenly had me thinking seriously about joining that damn “Chicago Housewives” show. Not that we were commingling funds yet, but Michael was supposed to be the one with the steady income in this relationship.
Dr. Lott knocked on my door, then opened it a crack. “You have a second?” Sarah crossed the threshold, opened the door wide and leaned against the frame. “I’m about to take a nice little siesta, then I’ll be up around 5 for our little walk through.” Tonight’s program, which we were hosting at a large South Loop dinner theater whose auditorium seated nearly a thousand people, was scheduled to start at 7:00.
I checked the time on my phone, calculating the length of the Doc’s rest time. “Ninety-eight minutes of shut-eye sounds good to me.” I glanced at her with a playful frown. “If I had enough internal peace to actually sleep, that is.”
Dr. Lott flung a couple of braids from in front of her eyes. “I can think of one person who should be here to help you get that peace. May I ask exactly where Mr. Michael is?”
I exhaled and leaned against the nearest dresser. “At work.” I frowned. “You don’t want to know any more than that, trust me.”
Dr. Lott crossed her arms. “Aimee, I want you to forget for a moment that I’ve known Michael since he was a baby, and still talk weekly with his mama. Everything okay with you two?”
I glanced up at her, feeling my eyes grow big. “We have our growing pains, of course, but we’re handling things.” I frowned sheepishly. “There are times I wish we had a little more money, though.” Dr. Lott shook her head, her soft gaze feeling like a pat on the back. “That will come, trust me. We’ll take in a nice haul tonight, for starters.”
“And in the meantime,” I said, repeating a mantra Sarah had bored into my brain with repetition, “I just have to be smart about my spending.”
“You’ve got it,” she said, snapping her fingers. “If you need to talk again before the walk through, just come tap on my door.”
As Sarah closed the door after herself, I shut my eyes for a minute to think, then awoke with a start a few minutes later when someone else began knocking at my door. Rubbing a hand across my face and grabbing a breath mint, I yelled toward the door. “It’s open!”
The door opened, and a tall, fit man spoke from the safety of the threshold. “Hello.”
The butterflies in my stomach told me it was Ian even though he was still partially shrouded in the hallway’s dim lighting. In a likely bid to go unrecognized, he had foregone a suit and tie in favor of a slick leather bomber jacket, expensive-looking jeans and a snappy, open-necked dress shirt with vivid hues of yellow and navy blue. His hair was cut closer than usual, and he wore a pair of stylish glasses that he usually reserved for reading in his office.
Instinctively, I motioned him in, then walked past him and slammed the door closed. “Ian, how does this make sense?”
“I don’t have long,” he said calmly as he reached for my face and gently stroked at one side of my mouth. “I, ah, escaped the loving attention of my security in order to get over here.”
Equally rep
ulsed and flattered, I shut my eyes. “Ian.”
“You don’t need to say anything,” he said, removing his hand from me. “I’m guessing life with young Michael is exciting, but just might make you long at times for the benefits of a grown, established man. One who is separated by years from his ‘other women,’ not weeks.” He swiped a finger underneath my trembling chin, tapping gently until I relented and met his eyes. “One who can be strong in those rare moments when you feel weak.”
Staring up into Ian’s bold but calm gaze, inhaling the potent combination of his Polo Blue cologne and his natural scent, I was embarrassed by the sigh that filled, then escaped my body. “I-I’m over you,” I said, hoping Ian would be more convinced in the moment than I was.
CHAPTER 43
Michael
After shooting Aimee a text reminding her that I had to go into the office for the morning, I took the elevator down to the street, found my car and headed to work. Saturday or not, I wound up putting in a full afternoon in order to wrap up a time-sensitive project for our board of directors. It was nearly six by the time I headed to the elevators on my floor, ready to zip over to the venue for Aimee and Dr. Lott’s seminar, when Scott called me. After enduring a couple of my questions about how he was processing the news about baby Adam’s paternity and Ava’s dishonesty, Scott brought the conversation back to his terms.
“You aren’t still chasing after Olive, are you? Bobby said when he talked to you yesterday, you still seemed to be obsessing over this baby question.”
Stepping out of the elevator, I sighed. “It’s kind of an important matter, man.”
“It’s as important as Olive makes it out to be,” Scott said. “Look, just understand that right now this is about her getting her head around things. You don’t want to spend your life with her, you wanna be with Aimee, right? That’s a great fit because Olive clearly prefers being with this Carlos. They will raise this baby, and give you free rein to focus on any children you might have with Aimee some day. It’s a sweet deal, take it!”
We argued back and forth about Scott’s values versus mine, then we were interrupted by a loud ping on my end of the line. Seated in my idling car, I glanced at my buzzing phone. It was a text from Helen, Aimee’s publicist: 'Late-breaking Google Alert; ABC’s 20/20 just announced tonight’s show includes Robin Roberts interview with Nadine Wallace. They’re teasing it with a live stream conversation in a few minutes.'
My torso shuddered. “Oh, no.” Pulling out of my parking space, already mentally speeding toward Aimee’s seminar venue like a bat out of hell, I filled Scott in. He agreed this couldn’t be good; Nadine was probably looking to slime Aimee and play her up as a heartless homewrecker, just when she was accomplishing so much good for tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of young women.
I reached the venue for the seminar in record time. By the time I parked in a nearby lot, there was no time to reach Aimee before catching the live stream in real time. In order to help defend her from Nadine’s slanders, I needed to see this from end-to-end.
As I sat in my car and pulled up the stream on my phone, though, my determination melted into horror at the sight onscreen. There, in the apparent privacy of her own home, sat Nadine Wallace dressed in a snappy cobalt blue pants suit, her hair flawlessly feathered. She sat across from noted broadcaster Robin Roberts, but those two were the least interesting participants. No, the show stopper was seated beside Nadine, a woman twice as striking despite wearing a plain white maternity blouse and jeans. The calmness of her brown-eyed gaze and her flawless golden skin transmitted a peaceful aura to everyone watching but me. Olive nodded as Robin Roberts welcomed her into the conversation, a beautiful, poised bomb ready to destroy everything I had worked for with Aimee.
CHAPTER 44
Aimee
“Aimee Chase is a fraud,” Nadine told Robin Roberts as I nervously cleared my throat. Seated in my dressing room with Sydney and Tara flanking me and each holding one of my hands in solidarity, I braced myself. Helen had insisted that I not watch the interview and keep my eye on the ball of tonight’s program, but my girls had supported my desire to watch it live.
“Robin,” Nadine said, “I didn’t want to have to come forward and attack a young woman who’s obviously got a lot of talent. She hasn’t left me any choice, though. She helped ruin my marriage to Ian, but now gets to parade around as if she’s some wise luminary everyone should bow down to. What a joke.
“Not only has she not owned up to how wrong she was to continue seeing my husband after we were married, she wants to pretend as if she’s found the key to making a relationship work, like the one with this Michael Blake. Let me tell you, she’s still as lost as all these women who are spending thousands to hear her speak or to buy her books.” She stared straight at the camera, her set jaw and piercing stare making me feel she could see me beyond the confines of the television. “For the courtroom of public opinion, I have a witness who will testify to that. Olive?”
Robin took the cue to bring the striking woman seated next to Nadine into the conversation. I could barely imagine what this complete stranger had to say, but the connection between my dreams about Robin and her role in this interview made me break into a sudden sweat.
With each of my best friends rubbing my back, I sat there like a prisoner before the iPad and sobbed as Olive unspooled the facts of her relationship with Michael, and most importantly the pregnancy. I appreciated Sydney’s and Tara’s whispered assurances, but they fell flat; my fight or flight reflexes were fully engaged, and flight was winning.
I shook my girls off of me and stood, hands balled at my side. “I deserved this, didn’t I?”
Tara wiped away a tear. “Now Aimee, you know that’s not true.”
“I’m such an idiot.” I shook my head, a motion so violent that it shook multiple layers of my hair into my eyes. While my eyes had technically been wide open, my belief in the underlying “niceness” of Michael Blake had blinded me to the significance of the warning signs: the multiple bimbos circling him at the mayoral gala, the professional unrest he’d unleashed by sleeping with Beverly, and just recently the YouTube video launched by his spurned one-night stands. Now this–a revelation involving a very real, perfectly innocent human life.
Sydney crossed her arms and nudged an elbow into my side. “Chase, if I do the math, based on what the lady said, she got pregnant before you and Michael were serious.”
I whipped back toward her, extended a flat palm toward her face. “Syd, when this happened isn’t even the point. It’s the secrecy that’s the problem.” I threw my hands in the air, my eyeballs viscerally pulsing with intensity. “He just swore to me the other night that there was ‘nothing else’ out there. He walks through that door right now, I’ll kill him.”
As Tara and Sydney tried to soothe me, I pulled away and grabbed my coat. I had a hand on the doorknob when Sydney placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Chase, take a deep breath maybe? The seminar starts in a few minutes, and Michael’s not even here yet.”
I stared at Sydney’s hand on my shoulder in a way that told her to draw it back, quickly. “Trust me,” I said, swinging the door open, “he’ll be better off not seeing me now.”
CHAPTER 45
Michael
Head still ringing from what I’d just witnessed in Nadine and Olive’s interview, I blazed a trail toward the theater’s front door. The security staff wasn’t exactly efficient; based on the lengthy line of ticket holders, they were pretty much collecting people’s DNA before admitting them. With less than thirty minutes to go before Aimee was due to take the stage with Dr. Lott, I couldn’t afford to wait out their standard process.
Toward the front of the line, I caught sight of an official-looking, heavyset woman in a navy pants suit with some sort of badge fastened to her jacket. “Ma’am,” I asked as I neared her, “I need to access the backstage. I’m with Aimee Chase?”
She paused a conversation she was having, glancing at me with poo
rly concealed annoyance. “I have access to her approved visitor list.” She raised her phone, tapped her screen a couple of times. “Name?” When I told her, her expression drooped. “Hmm.” She scanned her screen a second time. “Sorry, sir, no Michael Blake on this list.” She shrugged. “Hope you can catch her as the program ends.”
“There’s no way that’s right.” Truth is, I had a very bad feeling it was exactly right, but I wasn’t ready to acknowledge it yet. “I’ll need you to call backstage, get the question to her please. I know she wants me back there with her.”
The woman, whose badge identified her as “Barb,” allowed herself a lazy blink. “Well, I’m glad you know everything. Are you available to work tonight?”
“Forget it.” I turned around, headed back toward the curb, then hustled around the north side of the building and down the nearest alley. Maybe I could catch a lazy security guard on a smoke break who’d let me in if I asked real nice.
I had no idea what awaited me even if I could get to Aimee before the start of her show. Neither she, Sydney, Tara nor her mom had acknowledged my texts or calls, which I had logged throughout my humiliated viewing of Nadine’s and Olive’s interview. The only people I spoke to wound up being Brody and Scott, who had advised me on how to approach Aimee about Olive’s inconvenient revelations, and Olive’s boyfriend Carlos.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Michael,” he had said when I answered his call. “We needed the money, and it was there for the taking. Nothing personal, okay?” Apparently Nadine had employed a private investigator to find dirt on me, and the guy had trailed me the day that I ambushed Olive at the Schaumburg Wal-Mart. From there, it had been easy for Nadine to offer a pretty penny in exchange for Olive coming out with a fact that they’d rightly guessed I had not yet shared with Aimee.