“About us,” she suddenly blurted out, unable to stop the words from tumbling from her mouth like so many jagged boulders, rolling down a cliff. She would now have no control over the mess they were bound to make.
He eyed her keenly. He was enamored with every damn thing about her, and loved how it felt to be with her. She was sharp witted, exciting, fun, provocative, savvy, sultry and a real knockout. She also had amazing breasts and a figure that was to die for. But he now realized she was not afraid to admit she was in really deep, and seeking comfort over just where their relationship might be finally headed. He recognized that she had probably been burnt by men so many times in the past. He also recognized that she had allowed her once finicky heart to become enraptured with him in every way. There would be no going back for her. It was either end up having a trip to the altar or a trip to the looney bin. He prayed he wasn’t going to let her down. Still, her overwhelmed heart had backed them both into a corner from which there could be no reprieve.
XXX
The next four weeks were absolute chaos, with reporters buzzing around Arnold and Marg like they were a fine gourmet meal. Their main rival, the incumbent mayor David Dodds, seemed to be developing an acute case of foot in mouth disease. Instead of ignoring Arnold, and focusing on his main rival, Nevil, who was the shifty ‘jobs for everyone’ candidate, David had decided to attack newcomer Arnold with a gusto and fervor that was as dirty as it was expensive.
The massive, ill-advised, month long campaign against Arnold was making David’s campaign manager, Howard Reading, extremely angry and frustrated. Howard quickly resigned, and was on public record as saying that David’s stupid ads were merely giving Arnold a lot of free publicity he wouldn’t have otherwise gotten. As the saying goes, bad publicity can be good publicity in that it shines a spotlight on the one you are trashing. As a result, reporters were dangling microphones and recorders in Marg and Arnolds faces all day long, and the more they did, was the more that Arnold and Marg began articulating their campaign platform and repudiating David’s ill-fated lies against them. As a stroke of sheer genius, Marg then persuaded the disenchanted and disenfranchised Howard to join their camp, a move that was as embarrassing to the incumbent mayor as it was devastating.
Marg listened to the phone ring five times. Once more and it would go into voice mail. The voice of Arnold suddenly greeted her.
“Hi hon.”
“Hi right back at you. We’re up almost a full twenty-five points since the beginning of the campaign when you first tossed your hat into the ring over a month ago.”
“A full twenty-five points? How is that possible?” Arnold asked, trying to hide the escalating jubilation in his excited voice.
“Well, with David running off at the mouth, spouting his lies about you and inconsistencies about his own platform, a lot of voters are starting to listen to our campaign slogans.”
“That is great news, although, I may have gotten us into some hot water with some ill-advised vocal bloopers of my own.”
She listened to his confession apprehensively. They had agreed that he would stick strictly to their campaign platform on helping create more facilities for women, such as subsidized daycare, and more abuse shelters, not to mention their five point plan to try to revitalize downtown and attract new businesses to the city. She had also come up with the brilliant plan to recruit hundreds of animal lovers as dog catching volunteers. It had also been agreed that she would do the heavy lifting where interviewing the press was concerned.
“Just what did you say and to whom?” she asked, unable to stop herself from trembling.
“Well, that Scottie fellow from the Detroit Herald. He asked about you and I.”
Marg’s ears were suddenly primed and at full attention, attentive to every syllable that should from henceforth leave his trembling lips. “You and I?”
“Yes, you and I. He wanted to know if it were true that you and I were actually lovers.”
Marg cringed. They had worked so diligently to keep their private life out of the campaign. Someway, somehow, some nosy reporter was catching on to the fact that they were mixing business with pleasure on the side.
“Sounds as though someone told him about you and I. We’ve been very careful. He would have never have guessed that on his own,” she surmised.
“I agree, and I was just about to tell him that we were not an item, when I suddenly bit my tongue and asked him where he had heard such a rumor. That is when he shocked me by saying your mother insisted that we were actually engaged to be married.”
Marg was flabbergasted. All her life her mother had been pushing her nose into her business, trying to influence which boy should take her to the prom or which man she should dump or continue with as time went by. Only now she was going too far, sneaking up to the press and trying to solidify their arrangement by sticking her damn nose where it didn’t belong. She had no right blurting out the details of her private life to some snooping reporter. It surely was going to complicate the campaign.
“I have to go,” Marg suddenly blurted out angrily.
“You’re going to phone your mother and read her the riot act, aren’t you? Try not to be too hard on her. She meant well.”
“I suppose she did, only now David will be exploiting this news to suggest that you are a hustler and a player by humping your campaign manager and that if elected, you will be giving important posts to family and friends. He is bound to paint you as some womanizer and then turn our women’s campaign into a farce, claiming the only thing you want to do for the women of Detroit is to sleep with them.”
“He wouldn’t dare stoop so low.”
“If he thought he was going to lose the election? He would say anything and do anything. You were a very popular councilman in your day. People remember the good things you did and how you worked so tirelessly on their behalf. That might all be water under the bridge now with mother’s super-sized mouth. Besides, it puts us both on the spot in other ways.”
“Other ways?”
“Of course. For example, you and I had better be on the same page. Mother is obviously hoping that I will get married soon. Most mothers want that for their daughters. She probably thinks you and I make a very good couple. Still, we have no idea of all the things she might have told this reporter. If anything you say doesn’t match up, he could call you a liar.”
“Precisely my sentiments, which is why I agreed with him.”
“With what?”
“I told him that yes, you and I are engaged to be married.”
Arnold’s words slammed into her mind like a torpedo. Winning some election was one thing, but becoming married to the man of her dreams and to the one she loved so desperately, was an even bigger prize. Getting rid of her once he became mayor would be easy for him, but not if she was wearing his ring. The voting public hated men that welched on their promises to women.
“And are we?”
“Are we what?”
“Engaged to be married?”
He eyed her carefully. His declaration to the reporter had been to merely derail the subject and to nullify her mother’s unauthorized rantings.
“I couldn’t tell him anything different than what your mother was saying, because that would have made one of us out to be a liar, and David would have used that against me, claiming I was the one that lied, and therefore was untrustworthy.”
“So you did in fact lie by saying we were engaged when we are not?”
He felt backed into a corner. For the first time he could really see the extent of her desperation. Where he was concerned, her heart, mind and soul was all in. It was either sink or swim.
She took his pause to symbolize an authorized rejection of her. “You know,” she said, almost in a whisper. “I seem to do this to myself every time, hook up with a man who leads me on and paints such a rosy picture of our future together, only there never is a future, and I am always left to pick up the pieces when he finally does manage to move on to someone e
lse.”
“You’re not being fair, there is no one else.”
“Maybe not now, but there is definitely not an ‘us,’ because you keep tap dancing around it and playing fast and loose with my emotions. Either we’re a couple or we are not.”
“We are a couple.”
“And either we are engaged to be married or we’re not.”
“I never proposed to you officially, and we both know that.”
“And yet you told the reporter that you had.”
“What do you want me to say? Your mother was spreading gossip and putting my campaign in danger.”
“So now I’m a danger to your campaign, is that it?”
“You’re twisting words, and saying I said things I never did.”
“I’m sure I’ll soon read on the front page of some local paper that you are insisting that you and I are engaged to be married. But what you’re saying is that you and I are nothing.”
He opened his mouth to respond, but then felt better of it. He now understood that it wasn’t really Marg talking. It was really her bitterness saying the words. At age thirty-three, she was angry over fifteen years of futile dating, and understandably so. Years of loving men had not produced a husband, and years of hoping at least one of those men would have chosen her as his future bride, was also not seemingly in the works. He was adamant that she not read anything into his public declaration that they would be getting married come hell or high water. He had not meant to stir the pot, nor awaken her bitterness, and yet he had managed to do both.
“I don’t like lying,” Marg insisted. “Reporters are bound to ask me about our so called engagement, and yet, I don’t even have a ring to show them.”
“Maybe it was a mistake to involve you in this campaign.”
“What you’re really saying is that maybe it was a mistake for you to involve me in your life at all!”
“I never said that. You are purposely twisting everything around again. I said what I said to the reporter because I was backed into a corner. We are seeing each other outside of the campaign trail. Your mother said as much and a whole lot more.”
“So now it’s my mother’s fault that you lied about us being engaged. Nice touch.”
“You can be infuriating.”
“And you can be such an asshole. I don’t think I want talk to you for the rest of the day.”
She hung up quickly then tossed the phone onto her bed. Her volunteers had planned a rally for later that day, at a downtown Detroit restaurant that was closing its doors for good. Another small business was biting the dust. I was a great opportunity to further paint the mayor into a corner over his abject failure at stopping jobs from bleeding out of the city. The press was going to be there, and Marg was supposed to be there as well, but now, she was not going to bother at all. She was in a rage. She had spent the last fifteen years of her life dating men in earnest, fully expecting that Mr. Right would emerge sooner or later, and there had been oodles of breathtaking Mr. Rights for her to choose from, and she instinctively chose them all, except that they predictably moved on to some other girl once they’d had their fill of eye popping breasts and a world class booty.
She brushed away a tear at the thought, trying not to let her emotions overwhelm her. Somehow it just didn’t seem very fair. Men seemed to like her, even love her, but taking her home to mother was always reserved for the next woman to come along. She was now thirty-three, and although she looked stunning for her age, and was an absolute knockout, it was always a woman not as good looking as her to snare the particular man in question. And she had no doubt that the same scenario would probably end up playing itself out against the new man of her dreams. And when that happened, she would be just as devastated, but not as surprised. It was as though she were being punished over and over for the sins of someone else.
The phone rang again.
It was Arnold again.
She was still mad. Fuck him! It suddenly dawned on her that sooner or later he would be bringing down the damn hammer on her thick stupid skull. Her sister had warned her not to jump into the latest relationship waters with both feet, especially when those waters were insurmountably deep, and way over her head. Her weary, shell shocked body shook in her slippers as she supressed the new flood of tears. When would she ever learn?
She tossed the phone in a rage toward the wall, hoping to smash it into a million pieces, but if bounced off a wing chair cushion and landed harmlessly on the plush carpeting, still ringing. She was going to have to listen to Arnold trying to reach her whether she wanted to or not.
She did, however, surmise that she had bigger problems. And she was suddenly packed with stress. If she did stay in his campaign, the press would be hounding her daily about the relationship she and Arnold were in, and how he had claimed to be engaged to her. She now wondered if she should hold his damn feet to the fire and insist he marry her first as her payment for trying to get him elected to Detroit’s highest office. Was she actually going to just stand idly by while he lied to everyone in the city about the two of them being actually engaged? But the truth was that in real life it was nothing but a sham and a farce designed to make him look more family oriented and less of a player.
The pressure was preying on her mind, causing sweat to form over her trembling body. Could she really handle another man she loved, telling her he was going to trade her in for some other woman, even if that other woman wasn’t half as talented or good looking as her? The whole thing made her sick to her stomach and she suddenly felt the urge to vomit. She did so after rushing into the bathroom and lifting the toilet seat.
The bathroom began to spin. Was it really going to end someday like all her other ill-advised relationships had ended? With her staying hopelessly and helplessly in love with her shiny knight as he rode off into the sunset with some other woman? Leaving her to wallow in tears as being the one to be callously left holding the broken heart bag? She had invested so damn much time, effort and loving into him, and had worked tirelessly toward the noble goal of getting him elected. As things now stood, her adorable man was running neck and neck with the incumbent mayor, with the only other candidate, running a distant third. Momentum was definitely building in Arnold’s favor, and a lot of it had to do with a campaign program that she helped both create and put in front of the press. And her ideas had definitely taken hold, causing Detroit’s long suffering citizens to take a hard look at the handsome, hard-working ex-councillor who seemed to be wildly in tune with their concerns, hopes and dreams for the future. As things now stood, Arnold had been gaining five poll points a week over the last fiveweeks. At this rate, he would be winning in a landslide in just two months time.
She sighed with bittersweet emotions over the thought that she was helping elect a guy who meant more to her than the very air she breathed, or even the very food she pushed down her pretty black throat.
Arnold Winston, Mayor of Detroit City! It had a rather nice ring to it, but in terms of making her happy, it was turning out to be a rather hollow accomplishment. What would Arnold Winston, the mighty brand new Mayor of Detroit City actually do to her heart after another two months of daily fucking her ass off? Once he was elected would she still be his girlfriend of choice? And would there not be other interested ladies, desperate for the limelight, both black and white, young and old, popping out of the wood work to lay claim to her mayor? Which was her man? And how would her current man react toward all the grasping red painted nails clawing at his bachelorhood like vampires in the night? Surely his lack of fortitude and backbone at making up his mind about her would result in him driving a damn stake through her heart as all those other interested women ended up walking away with her man. Her man! Her future! Her love!
She was suddenly hot and flush in her face with unbridled fury. She had never loved a man so much in her entire life as she now loved Arnold. Was she really going to simply end up losing him? As much as she sought to supress her damn fears, the writing was on the wall. S
he found it hard to breathe. Why wouldn’t Arnold commit to a real engagement unless he fully intended to dump her after the election? The bathroom spun once more. She was hyperventilating, and in a full blown panic, facing an anxiety attack that left her fighting for breath.
She was soon covered in sweat, crawling out of the bathroom to where the phone had landed nearby on the plush carpeting. She managed to reach it and dial 911 just before she passed out.
XXX
She felt the soft but larger hand of a man clasping her fingers. Arnold’s hand? She had been dreaming of him in la-la land. Was he now present in real life as well? But present where? It sure didn’t smell like her bedroom. Just where the hell was she?
Her eyes fluttered, and flashes of blinding light caused her to turn her face to the side. The scent of disinfectant taunted her nostrils. Her half opened eyes picked up a hint of boring grey. The hospital, perhaps?
“Where…where am I?”
“Shhh, you mustn’t try to speak. You almost had a nervous breakdown.”
The voice was squeaky and determined, definitely that of her younger sister, Delores.
“Delores?”
“Yes.”
“You flew out from Chicago?”
“Earlier today, as soon as I heard you’d collapsed.”
She sighed and glanced briefly at Delores’s beaming but worried face. Then Marg turned and caused her big brown eyes to remain fixed on Arnold, the object of her desires. He was still so irresistibly handsome, still so refined looking, still so adept with his muscular build at making her heart skip a beat. If only…if only…
As Time Goes By: A BWWM Interracial Romance Page 5
