Page 47 of One Bet

“Well, that can’t be right. I signed the papers over a decade ago.” Whatever clerical genius messed this up was getting a bottle of 80-year-old whiskey from my Christmas gift list.

“Did you send them back?” She had one hip cocked and a hand clutched onto it.

“Of course, I sent them back.” I checked my watch because this conversation had gone on about three minutes longer than it should have. And the look on her face, irate red cheeks; enraged flashing eyes, and a ready-to-kill sneer, meant that unless I found a way to stop it, it wasn’t going to be ending any time soon. “Look, Beth, I have patients to see. Can we possibly talk about this later?”

“No. No. No! We can’t talk about this later!” And now she was shrieking. “You’re married to someone else! And we’re supposed to be walking down the aisle in nine days. Nine!”

She closed her eyes and breathed out slowly. I’d seen her do this before. About a hundred times already. And there was nothing I could do to stop the snowball effect of bad behavior. The cursing. The screaming. The tears. And I was powerless to stop it. “And you’re married to someone else. Do you know what that means?”

It meant we weren’t going to be able to get married. No Cooper/Makenzie wedding at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Had she not been standing in front of me with her green eyes flashing fire and her fists clenching like the only thing keeping her from punching me was the three feet of space between us, I might have done the happy dance, or the thrilled beyond comprehension tango, or the yay I didn’t have to marry the wicked witch shuffle. But she started moving closer, and it wasn’t like I could back up.

“Okay, so we have to postpone.” Her eyes widened and her breath came in short angry huffs. “Look, it’s only a couple months. Just let me talk to Felicity, and I’ll get it straightened out.”

Not that big of a deal. A few hundred phone calls. A few lost deposits we could both afford. This was nothing more than a scheduling issue. Definitely not something worthy of the tantrum. But Beth Cooper, despite her public, always smiling persona had never met a tantrum she didn’t like.

“I need to be married. They aren’t giving my show to Zach Wembley because of his happy wife, happy life thing. Married people are trustworthy.” She hissed the words in a tone too sharp and too angry for anyone’s good. Especially mine. “I need the ratings our wedding will generate. I need this marriage. “And they’re deciding right after Christmas. We can’t wait a couple months.”

She crossed her arms and shook her head, hair sprayed so stiff it didn’t so much as shimmy. “I won’t wait.”

When I didn’t move, she shoved the bed in our little cubicle toward me, then her face fell, and her eyes brimmed with tears. “This show, the audience I’ve built over the years, it’s all I ever wanted. And I’m not going to lose out because you didn’t use correct postage. Fix this!”

I sighed because what else could I do? Nothing but a trot down the aisle was going to shut her up and keep my reputation intact. No one wanted a pervert as their doctor. And she had the powerful medium and the video to spin the story she was threatening to tell. Shit.

“What do you expect me to do, Beth? How the hell am I supposed to find someone to cover my shifts, hunt down Felicity, and get divorced in nine days?” That damned video had cost me enough already. I wasn’t going to sacrifice the reputation I’d worked so hard to build and then protect. So, by God, if marrying Beth Cooper was the only way to keep it quiet, then I’d marry her.

Her voice was smaller, less frantic than just a second ago. “I want you to fly to Maine and talk to the crazy she-bat. You tell her if she doesn’t want her sex video, which makes her look like some penis-crazy nympho, to go public, she’ll divorce you right now.”

“I don’t even know if she still lives in Maine.”

“Of course, she does. She’s too pathetic to go anywhere else.” She yanked a folded piece of paper from her pocket. “She even lives in the same freaking house. And you need to go talk to her. Use that Makenzie charm and get her to divorce you.”

She stamped her foot, a petulant move in my book, but it was Beth, so it wasn’t beyond her. “Right now! Because so help me God, if I don’t get this promotion, I’m taking you and her and everyone involved with these videos down. And it’s a #MeToo world, Finn. You know what’ll happen. Do you hear me?”

Pardon me if I wasn’t exactly cartwheeling my way to the church to be married to this one. “I hear you.”

Half the damned hospital heard her.

She leaned in close enough that I got a nose full of her perfume. It reminded me of crazy with a smidgeon of bitchy afternotes. My future was that smell, and I almost groaned in misery out loud, but snapped my mouth shut to hold it back.

“Make this happen, Finn.” She turned and walked to the door, and I stared because there was nothing else I could do. “I’ll book you a flight.”

Not only would she book my flight, I wouldn’t even have to worry about packing, arranging a ride to the airport, or telling whoever needed to know I would be gone for a couple days. When something mattered to Beth Cooper, it really mattered to Beth Cooper. And she would do whatever it took to make sure I was divorced by a week from Saturday because that was the kind of thing she did.

But what she didn’t do was love anyone other than herself. And as much as I wanted to save everything I’d worked for, I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of my life, or even one minute of it, tied to someone so angry and so vicious. Not when I knew what it was like to be married to a woman I loved with all my heart. But I also knew I didn’t have a choice.

One Decade Ago

From the moment I discovered football, Sunday was always my favorite day. That came to have even more meaning when I started to play for the university’s football team. Sunday was the day after the game, when we were all still heroes even if we lost. A day when we didn’t have classes and could just relax. We’d watch NFL games all day long with beers and bets on the side.

This particular Sunday was wasted on me because I felt as if I had a hangover, my knee was in a splint, and my bedroom was dark. This Sunday, I wasn’t a hero. I was a casualty. Tackled on fourth and goal at the one-yard line, leg bent awkward, pinned under a guy from Oklahoma who weighed in at a proud 220, all of which landed on my right leg. Hence the druggy hangover, splint, and darkness.

Monday wasn’t much better, but by Tuesday I was fed up with Vicodin and decided not to watch the live stream of my classes today, a luxury afforded to athletes and distance learners. Today, I was going to grace my teachers with my presence. On crutches. I limped across the campus from the Alpha Alpha Phi fraternity house where I lived. Not my finest hour. And the next one was worse. I hobbled into class, drenched in sweat, arms aching, knee throbbing, head ready to explode.

All this effort for Anatomy and Physiology. For a class that I could have probably passed in my sleep thanks to a photographic memory and a two-hour-a-day pre-party study time schedule, because Alpha Alpha Phi was a party frat and we partied every night.

I took the first empty seat I found and sat down. I propped my crutches on the wall beside me and wished that before I set off on my hour-long trek to class, I’d remembered my backpack with my notebook and pens.

Optimistic me thought listening might work, but the me who knew my devil that didn’t give a fuck attitude was fully aware that listening without reading would never work for me. Of course, I could always just sit here for an hour and wish I wasn’t thinking about my notebook and pen because a photographic memory only worked on things I could see, not what I’d heard.