Extreme Bachelor (28 page)

“Really? You don’t remember you were out
with her just last week?” Leah asked, fuming. “Between your dates
with me?” she added, wiggling her fingers between dates.

“We had dinner, the four
of us. I never touched her,” he said, moving deeper into the room.
“It was just a favor to a pal—go out, keep her company while he
tried to make some headway with the woman he wants to get to know.
It didn’t mean I was
dating
her. Regardless of what she says around work, she
knows it, too.”

Leah nodded, then stooped over, picked up a
pair of shoes. “Then why did you give her a job?” she blurted,
throwing a shoe into her suitcase and holding the other one, heel
out, aimed right at Michael.

He looked at the shoe and held up his hand.
“I didn’t give her a job. Jack did. And without my knowledge.”

She was still skeptical. “I can’t speak for
Jack or how he reels them in,” he said, looking boyishly
distressed.

Leah tossed the shoe into the suitcase, put
her hands on her hips. “So what about Nicole Redding? That was
quite an intimate moment you were having a couple of days ago.”

He groaned again, shoved a hand through his
hair. “Don’t get me started on Nicole,” he muttered, but then
looked at Leah sidelong and shook his head. “Nicole and I were an
item a few months ago,” he admitted. “We were together for about
two months.” He frowned slightly, as if the memory was unpleasant.
“She was also seeing some director at the same time, and when I
found out about it, I ended it with her. Frankly, I was looking for
an excuse—I wasn’t that interested.”

“You had to go out with her for two months
to figure that out?” Leah asked disdainfully. “So what was that
little tête-à-tête about?” she asked, motioning with her hand.

“Well, to put it bluntly, Nicole appears to
be between lays. And she’s hoping to hook up again.”

“Wow,” Leah said. “That’s like . . .
horribly honest.” She turned away, picked up a pile of
clothing—dirty or clean, she had no idea—and dumped it carelessly
into her suitcase. Nicole Redding, a huge movie star, was jonesing
for her guy. How bizarre was that?

“I told her to forget it,” he added
quietly.

Leah snorted. “That’s great, Michael. I hope
for your sake she forgets it.”

“Leah—”

“Just out of curiosity,”
she asked, turning to face him again, “when you guys were
together,” she said, making quote marks with her fingers, “how did
you keep from crushing her? She’s just a tiny little thing, and it
seems like there would have been a danger of
hurting
her—”

Michael closed the distance between them,
put his arms around her in spite of her throwing up her arms to
stop him, and held her tightly in his arms.

“I guess, though, if you’re the Extreme
Bachelor, you must have worked those tiny details out,” she mumbled
into his shoulder.

“Stop,” he breathed into her hair, and put
his hand on the back of her head. “I didn’t lie to you, baby. I
love you, and I’ve loved you all these years. Granted, I haven’t
been a saint, but I haven’t lied to you. There is no one else.
There is no Ariel, no Nicole, no one but you.”

Instead of soothing her he was making her
angry—she’d heard this song a few times too many now and was
getting sick of it. She shoved against him, breaking his grip on
her and making him spill his beer on the carpet. He moved to get
something to clean it, but she threw a towel down and stomped on
it, grinding it into the carpet. “Just tell me how many other women
are going to come crawling out of the woodwork and claim some sort
of relationship with you?”

“What does it matter? There is no one else,
and there won’t be now that I have found you again.”

“It matters! What am I supposed to do, just
pretend like none of it bothers me? Like it doesn’t hurt all over
again? Or make me feel like an idiot for believing we could go
back?”

“Did you believe that?” he asked,
surprised.

Her hands curled into
fists. “Yes,” she said bitterly. “For a moment, one single,
solitary moment, I believed it. But I didn’t know you jumped back
into the dating pool with both feet. Not me. It took me years to
get over you. It took me
years
to get up the nerve to date again, because I
didn’t think I could ever love anyone like I loved you, and if by
some miracle I did, I couldn’t stand to go through it all again and
risk being dumped like a bag of garbage one day. So it’s not
exactly easy to keep running across all these women you’ve dated
and been with and try and act like it doesn’t bother
me.”

“What do you want me to do?” he asked
angrily. “I can’t turn back the clock; I can’t do anything but tell
you there is no one else. The fact that there are so many of them
cropping up all of a sudden should be more evidence that I could
never manage to maintain a relationship for more than a few weeks.
They weren’t you, Leah.”

She glared at him. Michael glared back. She
kicked her suitcase shut. He tossed the beer into her trash
can.

“So?” he asked.

“So?”

“So where does this leave us?”

She gave him a petulant shrug and looked at
the floor. “I’m not sure.”

“Maybe it leaves us with dinner.”

“Maybe it leaves us with a gash too deep to
heal, Michael.”

“Come on, baby,” he said, moving closer,
stroking her cheek with his knuckles. “Trust me. Believe me.”

Bite me
, she thought bitterly. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know
if I can.”

“Okay, look,” he said, just as wearily. “We
can’t expect to fix everything gone wrong between us in a matter of
days, right? So let’s just have some dinner and see how it goes.
What do you say?”

He was right—old, deep, gaping wounds took
time to heal. She just had a funny feeling that she hadn’t quite
found all her wounds, or knew how deep they ran. “All right,” she
said. “Just let me change.”

He nodded and walked out, leaving her
behind, the space between them opening up like a gulf.

Dinner did nothing to improve their mood.
Michael tried to talk about work and how he was looking forward to
finally getting to Washington and the actual filming. His talk of
Washington reminded Leah that Jill, yet another woman Michael had
dated at some point in the last five years, had told them when
Michael had showed up to boot camp that they had gone white-water
rafting with the other guys a couple of years ago in
Washington.

Leah could picture herself at dinner parties
and Hollywood affairs with Michael, meeting woman after woman
Michael had once dated, or taken white-water rafting, or flown to
Paris, or whatever. She grew more sullen. He grew more exasperated
with her sullenness, professing an inability to understand why she
couldn’t just accept what he was saying, and that made her angry
all over again.

“So what you’re saying is that basically, I
shouldn’t have any feelings about the women you’ve slept with, is
that it?” she snapped.

“Hey,” he said low, looking at her darkly.
“I told you, I didn’t sleep with all those women.”

“You slept with
some
of them. You
dated
all
of
them.”

He said nothing, but clenched his jaw
tightly shut.

“And could you please just explain to me why
they all have to end up on this film?”

He drove his fork into his food. “I told you
that, too, Leah,” he said sharply. “Jack thought it would be
funny.”

“Ha ha,” she said, and pushed her plate
aside.

“Jesus, will you stop persecuting me?” he
asked, dropping his fork. “I can’t change the past. I can’t make it
go away.”

“Right,” she said nodding furiously. “And
maybe you shouldn’t try. Maybe I shouldn’t either. Maybe we should
just let the past lie.”

“Oh for Chrissakes,” he said, and pushed his
plate away, too. He started looking around for a waiter. “This is
going nowhere. Let’s just get the hell out of here.”

“Fine with me,” she snapped.

They sat in stone-cold silence until the
waiter came and gave them a bill. Michael tossed a few bills on the
table and stood up. So did Leah. And together, they marched out of
the restaurant, the gulf that had started to creep between them
spilling into an ocean by the time they reached the car.

Michael drove like a maniac back to Leah’s
house, clearly ready to be rid of her, and the feeling was entirely
mutual. At that moment, Leah didn’t care if she ever saw him again.
But when they pulled into the drive, and she reached for the door,
Michael put a hand on her leg. “Leah. We can leave it like this. Or
we can agree that it’s something we’re going to have to work
through if we want to be together.”

She hated logic. “Or, we can just call it a
day and move on,” she said, her hand falling away from the
door.

“We could. But I don’t want that. Do you
really want that?” he asked as his hand sought hers.

“I don’t know what I want,” she said
morosely, and let him twine his fingers with hers.

“I understand that. But please don’t jump
off the deep end on me, baby. Give me a chance.”

Leah looked at the brown eyes so beautiful
they almost made her weep, at the chiseled face, the sexy five
o’clock shadow, and as always, that thick strand of black hair
across his brow. No, she wasn’t ready to give up. She didn’t know
what to think or what to believe, or what really was bothering her,
but she wasn’t ready to quit.

Michael, like always, seemed to know what
she was thinking and leaned across the console, touched his lips
lightly to hers. His hand fell on her cheek, his fingers spreading
across her face. Leah gripped his wrist, clinging to him, feeling
the power of his desire seep through her skin. She didn’t want to
let go, she wanted to believe him, but she couldn’t seem to swim
past old, hurtful feelings that kept surfacing. Mixed in with the
joy of having discovered her one true love again were bits of anger
and distrust and that dreadful feeling that she was headed for the
biggest fall yet.

So she pushed back from him and turned away,
looking blindly out the window. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said
softly, and got out of the car, shut the door, and hurried to her
front door without looking at him, without seeing that expression
in his eyes that could make her forget herself.

Michael waited until she was safely inside,
then put the car in reverse, spinning out of her drive and getting
the hell out of dodge.

Frankly, he was beginning to wonder if a man
could ever go back again, or if it was always just too late. He
loved Leah, more than anything. But he didn’t relish the thought of
apologizing for his past all the rest of his days. At some point,
if she wanted to be with him, she had to accept what had happened
and move on. Or, if she couldn’t let go of her grudge, she could
just simply move on now, like she said. Without him.

Either way, at the moment he didn’t give a
shit what she did, because he had a splitting headache.

Subject: Old Times

From: rtj0431

To: Michael Raney

Time: 4:32 pm

Yo, bro, been trying to get hold of you. Rex
here—remember your old pal? The one who is actually trying to save
your ass? Listen, you’ll want to hear what I have to tell you. It
concerns an old friend of yours who is no longer in the place you
left him. Give me a call on the usual line, but call soon.

LEAH was exhausted when she showed up for
work the next morning, having spent yet another sleepless night,
courtesy of Michael Raney. What happened to that vow she’d made to
herself one hundred years ago that she’d not lose one more moment
of sleep because of him, anyway?

As Leah marched across the parking lot,
backpack in hand, Trudy, who was waiting at the gate, lifted her
psychedelic shades and peered closely at her. “What’s the matter?”
she asked when Leah reached her.

“Nothing,” Leah said. “I just didn’t get
much sleep last night.”

“Oh no,” she said knowingly, and hands on
hips, she nodded sagely as she sized Leah up. “Oh, honey,” she
said, with a sympathetic shake of her head. “You look like shit.
That’s the deal with these movie guys—they’ll say anything to fuck
you. So what did he say this time?”

What hadn’t he said? Leah shifted her
backpack from one shoulder to the other. “Nothing, really.” She
didn’t want to rehash it all again—she’d just spent the better part
of one night rehashing it over and over and over, until her head
felt like it was literally going to explode off her shoulders. “So
don’t we have a meeting with the director this morning?”

“Yeah,” Trudy said, and put her arm around
Leah’s shoulders, squeezing her tight. “Let’s go show him that Yin
and Yang are the best he’s got.”

Leah let Trudy pull her along.

They rehearsed the battle scenes all morning
with the director and Charlene Ribisi and Nicole Redding, who,
Trudy pointed out in a stage whisper, couldn’t carry her cell phone
if the director asked it, much less the scene. Charlene Ribisi, on
the other hand, was a professional and about as buff as any woman
Leah had ever seen. In one scene, Charlene had to push her down,
and for a woman weighing all of 110 pounds at 5’10”, she sure
packed a punch.

The most telling part of the rehearsal came
just before they broke for lunch, when the director, looking
through a camera lens, shook his head and yelled cut.

“Were we filming?” Nicole asked, clearly
annoyed.

“No. And it’s a good thing we weren’t,”
Harold said. “Honey, you’re going to have to lose a few pounds in
the next week. You’ve got a couple of places that aren’t coming
across very well.”