Just Rules (9 page)

“Well —he cleared his throat— I’m sure someday she’ll find Mr. Steel Pants,” he joked, trying to get things back to normal.

“I have to go,” said Tim. “I found out where Amanda does her shopping and I’m going to follow her. I’ll call you in a few days. Take care of Susan, please. I would ask my parents, but they are still angry with me for having left and I don’t think that she would feel like seeing them.”

Mac didn’t doubt Senator Delany was furious with his eldest son.

“OK, don’t worry. And try not to act like a stalker, would you?” he said.

“I’ll try. I promise.”

Mac smiled and doubted that his friend was capable of keeping his promise. He was about to say goodbye and hang up, but then he thought of something.

“One thing, Tim…”

“Let me guess. You’re going to tell me that if I get locked up in a French jail that you’re going to let me rot here?”

“No,” he breathed. “Did you tell Susana that you were going to Paris and that you have a child?” Mac had been mulling over the various conversations he’d had with Susan for weeks, and he couldn’t figure how much she knew about her ex-fiance’s situation.

“No,” said Tim, and he sighed. “It seemed cruel and unnecessary.”

Mac could tell his friend was lying. He had known Tim since they were ten years old and knew when he was hiding something.

He suddenly remembered the press release Tim had send to the media and that Mac had read hours before and put two and two together. And he became furious.

“You’re a selfish pig,” he said to the man that was like a brother to him. “You didn’t tell her because you don’t want her to think badly of you.” If Tim had a weakness it was that he needed to be on everyone’s good side. I was a sick obsession and Mac suspected that it had a lot to do with the reason Amanda left him.

“What did you want me to do, Mac?” Tim didn’t deny anything.

“Tell her the truth, asshole.”

“I told her that I couldn’t marry her,” he said.

“The official statement said:
Mr. Tim Delany and Miss Susan Lobato Paterson have decided to postpone their marriage.
You covered your ass, Tim.”

“That’s not true; the official statement is just a formality. And I wrote it that way so that the press wouldn’t bother Susan.”

“Look, Tim, I’m going to believe what you just said because we’re friends, but you have to tell Susan the whole truth.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean why? She doesn’t deserve to doubt herself. You left her high and dry for the whole world to see only two months before the wedding. Surely she thinks it’s her fault. You have to tell her that she never had the slightest chance of taking Amanda’s place, and much less now since you have a child with her.”

“Why?”

“Are you trying to get me going on purpose? I just told you why.”

“No.
Why
does it matter to you?”

How does Tim know it matters to me?

“It’s the right thing to do,” he muttered, hoping his friend wouldn’t ask him anymore questions.

“Alright,” agreed Tim, giving up. “You’re right —he added— I’ll call her, but I already told you before that she won’t answer my calls.”

“Keep trying,” ordered Mac.

“I will if you promise me you’ll go see her one of these days.”

“I will, and call me when you can, and please try to get back when the new season starts. It looks like I’ll be team captain again.”

Tim hung up laughing and feeling relieved, knowing that his best friend wasn’t abandoning the Patriots, and Mac went back to bed. He still wasn’t going to sleep well just because he finally had a reason, an excuse, to see Susana. Tim didn’t tell her the whole truth, he thought, rolling over in bed. He was going to have to do it himself.

Susan hadn’t cried again since MacMurray’s horrible visit. In fact, she was so furious for having let that tear fall in front of him that she promised herself she’d never cry over a man again. The anger she felt filled her with strength, and when she sat in front of the computer she was able to write her section of the news that night in one sitting. The economic crisis in Spain and the effects it had on Europe and the United States was enough to make her completely forget about Tim, the wedding, and MacMurray, at least for a while. But as soon as she arrived to the television station and saw how everyone was looking at her, it all came back to her.

Tim had kept his promise and had issued an official statement to the press. At least that was one promise he hadn’t broken, she thought sarcastically. However, the message wasn’t what she was expecting:

Mr. Tim Delany and Miss Susan Lobato Paterson have decided to postpone their marriage.

The statement obviously kept going and in it the
couple
apologized to their guests for any inconveniences and asked for their understanding. After another paragraph of empty words, they closed the statement asking the press for privacy.

Susan didn’t know what to think. Why the hell had Tim written that? Why didn’t he just say that the wedding had been called off? It was a tactic frequently used by famous people in order to buy some time and to wait until the press moves on to something else, but she didn’t like to lie.

She kept walking down the hall and tried to take her mind off of it, but the looks from her colleagues wouldn’t let her.

People looked at her with pity. Some pretended like they had no idea, but they all tried to avoid her. It was like they were scared to talk to her or get close to her in case she started crying hysterically, so she decided to ignore them all and walked straight toward her office. She hadn’t even been there for five minutes when Joe, the director of the program and apparently the only one in the whole T.V. station with some guts around there, showed up.

“Is the statement true?” he asked straightforward, as if he were asking for the time.

“Yes.”

“And I thought Tim was a smart man. Anyway, are you going to mention the latest elections in your program tonight? Because I was thinking…Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked, realizing that she was looking at him strangely. “Did you think I was coming here to throw you a party?”

“No, of course not,” responded Susan, after clearing her throat. “Thanks, Joe.”

“You’re welcome, and for the record, I don’t know what happened between you and Tim, and I don’t want to know, but in my opinion, he’s a complete idiot. OK?”

“OK.”

“Get to work.”

And Susan did just that.

After that program, when Susan left the T.V. station, she was harassed by all the tabloid journalists imaginable. She would have loved to ignore them and to tell them to leave her alone, but that only would have made things worse, so she stopped in front of the door of CBT and responded to a few questions, rather, she dodged them because in the end she didn’t say anything more than what was said in the statement, that Mr. Timothy Delany and she had decided to postpone the wedding for the moment.

Postpone? Why the hell did Tim use that word? She couldn’t stop thinking about it. Why hadn’t he said
cancel
? Ah, yes, because he had decided that it would be best for both of them if they said that they had decided to take a break. This way it would be less of a scandal. Yeah, sure, maybe for him. He was in Paris, she thought furiously. Thanks to one of her tabloid news channel competitors, Susan had seen Tim walking through the Charles de Gaulle airport.

Asshole.

No journalist in their right mind would believe that they had
postponed
the wedding without any motive. They weren’t stupid. Tim had the theory that with time the press would forget about them and leave them be, but that night Susan didn’t give a shit about theories. The only thing she wanted was to go home and rest…and to tell those journalists that if they wanted to know anything else that they should go find Tim somewhere along the Sena.

Clearly, as she was a very discrete person, she didn’t say anything. Instead, she just sat there and took the harassment until they decided to give up and let her go. It was the first time in her entire professional career that she seriously thought about letting go of her promise to never talk about her personal life and felt like shouting to the whole world that she was furious with Tim and everyone else, and that the only thing she wanted was to be left alone.

Seeing Tim in France had had a strange effect on her. It was as if the breakup was more real, and Susan was finally able to take the necessary steps to erase any trace of Tim from her life.

Although painful, she felt relieved.

She spent the entire morning putting the few personal belongings Tim had left in her apartment —a book, a pair of sneakers, and pajamas— in a box. She closed it up and stored it under her shoe rack. On the side of it she wrote in big letters: TIM, and she imagined making a box big enough to fit all of the memories inside her mind. If only it was that easy. Susan wasn’t going to be so immature as to burn their pictures, but after a glass of white wine it didn’t seem like such a bad idea, and she decided to try it. When she realized that she had not one photo of them together, she was horrified.

They really were a pathetic couple, however, that doesn’t justify Tim leaving and canceling the wedding. She settled for erasing the few photos she had of the two of them on her phone and poured herself another glass of wine.

The next morning, slightly hung-over, Susan decided that she was going to start a new chapter in life; the final chapter. At work she had to deal with a few condescending looks and a few questions here and there, but, surprisingly, everything seemed to have returned to normal rather easily.

Shouldn’t I feel sadder or more emotionally exhausted? Maybe, but Tim was in Paris and there was nothing I could do about it, so it didn’t make sense to sit and mull over it.

Yep, her life was back on track, until MacMurray showed up one night at the television station.

Since Mac knew that calling her wouldn’t get him anywhere, he didn’t even try. He didn’t try to stop by her apartment either because he was convinced that Susana had given specific instructions to the security guard of the building not to let him in. So the only viable option he had left was to go see her at work. Nobody at CBT, the television channel where Susana worked, would dare kick him out of there. It would cause such a scene that he could just imagine the headlines:
An enraged economist impedes the captain of the Patriots from entering CBT.

Susana wouldn’t have any choice but to talk to him. Perhaps she wasn’t exactly like he thought, but he was willing to bet his right hand that she wouldn’t want to make a scene in public.

Mac was left-handed.

Mac was a very meticulous man and liked to plan things down to the very last detail. It didn’t matter if he was planning a dinner or buying a house. That’s probably why he was the best captain the Patriots had ever had. Since Susana only gave the nightly news, Mac figured that she wouldn’t go to the station until mid-afternoon, and therefore it would be best to arrive during the middle of the program when she would already be on set, and he would wait for her to finish. If she had the cameras on her, she wouldn’t be able to yell at him or throw him out without listening to him.

Yes, it was a good plan, until she saw him.

As soon as Mac entered the set, after having greeted a few sports commentators he bumped into in the hallway, she shot him a chilling look. He noticed the exact moment when her eyes fell upon him because he suddenly started to sweat. He tried to act as if nothing was wrong, and smiled from ear to ear.

Susana gripped the pen she was holding and it fell to the ground. Mac winked at her and she had to repeat a phrase because she lost her place.

Mac knew that as soon as she finished the program he was a dead man and that the smartest thing to do was to stop provoking her, but he couldn’t help it. He stood there looking at her as if they were great friends, as if his being there was no big deal.

He also couldn’t help but think that she was beautiful.

The buzzer that marked the end of the program went off, and Susan and the rest of the presenters stood up and walked away from the table. Mac was watching her and saw that her eyes were sparkling, literally.

Did her eyes turn green when she was furious? He had always assumed that they would turn black, and he tried to imagine what else would make her eyes change color. In his mind he still called her Susana, although if he wanted to make it out of there alive, he better call her Susan.

“Good evening, Susan,” he said, when he was finally close to her.

“What are you doing here?” she asked furiously, but in a whisper.

“I came to bring you this.” He took out a box of mint chocolates that he had bought on the way. Until now, he had been hiding them behind his back.

You’re a liar. You had to go three miles out of your way to buy them.

Susan was shocked and didn’t say anything.

“They are dark chocolate filled with mint,” explained Mac, noticing that she didn’t say anything. He stood there holding up the box in the air.

“Come to my office,” she muttered. She stood up without waiting for him.

Mac had no choice but to follow her to the end of the hall. Susan stopped in front of the door, unlocked it, and held it open for Mac to go inside. She went in behind him and slammed the door shut. Once they were alone, they stared at each other in silence.

Several seconds went by. He swore he could hear her breathing, or was that him? They couldn’t just stand there doing nothing with all that tension in the air. One of them had to do something.

Mac turned around and saw Susana leaning against the wall, looking at him even more confused than before.

“I’ll leave the chocolates here,” said Mac. He looked around and decided to leave the box with the orange bow on the table full of papers. This didn’t seem like Susana. Wasn’t she a neat freak?

Damn it. He had been so wrong, and that woman was driving him so crazy.

“Why did you buy me chocolates?” she asked, oblivious to what was going on in his head.