CHAPTER TWO: Lucy Rhodes
“Are you sure about this, Lucy? Are you really sure this is the right thing for you to do?”
I could hear my dad’s voice in my head as clearly as if he had been standing next to me in the empty New York City apartment that would be my home for the next twelve months. That’s how long my new employer World News Network had agreed to pay for housing under my new contract as the executive producer of WNN’S World News Tonight. They were paying me a nice salary, but I had heard horror stories about the cost of living in New York City. I didn’t know how much the lease payment was on a furnished apartment like this, but I expected that I’d be looking for something smaller and less costly when the year ran out. And that was if I still had the job. I had a one year contract and this was big-time television after all, so nothing was written in stone.
The TV news business was a revolving door. I worked behind the scenes so it was not as cutthroat as being on the air, but I still had to prove my worth to the network or they’d hire someone younger for less money to do the job. And the most difficult part of any executive producer’s job, especially at this level, would be dealing with the on-air talent who were usually pompous, egotistical assholes of the male variety, or hot young females who were sleeping or conniving their way to the top. I’d worked at TV stations in little towns and big cities and the one thing they had in common was that they were all soap operas. The only difference were the sizes of the markets and the sizes of the egos. There was no larger market than New York City and I was sure the egos would match.
I smiled when I heard my father’s voice in my head, asking if I was sure I was doing the right thing. I’d had a good thing going in Chicago. I had a great job as the executive producer of the nightly news at WCIL, a great house in the suburbs, and what I thought was a great marriage to my college sweetheart, Randy Rhodes, who ended up tearing my world apart and leaving me to sort out the smoldering ruins. Getting the job offer in New York from my old boss, Ed Quigley, was a welcomed coincidence. I jumped at the chance to leave my old life behind and start anew. And now, here I was.
“Are you sure about this, Lucy?” my dad’s voice asked again.
“Yes, daddy,” I said quietly. “I’m sure.” I smiled at the memory of my dad, his soft eyes always so full of concern for his only daughter. I took a deep breath and imagined the smell of his Old Spice and hair cream. I could feel his arms around me, bear hugging me until I grunted while he pretended like he was never going to let me go.
He was always questioning my motives and my decisions when he was alive. It bugged the shit out me when I was a kid, but once I became an adult I understood that most of the questions he asked were submitted for my own wellbeing. It was his way of asking, “Lucy, have you really thought this through? Is this really the right thing for you to do?”
“I have no idea, daddy,” I said with a sigh. I shook my head at the meager stack of boxes the moving company had set along the living room wall and gave a heavy sigh. I counted them with my fingers. Ten boxes. I was thirty-four years old and the sad contents of my entire life could be held in ten cardboard boxes with room names scribbled on the side in black marker: KITCHEN. BEDROOM. LIVING ROOM. BATHROOM. MISC.
It was sad to think that this was all I had to show for what I thought was a pretty good life. Sadder still was knowing how quickly that good life could come crashing down when you discovered that your husband was a sex addict with no self-control. Oh, fuck that. I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a sex addict. Randy was just a guy. He was a self-centered douchebag who thought with his cock rather than his brain. In other words, Randy Rhodes was a typical piece of shit who would fuck anything that moved and some things that didn’t. I wasn’t sad that I had caught him cheating on me. I was sad that it took ten years of my life to realize what a lowlife piece of shit cocksucker he was.
I’m not bitter.
Oh no, not me…
I met Randy in college. I was the bright-eyed innocent sophomore from Wisconsin and he was the smooth-talking, worldly junior from Chicago who was the life of every party he attended. I met him at a fraternity party and instantly fell in love.
Randy was a marketing major and I was in the journalism program at Stanford. I was a shy, unassuming country girl with blonde curls and timid eyes, and he was the proverbial tall, dark and handsome Italian with coal black hair, deep blue eyes, and a swagger that scared the hell out of me at first, then became a drug I could not resist. I fell madly for him, instantly, without listening to my girlfriends who told me what a pussy hound he was. I made the age-old mistake many women made. I thought I could take a bad boy and change him to suit my needs. I could turn a bad boy good. What a fucking fool I was. It just took me a fucking decade to realize it.
All I knew was that Randy seemed to like me and I damned sure liked him. We made awkward love the night we met in the back seat of his BMW. It wasn’t my first time, but it sure felt like it. Maybe it was because I didn’t have strong feelings for Randy like I did for my first lover way back in high school. Or maybe it was because Randy was so rough that it hurt when he entered me, so much so that I was afraid to do it with him again. It wasn’t that his cock was abnormally large or anything like that. It was just that Randy was a really rough lover. I swallowed my fears and kept fucking him until the roughness and the pain turned to pleasure. I liked rough sex now. No, that’s not entirely true. I loved it. I didn’t mind a good spanking or a little hair pulling now and then. Hit me in anger and I’ll kill you in your sleep. Pull my hair while you’re fucking me from behind and I’ll gush all over you.
Anyway, Randy and I dated all through college. Being a starry-eyed, smitten girl, I was monogamous from day one, but Randy continued to sow his wild oats. I was okay with it, at least for a while. When I caught him fucking one of my sorority sisters in my bed in my dorm room, that was when I drew the line.
“It’s me or them,” I said, shaking a finger at him so he couldn’t see it trembling from nerves. “I’m not gonna be the girl you come fuck at the end of the night anymore, Randy. I’m done.”
“Baby, you know you’re the only one that matters,” he cooed, pulling me into his arms and rocking me gently against his chest, as if I were a baby that needed comforting.
“Bullshit,” I said, pressing my ear to his chest so I could hear his heart beating. I closed my eyes and sighed at the sound.
He stroked my hair and whispered, “Baby, trust me…”
“I mean it,” I said, pulling away so suddenly it took us both by surprise. “You can either fuck me or you can fuck them, but you can’t fuck us all.”
Hearing those words in my head now, seventeen years later, I realized how pathetically stupid they sounded. Who the fuck was I? The Abraham Lincoln of college sex? You can fuck some of the people some of the time…
“I choose you,” Randy said convincingly, though in both our hearts we knew it was just more of his bullshit. It just meant that he would be more discriminating as to where he fucked his skanks and I would have to turn a blind eye if I had any hopes of a future with him.
And that was the crazy part. That’s when my dad would ask, “Lucy, are you sure about this?” When it came to Randy’s vow to be faithful to me, I literally was deaf, dumb, and blind. Even when we both graduated and I followed him to Chicago for work, I knew that I wasn’t the only woman in his life. He was very discreet about it, very careful, but I knew about his affairs all the same. And I ignored them. God help me, even when he asked me if I wanted to get married I ignored the fact that he was a cheat.
So, daddy, what was I thinking back then?
To this day, I still had no fucking idea.
Randy was Vice President of Sales for a company that sold microchips to large manufacturers. He made three times what I did as producer of the evening news in Chicago at a mid-ranked station. Everything was in his name because my college loans had maxed my credit. Our house in the suburbs, our cars, his motorcycle that he had never had time to ride, our vacation home in Connecticut, and the boat dry-docked there that had barely been in the water. On paper, it all belonged to him.
I stayed with Randy for thirteen years, then the camel’s back finally broke under the weight of a million straws. I came home unexpectedly one afternoon and caught him butt fucking our neighbor Louise on our living room couch. That was it for me. I didn’t even scream or throw anything. I opened the door and they both looked up at me in surprise. I gawked at them for a moment, then went upstairs to pack a bag. Randy came bounding up the stairs with the stink of Louise’s ass on his cock and her cunt on his breath, pleading with me to listen to reason. I did the only reasonable thing I could think of to do. I kicked him in his dangling ball sack and punched him in the nose with my left hand. The large diamond in my engagement ring went across his face like a can opener, splitting open his cheek and nose with the precision of a paring knife. I quickly packed the rest of my things and left him lying on the bedroom floor clutching his nose with blood running between his fingers. It was one of the most satisfying moments of my life.
“He’s going to need stitches, Louise,” I said when I reached the bottom of the stairs. She was still standing in the living room clutching her house dress in front of her fat boobs, giving me a horrified look. I smiled at her awkwardness. “Enjoy. He’s all yours.”
I checked into a hotel and cried myself to sleep. Surprisingly, after the tears ran out I slept like a baby and awoke feeling great, as if a huge weight had been removed from shoulders. As luck would have it, that was the day Ed Quigley called to offer me the job of executive producer at WNN. Ed was my old boss in Chicago. He had been trying to pull me into the big leagues for years. When he asked if I was ready to play in the major leagues, I said yes so fast it made him hesitate.
“Are you serious, Ed?” I asked.
“I am,” I said, forcing myself to sound stronger than I felt. “Are you seriously offering?”
“You bet your ass I am,” he grunted. Ed was nearing sixty and was as round as he was tall. When he spoke, it was on gusts of breath that seemed to burst from his lungs. “The executive producer of the nightly news is moving on next month. The job is yours if you want it.”
“Don’t I need to interview first?”
He scoffed. “Not with me. I know how good you are. I trained you, remember? Do you want the job?”
“I want it,” I said without hesitation or debate. “Yes. Definitely.”
He paused for a moment. Ed knew me well. He had always been like a second father to me. He could tell when something was wrong.
“Is everything okay there, Lucy?” he asked, his voice full of concern. “That dipshit husband of yours giving you trouble?”
“Not anymore,” I said with a sigh. “In fact, as soon as I hang up with you I’m calling my attorney. I’m counting on the divorce being quick and painless because I just want out. I’m not going to fight him for anything. He can have it all and I hope it burns down around him.”
Ed chuckled. “Hell hath no fury like Lucy Rhodes scorned. Okay, I’ll meet with my people today and email an offer to you by the end of the week.”
“Thanks, Ed,” I said. “Your timing couldn’t be better.”
“Then that’s good luck for both us,” he said. “I’m glad you’re okay, Lucy. And welcome to the big time.”