Coming Clean Read Free Page B

short—again—agitated me to no end. Shaw noticed. He knew I hated that watch. Not so much the watch but his obsession with it. An obsession that might have been okay if it had centered on the sentimentality that should’ve been attached to it, but that wasn’t at all what it was about. No, Shaw’s obsession was with his schedule and how late he was running. Always.
    Business was good for Shaw, though hectic. Since becoming a partner at Striker Sports Entertainment, the partnership we’d gone head-to-head to win, he’d been slammed with not only the corporate part of the business but also his own clients. Clients he’d refused to give up. Superstar clients who demanded a lot of attention.
    I knew exactly what that was like. Or at least I used to.
    Was I jealous? You bet your sweet ass I was. For several reasons. Several good reasons. For one, I’d technically won that partnership but had defaulted it to Shaw when a family emergency back home in Stonington, Maine, had left me with no choice. For two, though it would have been acceptable for a partner and an agent to date, I’d become pregnant and my duty was to stay at home to raise our child. Not because Shaw had insisted, but because I had.
    Antifeminist as it might have seemed, I was the daughter of an Irishman from a small fishing village in Maine; it was in my blood to put family first, to be a mother first, to put my son’s care before my own career. No matter how hard I’d worked to become successful as a sports agent—and that had been pretty darn hard, considering it was a male-dominated industry—Abe was so much more important. And considering an agent’s grueling schedule—cue another glance from Shaw to his watch—would have me away from home more often than not, Abe would practically be raised by a total stranger. I wasn’t okay with that. Honestly, though he’d never voiced it, I knew Shaw wasn’t either. His very effed-up absentee parents had really done a number on him, and he was hellbent on making sure Abe would never have to suffer the same fate.
    So Shaw got to live the glorious life of a sports agent, yukking it up with the rich and famous while furthering his career, and I was living the glorious life of a mother. An unwed mother. That’s right, Shaw had yet to marry me. He hadn’t even proposed and had zero intention of doing so. Which was another side effect of the number his effed-up absentee parents had done on him. Shaw didn’t believe in the institution of marriage, citing it was nothing more than a piece of paper, a legal document that had no bearing on how he felt about me. I was of the mind-set that if it was nothing more than a piece of paper, one that didn’t determine whether we would be together or not, what was the big deal about having it?
    Of course, I’d never pushed the issue. Traditional as I might have been, my living together with Shaw as a family unit without having said the “I do’s” had become commonplace over the last decade or so. I was still a “wifey,” I just wasn’t wearing a ring to prove it.
    I squatted down to Abe’s level, a feat made easy by the soccer mom outfit I’d donned this morning. I’d gone from pencil skirts, high heels, jackets, Wayfarer glasses, and my hair in a no-nonsense bun to khaki shorts, deck shoes, contacts, polo shirts, and a ponytail. And I even had the hybrid SUV with smashed Cheerios in the seats, tiny arms and legs from broken superhero dolls in the floorboards, and the Kidz Bop station queued up on the satellite radio. Hey, it was better than listening to a grown man dressed in a giant purple dinosaur costume singing a love song to my three-year-old…because that was just plain creepy.
    “Abey Baby,” I started, using my pet name for him, “Daddy doesn’t have a very long lunch break, so the sooner we bid a bon voyage to Mr. Binks, the sooner you can play with Daddy. Yeah?”
    Abe tilted his head to the side, the breeze blowing a wavy lock over an eye. He