As Time Goes By: A BWWM Interracial Romance by Tiffany McDowell Page A

dump or continue with as time went by. Only
now she was going too far, sneaking up to the press and trying to solidify
their arrangement by sticking her damn nose where it didn’t belong. She had no
right blurting out the details of her private life to some snooping reporter.
It surely was going to complicate the campaign.
    “I have to go,” Marg suddenly blurted out angrily.
    “You’re going to phone your mother and read her the riot
act, aren’t you? Try not to be too hard on her. She meant well.”
    “I suppose she did, only now David will be exploiting this
news to suggest that you are a hustler and a player by humping your campaign
manager and that if elected, you will be giving important posts to family and
friends. He is bound to paint you as some womanizer and then turn our women’s
campaign into a farce, claiming the only thing you want to do for the women of
Detroit is to sleep with them.”
    “He wouldn’t dare stoop so low.”
    “If he thought he was going to lose the election? He would
say anything and do anything. You were a very popular councilman in your day.
People remember the good things you did and how you worked so tirelessly on
their behalf. That might all be water under the bridge now with mother’s
super-sized mouth. Besides, it puts us both on the spot in other ways.”
    “Other ways?”
    “Of course. For example, you and I had better be on the same
page. Mother is obviously hoping that I will get married soon. Most mothers
want that for their daughters. She probably thinks you and I make a very good
couple. Still, we have no idea of all the things she might have told this
reporter. If anything you say doesn’t match up, he could call you a liar.”
    “Precisely my sentiments, which is why I agreed with him.”
    “With what?”
     “I told him that yes, you and I are engaged to be married.”
    Arnold’s words slammed into her mind like a torpedo. Winning
some election was one thing, but becoming married to the man of her dreams and
to the one she loved so desperately, was an even bigger prize. Getting rid of
her once he became mayor would be easy for him, but not if she was wearing his
ring. The voting public hated men that welched on their promises to women.
    “And are we?”
    “Are we what?”
    “Engaged to be married?”
    He eyed her carefully. His declaration to the reporter had
been to merely derail the subject and to nullify her mother’s unauthorized
rantings.
    “I couldn’t tell him anything different than what your
mother was saying, because that would have made one of us out to be a liar, and
David would have used that against me, claiming I was the one that lied, and
therefore was untrustworthy.”
    “So you did in fact lie by saying we were engaged when we
are not?”
    He felt backed into a corner. For the first time he could
really see the extent of her desperation. Where he was concerned, her heart,
mind and soul was all in. It was either sink or swim.
    She took his pause to symbolize an authorized rejection of
her. “You know,” she said, almost in a whisper. “I seem to do this to myself
every time, hook up with a man who leads me on and paints such a rosy picture
of our future together, only there never is a future, and I am always left to
pick up the pieces when he finally does manage to move on to someone else.”
    “You’re not being fair, there is no one else.”
    “Maybe not now, but there is definitely not an ‘us,’ because
you keep tap dancing around it and playing fast and loose with my emotions.
Either we’re a couple or we are not.”
    “We are a couple.”
    “And either we are engaged to be married or we’re not.”
    “I never proposed to you officially, and we both know that.”
    “And yet you told the reporter that you had.”
    “What do you want me to say? Your mother was spreading
gossip and putting my campaign in danger.”
    “So now I’m a danger to your campaign, is that it?”
    “You’re twisting words, and saying I said