Chapter One
RUTH
I have orchestrated multi-million dollar business deals and have butted heads with Fortune 500 CEOs and some of the biggest corporate lawyers in the country, but my biggest challenge by far was trying to remove a monster wedgie during my spinning class without the gorgeous guy behind me noticing.
Casually turning my head to the right, I checked my periphery, confident I looked like some halfwit who was thinking of changing lanes on a stationary bike.
I couldn’t tell if the man had his eyes focused on me or on the instructor in front of the class, but it didn’t matter at this point. I had real-world issues here and needed to solve the dilemma before my butt sucked all my clothes inside my body and turned me inside out.
With every revolution of my bike’s spinning wheel, the wedgie seemed determined to go deeper, like a burrowing squirrel who hadn’t found a suitable place for habitation.
I got up at five in the morning for this torture?
To make matters worse, the instructor—Manson, Mussolini, or whatever his name was—appeared to be on a mission to send us all into cardiac arrest. And don’t even get me started on the chafing from a bike seat that was obviously manufactured with materials excavated from the surface of Mars.
I needed a distraction for the extraction.
Glancing down at my water bottle in the drink holder, I came up with the perfect plan. I would wait for the instructor to get us up off our seats again for the next sprint, then drop my water bottle on the floor to create a ruckus.
If the man behind me was a gentleman—no wagers, please—he would get off his bike and get the water bottle for me, thus taking any attention away from my derrière long enough for me to perform the embarrassing and delicate wedgie-removing procedure without him seeing.
Ironically, the song changed to “Shake Your Booty” by KC and the Sunshine Band.
“Off your butts!” the instructor barked out like a psychotic sea lion with Tourette’s. “Take it up to level five for a sprint. Thirty seconds. Go! Go! Go!”
Perfect timing.
I slammed my water bottle to the floor behind me for the distraction.
It crashed against the back wall with a loud BOOM.
Never let it be said I did anything half-assed.
No pun intended.
I checked my periphery again to see if the guy fell for the trap.
Bingo.
He slowed his pedaling and glanced behind him at my bottle on the floor.
After he made a move to get off his bike, I lifted my butt off the seat, leaned forward on the handlebars, shifted all my body weight over to my left hand, and used my right hand to reach behind me and remove the mother of all wedgies.
Oh, no.
Completing the task was proving to be difficult since it was almost impossible to pedal while standing up on the bike with only one hand gripping the handlebars.
I used one finger, then two, then three, but still couldn’t dig out the wedgie that must have been halfway to China by now.
Losing confidence with every second that passed, I wobbled back and forth like the Elvis bobblehead doll on the dashboard of my dad’s 1977 Cadillac Coupe deVille.
Things were heading south in a hurry.
There was a sharp pain in my left wrist.
My elbow buckled.
Timber!
