Taking Chances: Volume One: Ellen's Bet

Ellen is a 37-year-old married mother of three. She is an executive with a Chicago firm that licenses proprietary industrial processes and provides training and consulting in those products to client firms.

She travels to Baton Rouge in early February 2010 to do such work with a firm there. She meets Patrick, who is her contact and facilitator on his firm’s behalf. Patrick invites Ellen to his home to watch the Super Bowl. Although not particularly interested in football, Ellen accepts, seeing the social occasion as a pleasant way to spend an otherwise dead day in a city she has never before visited. Ellen meets Patrick’s wife, Roberta, and three young men from the firm Patrick has also invited. Naturally, all the others expect the New Orleans Saints, who play home games just eighty miles to the south of Baton Rouge, to win. Ellen expects the Colts, who play in her neighboring state, to win. One of the young men proposes a bet on the game for a sizable sum which all the other men are willing to match.

Ellen is unable to cover the proposed wager with cash. For reasons she cannot begin to understand immediately, Ellen blurts out that she will cover the bet with her body. She understands the implications of what she is proposing. She understands the terrible jeopardy to which she is exposing herself. Somehow, though, the thought of being so far out on so perilous a limb – sweet victory one possible outcome, utter humiliation and abasement the other – lights a fire in her. In this novella of about 24,000 word she finds herself unable to resist the allure and tension of the hazard into which she is placing herself.