Let’s Pretend

by Laurent, River

  I couldn’t believe I had a meeting with the kind of company who, as my father would very colorfully say, wouldn’t even have pissed in my ear if I was on fire, only a few months before. It was a little disconcerting, of course, to know that my connection with Zach was what got me there. But hey, they would never have had my application if I hadn’t taken the initiative and filled out that form myself. I’ve never looked a gift horse in the mouth and I’m not going to start now.

  So here I am, just an hour or so away from the meeting, and no one has pointed to the hidden cameras to remind me what a fool I am.

  “Quit fretting. You look amazing. What time is Zach coming?” Lori asks.

  Zach is coming by Lori’s apartment to pick me up and take me to the meeting. I told him he didn’t need to come, but he wanted to. “I think it’s cool as hell and I want to be the one who takes you to your big break,” he told me firmly.

  "Nothing to do with the fact that I’m going to be going out to lunch with another man all by myself, now, is it?" I asked playfully.

  He wound his arms around my waist. "Nothing at all. I don’t trust men, but I trust you," he murmured, and he kissed me.

  I told him he honestly might be the perfect man and he laughed, but I have to say, since that episode with Dahlia, our relationship has only grown stronger by the day. I hadn’t realized how much I could trust him until I had heard him brushing her off like she meant nothing to him.

  "You’re going to do great, I know it," Lori tells me, and gives me a quick hug. "I’m so proud of you, you know."

  "Thank you," I reply, and squeeze her back. She is the only family I have left now and I feel extremely protective of her. "You’re keeping up with your studies and everything, aren’t you?” I fret.

  She rolls her eyes. “Oh, don’t start.”

  “I know I am just being the overprotective big sister, but that’s my job and I’m not letting it slide just because I’m not living with you anymore.”

  "Okay, okay. I’m keeping up with my studies just fine, all right?" she says with a laugh. "You have nothing to worry about, really. Just go and enjoy this lunch. You’re going to nail it.”

  “I just want to make sure everything is all right with you.”

  She smiles sadly. “You’re not Mom, remember?"

  Hearing those words out of her mouth makes me fall silent for a moment. She’s right, I'm not our Mom, but I could be someone’s mom soon. My period is a bit late. Since I’m on the pill, I haven’t panicked yet, or even picked up a test. I’ll wait a few more days. The doctor did say things could be a bit wobbly to start with.

  Before I can linger anymore on that thought, the doorbells rings.

  Lori runs to opens it.

  Chapter 27

  Scarlett

  Zach is standing there waiting for me. He greets his sister-in-law with a smile. "You’re enjoying having a bachelorette pad all to yourself?"

  She grins at him. “I’d like it more if I could live in a mansion like you.”

  “Lori,” I gasp.

  Zach laughs and holds his hands up as if conceding defeat. He turns to me, still shaking his head at her teasing. "You look great," he says enthusiastically, as he checks out my outfit.

  “Thank you,” I murmur. It's really a redo of my wedding look but in darker colors. I think it looks cool, but I’m not sure if it’s truly a good fit for the Evangelion Outfitters’s brand.

  "Ready to go?" he asks.

  I nod. Then I give Lori a quick hug goodbye before I take his arm and let him lead me out of my sister’s apartment. My heart is pounding in my chest. I can’t believe I am going to meet with Mark Simpson of Evangelion Outfitters. Actually, from the day I went to see Zach in his office and asked him to marry me, I can’t believe any of what has been happening to me.

  Zach drives me across town.

  I watch the people on the street going about their business. At this time, Zack is usually hard at work. While being married to him, I’ve learned a lot about him. How he started from almost nothing. How hard he works. How important his work is to him. "Why did you really want to come with me today?" I ask him.

  He glances over at me and sighs, clearly deciding whether or not he’s actually going to tell me the truth. "Look, I’ve been to these kinds of things before," he explains finally. "With guys like him. And trust me, from my experience, they use their power in these situations to...to get what they want."

  "What do you mean?"

  "He’s just contacted you out of the blue, pretty much, right?"

  “Well, I did send an application.”

  “Yeah, last year. He doesn’t know much about you, other than the fact that you haven’t got an established brand in the industry yet."

  "So?" I press, furrowing my brow.

  "So he knows that he might be able to use that.”

  “Use that?” I echo.

  “Yes, use that. Don’t fool yourself. Every industry has its casting couch, Scarlett.”

  "But he knows I’m married to you—"

  "That never stops them, trust me," he replies. “In fact, sometimes I think it encourages them. Taking what belongs to another man is exciting for them.”

  I fall silent as he pulls the car to a halt.

  He notices how quiet and withdrawn I have become, and he reaches over to take my hand. "I don’t mean to freak you out. Chances are, he’s going to be just fine, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t look out for you when it comes to stuff like this. I’m a man, so I understand other men."

  "All right," I mutter. I am a little thrown by what he has just told me, but I suppose he has a point. The chances of this being all purely innocent are not zero, but I hope and pray it’s so.

  "You ready to go in?" Zach asks.

  I nod.

  "Okay, let’s do this." He nods at me.

  I get out of the car, then Zach and I head into the restaurant together. It is the kind of fancy, upscale place that my father would have loved. He never threw his cash around, but when it came to celebrating big events, he always loved to book tables in lavish restaurants like this one, for the whole family.

  I can still remember Lori sipping on champagne and giggling at the gathering, he held to celebrate my last birthday. I smile fondly at the memory, and some of the tension I’d been carrying leaves my body. Okay, I can do this. I can make this work. I know it might be hard, but if my father could spend so much of his life coming from the ground up to pull his life together, then I could do the same thing.

  "Scarlett!” A voice calls to me, and I turn to see Mark Simpson sitting at a table against the wall. His eyes slide over to Zach at once, and his jaw tightens for a split second.

  I see it but I ignore it. I don’t want to believe Zach might be right.

  Then he smiles and comes towards me to kiss me on both cheeks. He smells of expensive, slightly overwhelming aftershave. He is dressed in a pink shirt and a pair of slacks that were probably hand-crafted for him specifically.

  "This is my husband, Zach," I introduce Zach to Mark.

  The two men shake hands and give each other a hard look.

  This is just how businessmen are with one another though, right? Nothing to read into, just the two of them trying to prove their respective dominance in this field. I take a seat, and the waiter immediately approaches with a bottle of wine.

  "I think I’m okay," I turn it down politely, but Mark tells him to go ahead and pour because it is a celebration. I turn to Mark and raise my eyebrows, but he lifts his glass and touches it against mine.

  "I thought it was only right that we celebrate this union," he remarks, as his eyes linger on mine just a little too long.

  I brush it off. I’m reading into things because of what Zach said to me in the car. There’s nothing here. There’s no way that someone like Mark Simpson is going for me when he could have any woman in the city he wanted.

  "Well, yes, I suppose our marriage wasn’t that long ago," I say, deliberately misunders
tanding him. I take a sip of the wine to show I’m game, even though this is meant to be a business meeting and I don’t want to get tipsy.

  "I was talking about you and I," Mark replies.

  My eyes widen with shock. Is Zach right about him? He is acting as though Zach isn’t even here.

  "I took a look over your application, Scarlett, and we’d love to take you on board at Evangelion."

  I stare at him in disbelief. Wow! How wrong has Zach been? I thought this was just going to be a chance for us to get to know each other, for him to parse out how much I actually knew about fashion before he thought about offering me a place. "Are you serious?" I squeal, when I find my voice.

  I notice a few people glancing around from their tables, but I don’t care. I’ve dreamed of hearing those words from an executive of a fashion house for so long. And now, here I am, sitting with my husband and the man who’s at the forefront of fashion in this city while he is telling me his company wants me to be part of it.

  He finishes his wine and nods. "I was very impressed by the sketches you sent in as part of your application. And your wedding outfit, and I thought it was so wonderfully classic. Almost breakfast at Tiffany-ish."

  Zach holds my hand under the table.

  I glance at him and beam. My expression telling him, see you were wrong. Everything is okay. After that, Mark and I spend the rest of the lunch talking fashion, stylists, models and designers. It feels so surreal, to be sitting here opposite him, to have him actually give a damn about my opinions, to listen to me and hear me out. He seems genuinely curious as to what I have to say, and I can’t help being flattered.

  "Obviously, I’d want to work closely with you at first," Mark tells me, as we wait for the bill to arrive. "You’re so new, I wouldn’t want to throw you out there by yourself right away..."

  "I’m sure I could cope," I assure him. "You don’t need to worry about me, really."

  "There’s nothing wrong with a little friendly lookout," Mark points out.

  Zach’s grip tightens on my hand beneath the table.

  The lunch finishes with Mark giving me his number and landing another two kisses on my cheek. I guess the fashion world is a very expressive place. I head back out to the car feeling a little giddy with excitement.

  "Can you believe it?” I say, feeling as though my head is going to pop with the enormity of everything.

  "This is huge for you and I’m really proud of you," Zach says with a smile. He is trying to be pleased for me, but I know there is something nagging at the back of his brain. I furrow my brow at him. "What is it?"

  "It’s nothing,” he says as he opens the car door for me.

  I climb into the car, but I don’t allow him to close the door. “It’s not nothing. Tell me what it is.”

  “Okay. There’s something off about that guy. I don’t know what, but there’s something not right about the way he operates."

  "I think you’re just looking for problems where there aren’t any," I tell him, but I am feeling a prickle of uncertainty even as the words come out of my mouth. I want to believe what I’m saying, because the alternative would be...well, the most disappointing thing that I can think of.

  Zach seems so sure, I don’t want to dismiss it out of hand.

  After all, Mark did seem overly enthusiastic about me, given that my only experience in the industry was an online course and a few sketches that I hadn’t even had time to turn into garments yet.

  “Time will tell,” Zach says cryptically.

  Yes, time will tell. I truly hope Zach is wrong. I lean back in the car seat, watching the workers walking along the sidewalks outside. I think excitedly about the fact that soon enough, I’m going to be one of them.

  Chapter 28

  Zach

  "Are you ready to sign the contracts on the Bilson holdings, Sir?"

  I look up from my desk and at my new PA. Nathan, a slightly jittery twenty-eight-year-old who I’m pretty sure has no designs of splaying out naked on my desk in front of me. Shit, even the thought of what Dahlia did still makes me cringe. I couldn’t imagine wanting to be with someone less than when I saw her without her clothes. She really thought she was God’s own gift to me.

  "Yes, sure, just bring them in," I reply.

  After a few minutes, he returns to the office with a cluster of papers. He hands them over to me.

  I take a look over the next company carcass I’ll be picking through. Bilson Holdings, a real estate company with a vast network of agencies in the suburbs, is in the beginning stages of rot. There just isn’t enough interest in their overpriced, under-marketed houses to keep them afloat in these lean times so I have been circling them for a while, keen to get them before the other vultures circling swoop in.

  The contracts are all ready for me to sign. I scan through them and pick up my pen to fill out the appropriate part of the form and sign it, but I find myself hesitating. I put the pen down and swivel around to face the window.

  Why am I hesitating? What's on my mind?

  I know it is a sure thing. I’ve done this before. So what’s going on with me? This company has been in the Bilson family for generations. The company probably isn’t far removed from the kind of business that Scarlett inherited from her father.

  But recently, it was passed down to the youngest son, who’s only twenty-five. He has a fluff college degree and chances are he hasn’t been raised to get his head around the level of skill and prestige it takes to convince people to buy homes or getting any real training. In business, any weakness means death. It’s the law of the concrete jungle. I’d expect the same to happen to my company if I was stupid enough to leave it in the care of a naïve kid.

  But these people are probably decent.

  Building a real estate business in that side of town could never have been easy, so there had to be some business acumen in the family. Maybe with a little help, they could actually turn their company around. It might sound crazy, even to my own ears, but did I really need to break up their company just to make a profit? There is more than one way to skin a cat. Maybe I can try something different. Maybe I can approach it with something else in mind.

  I grab the phone, checking the number on the contracts, and dial it up quickly, before I have a chance to talk myself out of this course of action.

  A few moments later, an exhausted man’s voice comes down the line, "Hello?"

  "Hello, is this Tom Bilson?” I ask.

  "Yes, that’s me," he replies. He sounds confused and so young.

  I was that young once.

  "How did you get this number? It’s not on any of our billboards anymore."

  “I need to talk to you about your business.”

  He snorts with incredulity.

  I can tell that he is already tired out by the very thought of this conversation.

  "What business?”

  "My name is Zachary Black," I say. "And I think I can help you there..."

  I pinch the bridge of my nose and wince. Am I really doing this? Is this who I am now? A voice in my head goes, yes, and I launch into my spiel. I explain to him how he might be able to save his business. It surprises me how easily the words fall off my tongue, given it’s against my natural instincts, or my best interest. I could have got my hands on some prime real estate if I just let his company fail, and yet, there is something in me, telling me to try and help. Where no one else would.

  "I just don’t know if we have the capital to start turning things around," he admits. "Don’t get me wrong, if we had had this a few months ago, maybe even a year, it would have been different, but now…"

  "I’ll put up the capital," I reply at once. Like I said, there are more ways than one to skin a cat.

  He becomes utterly silent.

  I can hear the static of his sharp exhale over the line. He can’t believe what I am offering him.

  "You mean that?”

  "Yes," I reply. "I’ll put up half-a-million, and you can start rebranding and rebuildi
ng from there, but you’ll have to keep me in the loop, so I know the money is being put to good use.”

  "Yeah, of course we can," he replies at once, then he hesitates again. "Can I ask you something? And trust me, I’ve heard all that stuff about looking a gift horse in the mouth, so you don’t have to remind me about it, but why the hell are you doing this? You’re the predator who hunts companies like mine down and tears it to pieces.”

  In all honesty, I’m not even sure why I’m doing this. It’s a huge risk, handing over this much money to a business that has already proven it’s not exactly adept at keeping its head above water ‒ but the thought of just leaving a proud old family business to sink even though it would be so easy to turn the company around ‒ suddenly seems so wrong.

  I might not have had this kind of help when I was getting started, but Christ, I’d have given just about everything to have a little hint of it. I have always been reluctant about helping out people in similar situations as me, just because I felt like I had to work so damn hard and long for whatever I got, why should I make it easy for anyone else?

  But that was before I met Scarlett and found out that life is not all about profit. Recently, her voice is always at the back of my head, asking me if this is the kindest, or the most useful thing I could do, given the circumstance.

  I know Tom Bilson’s business hasn’t failed yet, and with my help, there’s a good chance that they’ll stay afloat and even thrive.

  "Hello?”

  Tom’s voice draws my attention again. I snap back to reality. "Yeah, I’m still here. I guess you can just put in down to the fact that you got me at a good time. But of course, I’ll expect to be paid back with interest, and I wouldn’t say no to stock either."

  "Well, sure as heck you’ll get paid back in both cash and stock!" he exclaims.

  I can hear the giddiness in his voice. When I first heard him speak, he sounded like a man with a noose around his neck. Now, he is suddenly full of confidence and hope again.