Accidental Forever: Fake Romance Box Set

by Hazel Parker

  Brett nodded, just playing along with the idea that he’d had anyone on his mind that day, the whole weekend, the past week, other than Anna Diaz. He noticed the knowing gaze that Josh shot her, and when she met it, he wiggled his eyebrows up and down suggestively, which made her laugh out loud.

  “Stop that,” she scolded, hitting him lightly on the arm, a move that he knew all too well from girls at bars: she liked him. A playful excuse to touch him, to tease him with a preview of how her hands might feel all over his body in the hopes that maybe he might decide that he wanted the full show. Brett forced a smile when Josh made eye contact with him.

  “So, Anna knew you when she was in college, did she?” he asked. Anna buried her face in her hands in mortification.

  “We lived across the hall from each other for a year, yeah.”

  Josh grinned from ear to ear. “I bet college-Anna was a real wild card, right?”

  “Josh, I told you, I was not!” she argued, faking outrage but giggling through it.

  “And I told you I don’t believe it for a second,” he shut her down. “You’re smart and cute; there’s no way you just spent all your time studying. I bet you were the life of every sorority party there was.”

  For whatever reason, Brett found his mood souring every moment that he spent in their break room. Though he’d looked forward to seeing Anna all week, he wasn’t excited and happy like he’d expected to be upon seeing her, but instead was feeling agitated and upset. Something about the way Josh talked to her annoyed him, and even though Anna didn’t appear to have a problem with it, Brett thought that was no way to talk to a coworker. At least, that’s the excuse he gave himself for snapping.

  “You sure do seem to know a lot about her,” he asserted irritably, wincing internally when he watched her face fall from laughing and enjoying herself to confused and embarrassed.

  “Excuse me?” she dared him to repeat himself at the same time that Josh was backtracking.

  “Oh, sorry, man; I didn’t mean anything by it,” he apologized. “I didn’t know you two were an item.”

  Anna glared. “We’re not,” she reassured. “Brett is just an old friend.”

  She was right, of course, she was technically right, but her tone bothered him. “You don’t need to say it like that,” he said. Anna blinked.

  “Like what?” she asked. She was giving him a warning stare, like she could already predict what he was going to say and wanted him to take it back before he even spoke the words.

  “Like being with me is such a disgusting thought,” he said. “I’m an okay guy.”

  “I never said you weren’t,” she said hastily, “but I do think you should stop talking.”

  He met her gaze for a long, awkward moment, but it wasn’t until Josh moved in his gaze that he realized what was really bothering him: Anna clearly liked Josh, and that meant that outside of their fake rendezvous, she didn’t think about him the way he went home and thought about her. That made sense, he thought. Anna had a busy, full life before she’d met Brett, and so adding him to it didn’t change a single thing. Brett, on the other hand, had been living the same way every single day for years, and now that Anna was back in his life, everything was different. There was someone to expect things from him, to hold him to a certain standard, to keep him from self-destructing.

  “Gramps is almost ready to go,” he decided to say, dropping the argument before he made fools of both of them at her workplace. “You’re almost off, right?” Anna nodded tensely.

  “Josh was actually about to relieve me so I could go.” Without saying another word, Anna stood from the table, leaving her coffee cup abandoned and half-full and leaving Brett and Josh alone together.

  Josh wrung his hands together uncomfortably while Brett shifted from foot to foot, neither of them knowing what to say.

  “Listen, man, I didn’t mean to say anything inappropriate about your girlfriend,” Josh apologized, seemingly not noticing when Brett winced at the term. “I honestly thought that you two were just friends.” He paused, waiting for Brett to say something and continuing when he didn’t. “She’s just always talking about how tired she is of being single; I just assumed—”

  Brett shook his head. “We are,” he reassured; “we’re just friends. I’m just…I’m just an asshole,” he gave a self-pitying smile, and Josh laughed.

  “No, you just have a problem with me making a move on her because you like her,” Josh corrected.

  “It’s not like that—”

  “Relax,” Josh curtailed, “it’s okay. Me asking Anna out was going to be a bad idea, anyway. We work together, and she’s obviously got a…complicated situation going on here. I’m glad that you stopped me.”

  A familiar-looking nurse walked past the break room, and Brett glanced at his watch and realized that it wasn’t just the fact that every minute stuck in this painful conversation felt like an hour: he’d left his grandfather alone for about ten minutes, long enough that his bath was finished.

  “No one’s stopping you,” Brett said sincerely.

  He could see Josh being Anna’s type: caring, smart, and obviously someone with whom she had a good time. He’d dedicated his life, just like she had, to helping others, and he wasn’t too bad to look at, either. After Brett was finished using her, he would have to let her get back to this, and if he ruined it for her, he couldn’t forgive himself.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “No buts,” Brett cut him off. “What we’re doing is just…a fling. It’s going to end, and she likes you; I can tell.”

  Josh smiled as if that were flattering news to him but didn’t let it go completely to his head. “She likes you, too,” he said, though Brett doubted that very much. “So…you know, don’t hurt her.” Brett nodded. If anyone stood to lose something here, it wasn’t Anna: it was Brett.

  Chapter Nine: Anna

  Anna left the hospice center the back way so that she could avoid running into Brett again before she had a chance to cool off. Part of her felt a little guilty for abandoning him to take care of his grandfather all by himself, but, she reasoned, there were other nurses that he could ask for help if he needed it, and besides, she’d been told that Eustice was having a great day. She missed seeing him, just like she did all the patients that she’d grown close to in her hallway, whether they’d been there for days or for months, but to have to converse with him every day even feeling the way she did about Brett…it was just too risky. She might let something slip, and at this point, she wasn’t sure whether that would be that she hated him more than anyone she’d ever met, or that she thought she might be falling in love with him. It changed from minute to minute, but no matter what the cause, her blood was boiling with the thought of spending the whole evening with him.

  She showered away the sweat and the antiseptic smell that always seemed to follow her home from work, then did her makeup while she waited for her hair to dry enough for her to curl it. For her makeup, she chose a natural look, nothing too bold so as to not draw attention to herself, but enough to cover up any dark circles under her eyes and to give her cheeks and lips some color. She finished her hair before changing into the dress, and it happened to be just in time, because almost as soon as she’d zipped it up in the back, the doorbell rang. Brett was here already. After taking a deep breath to try to calm her nerves and giving herself one more glance in the mirror, she exited the bathroom and opened the door for him, and both of them froze, staring at one another for a long, silent moment.

  Brett was dressed in a tuxedo: he wasn’t in the wedding party, but she supposed that fancy weddings were just like that, and though she’d feared being overdressed in what felt to her like a ballgown, she now realized that her idea of wedding attire would have fallen way flat and was grateful again she’d let Martha take her shopping. His hair was styled and slicked back pristinely, and there was no trace of the five-o’clock shadow that he normally couldn’t be bothered to shave.

  “You look amazing,”
Brett broke the silence, his eyes scanning her up and down, then back up to focus on her one uncovered shoulder. “I didn’t think you’d pick something so risque.”

  Anna blushed, feeling self-conscious. “Is it too much?” she asked desperately, suddenly nervous. “I have a cardigan I could wear over it, but—”

  “No, Anna; you’re fine; you’re gorgeous,” he reassured. “It’s not inappropriate or anything. I just didn’t expect to see you look so…hot.” The admission was as offensive as it was flattering, but in the interest of not starting another fight, she chose to let it slide.

  “Is your grandpa in the car?” she asked worriedly, hoping that he hadn’t left Eustice alone just to come pick her up at the door.

  “No, I dropped him off at the church already. Martha wanted to make sure that they were able to get some pictures with him, in case he gets tired and wants to leave early.” She nodded in relief.

  “Are we ready to go, then?” she asked, double checking to ensure that she had packed her wallet, keys, and phone in her clutch and following him out the door, locking it behind her.

  Brett drove without speaking, blessedly: she was happy just to listen to the radio in relative silence instead of having to fake pleasant conversation with him, and she knew that he was likely trying to avoid digging himself a bigger hole than he was already in. Though it wasn’t too far from her apartment, she didn’t recognize the chapel that they pulled in front of, but that wasn’t too surprising considering that she hadn’t been to church since she was a child. Once her dad had died, her mother had stopped taking her and her brother to mass even for holidays, and she hadn’t picked up the habit in adulthood. This church was much nicer, of course, than her old familiar one in Harlem. There were high stained glass windows and a big bell on top, the kind of picture-perfect sort of chapel that she’d always pictured that she might have her own wedding in someday. Once parked, Brett rushed around the side of the car to open her door before she’d even unbuckled her seatbelt, and she bit down on a smile.

  “Thank you,” she said begrudgingly, allowing him to take her hand gently to guide her through the parking lot. This was it, the wedding: she was officially his for the rest of the day into the evening, whenever the reception ended and he chose to take her home. She forced her smile and resigned herself to having it stay there for the foreseeable future as they walked into the chapel and sat down in a pew for the ceremony.

  Anna was good at dealing with crying people. She spent a lot of her days comforting the dying, their families, and sometimes even other nurses when they got particularly attached to a patient or when the overall stress got to be overwhelming, which inevitably happened sometimes. She always knew just what to say to make a person feel okay in their vulnerability and usually, she managed to calm them down without too much thinking.

  That said, Anna did not know what to say to Brett’s mother and father when, after the ceremony, both of them wanted to meet her, still weepy and emotional from having watched their only daughter get married. It was going to be uncomfortable enough, she thought, to keep up this charade when everyone was partying at the reception, but she felt her heart begin to flutter with nerves as she shook both of their hands politely.

  “You must be Ms. Diaz,” Brett’s mother greeted tearfully, her face still blotchy and red in spots.

  “Please, call me Anna,” she returned. “It’s very nice to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Riggs.”

  “Oh, the pleasure is all ours,” Mrs. Riggs said. “When Brett told us that he was bringing someone to the wedding as a date, we were a bit…well, we weren’t sure what to expect. But when he mentioned that you two were in a committed relationship! I just couldn’t believe my ears! We just couldn’t be happier, right, dear?” Though she’d prompted her husband for agreement, he gave nothing but a stoic nod, which seemed to satisfy her.

  “I hear a lot of good things about you both,” Anna lied. Brett told her next to nothing about his family, and the few things that Martha had told her weren’t exactly flattering, but Brett’s mother was already fluttering onto the next thought, anyway.

  “Oh, dear, I must look awful,” she muttered almost to herself. “I just know my makeup has run. You two, go on ahead to the reception; Jack and I will catch up.” Brett kissed his mother on the cheek before taking Anna’s hand once more.

  “I don’t think your dad likes me very much,” she observed, worried that perhaps she’d said something wrong. “He didn’t seem very happy.”

  Brett laughed lightly. “That’s Dad for you,” he shrugged. “He’s never happy. Don’t take it personally.” Choosing to not pry into that statement further, Anna followed Brett to the front of the pews where Eustice was still sitting in his wheelchair alone. Apparently no one had come to get him yet.

  “Hey, Gramps,” Brett greeted, patting his grandfather on the shoulder lightly. “What did you think of the wedding?” Eustice turned to them with an ecstatic smile.

  “It was beautiful; Martha looked so happy,” he gushed. His eyes flickered to Anna, and his smile widened. “Anna, sweetheart, I’m so glad to see you. Are you feeling better?”

  “Hello, Mr. Riggs,” she greeted, fumbling for a moment over the lie she’d told Josh to use to get her out of seeing Eustice. “I’m back to good,” she said. “You look great.”

  He straightened his tie with a teasing smile. “I still clean up okay, for an old coot,” he winked. “You, though, look beautiful as ever. Absolutely stunning.” Anna made an embarrassed, dismissive gesture.

  “Oh, stop,” she said bashfully. She looked around the room; it seemed as if everyone were clearing out to go to the reception, but it didn’t appear as though anyone was coming to get Eustice yet. “How are you getting to the reception?” she asked. “Are you coming with us?”

  Eustice shook his head. “No, no; you two go ahead. I’m going with my son.” He looked to the doorway and waved. “Here he comes, now.” Brett led her away after she said goodbye and didn’t reach for her hand this time because no one was going to see.

  The reception hall was somehow even fancier than the chapel, though in a much different way. It almost looked how she’d always pictured the dining hall of a fancy cruise ship, but with an enormous area in the center that had been left free of tables so that people could dance. There was a live band on the stage playing swing music quietly, all of them dressed up as if they’d attended the wedding themselves, and even though they’d come straight from the church, she and Brett weren’t even among the first people there. She hadn’t noticed just how packed the church had been, she supposed, because the reception hall was packed full of so many seats that she could hardly believe that all those people had attended the ceremony.

  “There’s assigned seating,” Brett noticed as they passed a seating chart in the doorway. “We’re at table one, with my family.”

  Anna tried to restrain a groan at the thought of dining with them, but when she saw Eustice’s name on the spot next to hers, she felt instantly relieved. Even if Brett’s presence wasn’t all too welcome right now, at least his grandfather would be a friendly face, plus, Mrs. Riggs seemed nice enough. Perhaps they’d go easy on her, or at least maybe the music would get louder as more people came and she could pretend not to be able to hear well enough to have to talk much. She spotted their table immediately, not only because it was the closest one, but because Eustice was just arriving to the table in his wheelchair, chatting with Martha. She didn’t see her husband, whose name she’d learned was Jake—he was probably making the rounds to see the other guests since Brett’s parents had left the table to socialize with other relatives.

  She let Brett pull her chair out for her, and she took her seat next to Eustice. For a while, they chatted idly about things like the weather. He told her a few stories from his youth, things about immigrating with his wife and changing their names to something that sounded more American, then striking oil, getting rich, and having children of their own. Not only did she love talking to him,
but every minute she spent with Eustice was a minute she and Brett didn’t have to spend chatting up his other family members, which was a relief. After a short while, the food was served, a few people that Anna didn’t recognize made speeches about Martha and her husband that Anna didn’t know them well enough to get, and they ate.