by Jana Aston
“Right.” And with that he tosses the manila envelope he’d had tucked under his arm onto the countertop and begins unpacking the grocery bag. “You need to sign those, but first I’m making dinner and then we’ll talk.”
Fuckity fuck, that was fast. Apparently my husband doesn’t lack initiative. Initiative is a trait that comes in handy when you need the trash taken out or a piece of furniture assembled. It’s not a trait that comes in handy when you’re trying to buy some time on your annulment. “Dinner, wow.”
“I’m a very busy man, Payton. I’m multitasking.”
“Of course. And we should talk. Absolutely,” I agree as nonchalantly as possible while side-eyeing the hell out of the envelope. “So many things to talk about.”
“You don’t have anywhere to go this evening, I presume?” Vince asks, eyeing my pajamas again. I’m wearing my favorite of the sheet pajamas. Lydia made them out of a vintage sheet with a bright floral pattern. They’re super obnoxious. I’ve paired them with a grey tank top that says ‘I just want a hug,’ underneath a sketch of a porcupine.
“Nope.” I shake my head and wiggle the envelope with my fingertip. It’s large, the size of a sheet of printer paper.
“Are you sure? Do you want to double-check your calendar? I’d hate for you to have to run off without a bra again.”
“Don’t be old. I put it on in the car.”
“Glad to hear it. I’d hate to think of you running around Las Vegas without one.” His gaze drops to my chest. I’m definitely not wearing a bra right now and my breasts are most definitely appreciating his appearance in my house. “I assumed you’d have a corkscrew?” Vince questions as he pulls a bottle of red from the bag. “Pots and pans?” He looks as though he’s second-guessing the idea that I might own cookware. He’d be correct to second-guess it, but I live with Lydia so we should be good.
“What are you making?” I move behind the kitchen island to dig out the corkscrew for him, placing it on the countertop next to the bottle before scooting around him to grab the glasses.
“Chicken and pasta.” He shrugs out of his jacket and hangs it on the back of a kitchen chair before tugging at the knot of his tie. “You okay there?” He smirks, likely because I’ve stopped what I was doing to watch this tie-undoing. There’s something very, very enticing about the flex of his fingers, the veins running along the back of his hands as he works to loosen the knot and pull the material free of his collar. Why is that so stupid hot? I need to get a grip or this night is going to end the same way the previous two nights ended.
Wait, that’s what I want though, right? A night that ends in orgasms?
I do want that, but I want to talk too. Definitely. Maybe not about our pending separation, but things. I’d like to know how he feels about cats for example. And if he’s read any good books lately. If he prefers the Summer Olympics or the Winter. What his favorite movie is. If Saturday night was the best or worst night of his life.
I know he likes tacos. And pizza. And cooking. And giving oral. I know he’s not into tattoos because he married me to prevent me from getting one and I couldn’t find any on him. I know he thinks before he speaks and I know he likes me, at least a little.
He thinks I’m funny. And exasperating. And bossy. And beautiful, he said that I was beautiful.
It’s not the worst start in the history of starts, but I’d like to know more.
I pull out a stool and sit down at the island countertop so I can watch Vince work. It occurs to me once again what a shit wife I am. I don’t cook. I don’t give blow jobs. I haven’t asked if he needs anything dropped off at the dry cleaner. I don’t wear sexy lingerie. Maybe I should change? To be fair, the blow job thing is not my fault. I did offer that first night. I meant to yesterday but he distracted me with his tongue and that was that. Gah, I’m just the worst.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Giving you a blow job.”
“Yeah?” Vince responds easily, as if we’re talking about where the cutting board is. “Do you have a list of specific requirements for how you’d want that to happen?”
So he’s open to the idea, is what I’m hearing. Maybe he’ll want to date after the annulment and he’ll fall in love with me? It’ll make a great story for our grandchildren.
“You say that like I’m demanding.”
“You are.”
“I’m extremely easy-going! Everyone says so!” No one says that, actually. But it’s probably just because it’s never come up. It’s not as if I go around asking people if they think I’m easy-going, but if I did, they’d say yes. Probably. At least everyone except Vince would.
“You have a very easy-going way of getting your own way,” Vince states as he sets a pot of water on the stove to boil.
I suppose I can see where he might think that. That might even be a fair assessment. I’m really self-aware. I need to add that to my list of positive attributes.
“So for the blow job, can I tie you up?”
“No.” The answer is firm, his lips twitching like the question was amusing.
Humph. “Can you tie me up?”
“How are you going to give me a blow job if you’re tied up?”
Dammit! Worst. Wife. Ever. “I suppose without my hands it’d be more like you using my mouth to masturbate while I did nothing, wouldn’t it?”
“What a visual you paint, Payton.”
“You’re still welcome to tie me up though. It doesn’t have to be tradesies.”
“Tradesies,” he mutters with a shake of his head, but he’s smiling as he uncorks the wine and pours two glasses.
“So, where do you see yourself in five years, Vince?” Might as well dive in with the talking.
He looks up from rolling back his shirt sleeves, a look of confusion flashing across his face replaced with an amused narrowing of his eyes.
“Excuse me? Is this an interview?” He laughs, placing a pan on my stovetop before rummaging through my cabinets for a bottle of olive oil.
“This is serious. You’ll be old and divorced. Think about that.”
“An annulment doesn’t count as a divorce. It doesn’t count as anything.”
“Try telling that to Britney. She’s gonna have that nineteen-hour marriage on her Wikipedia page until she dies. Wikipedia, Vince. That’s forever.”
“Okay, whoa. Let’s step back a moment here.”
“Do you need a wife with benefits?” I press on, because taking a step back doesn’t sound like it will get me anywhere.
“What exactly does that mean?”
“I have health insurance. Do you need health insurance? I could add you to my plan. It’s very reasonable, adding a spouse only costs like an extra two hundred dollars a month. It’s a really good plan, too. At least that’s what Lydia told me and she works in Human Resources so she would know. I’m no benefits package expert.”
“That’s not what the term ‘with benefits’ means.”
“Listen, in this case I think it’s exactly what that means. Society is the one who turned the word ‘benefit’ into something dirty.”
“So there’d be no sex in this exchange?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course there’d be sex.”
“Did you just talk yourself into a circle?”
“Maybe.” Dammit.
“Hmmm,” Vince murmurs. He’s slicing a tomato. He’s got chicken simmering in a pan and the noodles are cooking. I take a sip of wine and watch him work. He’s got a dishtowel slung over his shoulder, sleeves rolled back to his elbows, and I’d skip dinner and go straight to eating him for dessert if I wasn’t so hungry. Stupid salad.
“What’d you have for lunch today?” I ask, because I really want to know. A cheeseburger? A protein shake? Homemade tuna salad on rye?
“I had a lunch meeting at the Palm and I had the salmon.”
“With like…” I pause, not sure how to pry subtly. “Someone from your staff?” I might as well have asked what she was wearing.
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“With a client.”
Oh, a client. A high roller. Or tipper? What do they call a big spender in a gentlemen’s club? Well, whatever they’re called. It’s interesting. I never imagined Vince wining and dining clients during the day.
“What about tax breaks?” I burst out. “Married couples get tax relief, right?”
“So you’re suggesting a marriage of convenience? With sex?”
“Maybe?”
“I can’t imagine anything about you would be convenient for me.”
I mean, he’s not wrong. I huff and run my fingertip around the rim of my wineglass.
“Eloping is kind of a sample though, right?”
“How’s that?”
“Like a free trial? Like when Netflix wants you to try them out so they give you thirty days for free?”
“No.” Vince shakes his head. “Eloping is nothing like that.”
“How about like a sample at the grocery store? Like when they let you taste the cheese before you buy an entire big chunk of it?” I make a motion in the air with my free hand, attempting to indicate picking up a small bit of cheese with a toothpick, but I think it ends up looking more like I’m making a sock puppet.
“What?” Vince tosses something into the pan with the chicken before turning back to face me. “How is a cheese sample like marriage?”
“You know that saying? Why buy the cow when the milk is free? I did offer you the milk for free, if you’ll recall. So really this is all on you.”
Vince stares at me for a long moment then shakes his head. It’s not a little shake though, it’s a full headshake.
“I cannot fathom one single way answering that ends well for me,” he mumbles to himself as he turns off the stove and drains the pasta.
I shrug and get a couple of plates out and set them on the countertop before grabbing two forks and a couple of paper towels that I fold diagonally in half like fancy napkins. Then I move our wineglasses to the table and sit, watching him finish up in the kitchen.
“Maybe eloping is like a test drive, except you’re test-riding your spouse to see if they’re a good fit?”
Vince’s lips tug into a smirk. “I think that’s what dating is for.”
“Sure. Except the majority of marriages end in divorce and the general assumption is that all those couples dated first.”
“Right.” He eyes me between dishing up two plates full of steaming pasta covered in some kind of cheesy chicken concoction with a tomato slice on top. Super fancy pants compared to anything I’d have served.
“Arranged marriages have a much higher rate of success and those couples didn’t date at all! So I think my math-ing would tell us that dating is nearly irrelevant to the statistical odds of a successful marriage.”
“So you’re suggesting a social experiment in which strangers marry each other to see if the divorce rates improve any based on random pairings?”
“It wouldn’t be totally random. It’d be based on mutual coveting.” I grin but he doesn’t say anything. “Coveting is a fancy word for ‘lust,’” I add helpfully. “Passion? Ardor? Desire?”
“Deranged,” he replies. “It’s a fancy word for ‘crazy.’”
Chapter Eighteen
Since he’s already divorcing me I set about clearing my entire plate when he serves up his chicken pasta dish. There’s no reason to pretend I’m a delicate flower at this point, we’re way past that. I’m also still harboring a little resentment over choosing that salad for lunch and too hungry to care.
“So good,” I moan around a mouthful of pasta. “Did they let you sample this cheese you used or did you already know it was good?” I ask when I’m done chewing.
“I can’t tell if you’re serious or insane.”
“I’m just a real good time.”
“You’re something,” he agrees. He takes a sip of wine, observing me over the rim of the glass.
“Have you ever met anyone like me though?”
He pauses for a long time, watching me as if he’s giving this some real thought. “No,” he finally says. “No, I most definitely have not.”
“Have you ever been married before, Vince?”
“No.” He shakes his head, a single back-and-forth motion. I wonder if he thought about marrying Gwen. That was the name of the ex Staci mentioned.
“Yeah, me neither.” I shrug. “I’m afraid I might be terrible at it.”
“What makes you think that?”
“My parents are terrible at it.”
“It’s not genetic.”
“No, but it’s learned behavior, isn’t it? That might be worse.”
“You seem very much like a woman who can do anything she sets her mind to.”
“Hmm.” I like that. I like that a lot. “What about your parents? Are they still married?”
“They were never married.”
“Oh.” I stab my fork into a bite of chicken while I imagine all the possibilities of what that means. Maybe it’s something very tragic, like his parents were madly in love but his father died while his mother was pregnant. Maybe he was on a military mission or in a car accident while on his way to pick up a crib. I wonder if it makes Vince sad, whatever it was. I take a bite and observe him, wanting to know more but sure I don’t have any right to ask.
“My mother was a stripper and my father was no one worth mentioning,” he says after a couple of minutes of silence as we ate. It’s like he can see the curiosity swirling around in my brain. Or maybe he’s already familiar with my vivid imagination and decided to nip whatever visions I was having in the bud.
“Oh.” It takes me a moment to process what he said. “Was?” I question. “Is she, um… has she passed?”
“Yes.” He doesn’t look sad, exactly. Vince doesn’t give away much, I’ve found, but there’s a definite poignancy that flashes across his eyes, a quick blink. “It’s been a long time.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“Did she teach you how to make this?” I stuff another bite into my mouth. I wonder if he’d like to be roommates if nothing else. I am good at doing the dishes when Lydia cooks, so I’m not a total deadbeat roommate.
“Not this specifically”—he smiles—“but she taught me to be self-reliant. She used to tell me she was my mother, not my maid.”
“Smart.”
“She was. She would have liked you,” he adds. Then he blinks, looking surprised that he said it, that he revealed something he hadn’t meant to.
“Do you have any siblings?”
“No, it was just me and my mom.”
“Where do you go at the holidays then? Thanksgiving? Christmas?”
“What?”
“If you don’t have a mom? Or a family? Where do you go?”
He looks at me for a long moment like my questions fascinate him. I think they’re pretty ordinary questions but maybe he’s not used to being asked such things.
“I work a lot during the holidays. Sometimes if I’m”—he pauses here as if he’s not sure how to phrase this part—“with someone, we might travel.”
Right. When he’s with someone. Someone who is not me.
“You can come here for Thanksgiving if you want. If you’re not with someone, that is.” I use my fingers to air-quote the word ‘someone.’ “If you’re home, you can come over. I won’t even ask you to cook, because Lydia will do everything. I’ll probably peel the potatoes or something.” I frown, thinking about how Thanksgiving is a couple months away and perhaps Lydia won’t be making Thanksgiving dinner in our apartment. We’d planned on it, discussed it when we made the move to Nevada, deciding it would be too expensive to fly home and we wouldn’t have enough vacation time to make it worth a trip. But things change and she might be officially living with Rhys by then. She might want to have Thanksgiving there, not here.
“Does peeling potatoes make you sad?”
“Ha, no.” He’s very observant of me, I’ve noticed. Observant in general. I lik
e the way he pays attention to me. “I was just thinking that Thanksgiving might be at Rhys’ place instead of here. I don’t think he’s going to want to part with her after spending an entire month with her, because she’s amazing and Rhys isn’t a total idiot. So who knows, she might be living with him permanently by then and they’ll want to have Thanksgiving at their place instead of here. Which is fine.” I wave a hand to indicate the fineness of the entire situation and add a little shrug with my shoulder because by fine, I mean it’s only sort of okay, because I thought Lydia and I were living together this year. “Does Rhys have a real kitchen in his hotel suite, do you know?”
“He does. They all do. But I think they order everything from the hotel kitchen. They might just cater Thanksgiving.”
“Oh, no. Lydia would stroke out before she allowed that to happen.” I shake my head vigorously. “Girl Troopers don’t cater. She’ll be making pies from scratch and creating a centerpiece out of something she rescued from the Goodwill. But anyway, you can still come. I bet it’ll be the best misfit Thanksgiving ever!”
“Thank you, I appreciate the invitation.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Tell me how you got kicked out of the Girl Troopers.”
“How do you know about that?” I drop my fork onto my empty plate and gape at him. I might joke about it, but only with certain people because I’m actually very sensitive about it. It’s the Achilles’ heel of my childhood.
“Canon told me.”
“Canon knows! How does Canon know? Does everyone know?”
Vince’s eyes spark, his lips pulled into a smirk. “I’m joking. You told me. The other night.”
“Oh.”
“So?” he prods. “Tell me.”
“It’s embarrassing.” I slump in my seat.
Vince leans forward, bracing his elbows on the table and leveling me with a stare. “When I was eight, my mom took me to Disneyland. It was a really big deal because we didn’t have a lot of money. By which I mean she couldn’t afford a hotel in Los Angeles and tickets to the park, so we drove there and back in one day. Four hours each way in the car so she could give me an afternoon at Disney.” He takes a sip of wine and shakes his head. “And then I punched Tigger in the nuts.”
