by Lauren Wood
I could feel it, though. It was written all over her face. She didn’t seem aloof, light, happy, and carefree like the person I had come to know since this whole crazy arrangement began. She was distant and distracted. She didn’t look at me the same anymore. With each passing day, I felt more certain that she’d actually go through with the marriage like she agreed to. Surely she would have told me by now if she was backing out. That should have put my mind to ease, but it didn’t. I was still a wreck, lost in my guessing games about what could be going on with her.
The most troubling part about it was that the concerns eating away at my gut seemed to have less to do with what it meant for our arrangement and me and more to do with what it meant for her. I was genuinely worried about her. I wanted her to be happy. The fact that she obviously wasn’t was driving me crazy, especially since every time I tried to confront her about her despondent behavior, she told me everything was fine and changed the subject.
I was so lost in my own thoughts that I didn’t hear the balcony door open behind me. It wasn’t until I heard his voice that I realized Eric had decided to come out and interrupt my solitude.
“I figured if you vanished from your own bachelor party, it’d be because you had snuck off with a stripper,” he quipped. “I didn’t expect to find you here.”
“There are no strippers here,” I miffed.
“Per your request, which is another thing I wouldn’t have expected.”
“I’m not in the mood for strippers.”
He nodded and leaned over the railing next to me. “You don’t seem to be in the mood for a lot of things here lately. Anything you want to talk about? Getting cold feet?”
I didn’t know how to explain that what I seemed to be feeling was the opposite of cold feet. I wanted this arrangement to work out for more reasons than I even seemed to understand anymore, while Maya wanted it less.
“I’m proud of you, Jesse. It was very admirable for you to set this whole thing up just to make our grandfather happy.”
My eyes widened as I looked over to him, trying to figure out if he was saying what I thought he was. What did he just say? Did he know?
I tried my best to play dumb. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“You don’t have to hide it from me,” he answered. “I know you went to the agency and set up an arranged marriage.”
“How? No. No, I didn’t. I met Maya at that exhibition like we told you. We’ve been dating ever since, and I…I love her,” I gulped, feeling funny as I said the words out loud. “I proposed to her and—”
He cut me off with laughter. “First off, you’re a terrible liar. Second, I remember when that exhibition was because Liz was in attendance. I know for a fact you weren’t there.”
I remembered what Maya had said about our story when we were figuring out what to tell everyone. “There were tons of people there. Just because I didn’t run into Liz there doesn’t mean anything.”
“No, I know you weren’t there because you were on a date with that Scandanavian model that night. You called me and told me all about it the next day, and you two definitely didn’t go to an art exhibition.”
He stared me down but was kind enough not to repeat the antics I had regaled to him from that evening. It was a wild night, and he was right. I had been caught.
“Who else knows?” I panicked. “Dominic? Jason?”
He slapped my shoulder in assurance. “Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me.”
I exhaled with relief. The last thing I needed was all of my brothers teasing me relentlessly for resorting to such measures. If any of them had to find me out, I was glad it was Eric. He was the only one who would really understand something like that, anyway.
“So, with that out of the way,” he added, “why don’t you tell me what’s really on your mind? Why are you out here sulking and missing out on your party?”
I shook my head cluelessly, not knowing where to start. “I don’t know. I’m worried she doesn’t really want to be doing this.”
“Of course she doesn’t want to be doing this. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? You don’t want to be doing it, either. You’re paying her. Anyway, I meant what I said before about liking her. She’s a great girl. If you’re going to pretend to be married to someone, you ended up with a good one.”
“That’s the problem,” I sighed. “She is a great girl. Maybe too great of a girl. Maybe I feel guilty about…”
“Not really loving her?” he suggested.
Something caught in my throat. I wanted to protest that I didn’t really love her, but I didn’t have to. That wasn’t in the contract. Love had nothing to do with this. But when it came to saying the words out loud—I don’t love Maya—I couldn’t say it. My inability to get the words out terrified me.
“Oh, I see.” A smug smile eased across Eric’s face.
“See what?”
“You really do love her. That’s the problem.”
Again, I tried to protest. Nothing. Apparently, my capacity to lie had run out, but I didn’t have to say anything. Eric had already figured everything out for himself, and there was no use trying to hide it. I told him everything and let him delight in the irony of me falling for my fake bride. It felt good for someone else to know besides me, even though I was only accepting it now, there on the balcony as I blabbered on to him. When my words finally ran out, he was quiet for a long time, looking to be deep in thought.
“Are you going to tell her how you feel?” he asked finally.
“No,” I said immediately. “Absolutely not. For one, she’d definitely back out. And two, I just started figuring out how I feel. What if it changes? What if the feeling goes away? Sticking with one woman has never really been a strong suit of mine, and don’t give me some bullshit about how everything changes when you find the one. Obviously, that’s not what’s happening here. I didn’t find her. I ordered her from that stupid agency, and that’s not how you find real love. I’m not too stupid to know that much.”
“I don’t know about that. Maybe you really are that stupid,” he teased. “Love is unpredictable and bites you in the ass when you least expect it. Take it from me or any one of your brothers. What I’m saying is, don’t be so quick to assume Maya couldn’t be the one for you. Life works out in funny ways.”
“No kidding,” I huffed as a sudden wave of exhaustion hit me.
I couldn’t wait for the bachelor party to be over so I could call Maya and make sure she was okay. As for my feelings for her, I was keeping that to myself. No good could come out of springing that kind of thing on her just days before the wedding, which was an absurd thought. You definitely want to tell the woman you’re marrying that you love her, right? Only I could find myself in this kind of a ridiculous mess.
22
Maya
I stood in front of a big mirror in the bridal suite as Vanna laced me into the beautiful wedding gown. The tighter the corseted top squeezed around my chest, the more I started to feel like I might get sick right there in front of everyone.
Liz was nursing baby Adrienne nearby, watching with excitement as I got ready. Margo and Tara were giggling over mimosas on the victorian sofa behind me. Apparently, they already knew each other. Small world, I thought. This level of the rich and elite was very small, as I was learning. It was a world I didn’t actually have much desire to be a part of, and now I had the freedom of wealth without obligation to any of these people. Yet, here I was anyway.
My face was drained of color. I looked pale with a tint of green, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Everyone had been politely trying not to notice my distress, but as the morning went on, my anxieties were becoming harder to mask and harder for everyone else to ignore.
“You okay?” Vanna finally asked, staring at my reflection. Tara and Margo stopped chattering when they heard her ask. They had wanted to do the same.
“You look like you might pass out,” Margo noted.
I wanted to tell th
em I was fine, which is all I had been doing for the past two weeks. I had been telling Jesse I was fine. I had been telling myself the same lie. When confronted by all of them while standing there in that big white dress, though, I didn’t feel like I could say it anymore.
“I just need a minute,” I answered through shortened breaths.
Vanna stepped back and let me sit in a nearby chair, which I practically collapsed into. They all clamored around me with concern. There was no hiding it anymore. It was obvious I was not the joyful, glowing, happy bride everyone expected me to be. They brought me water and aspirin and asked a flurry of questions all at once, none of which I could single out enough to understand.
“I…I’m just…I need—” I tried to stammer out some kind of explanation, but it only made it more apparent I was on the verge of a panic attack. I needed to get the hell out of there, but I couldn’t say that.
Tara’s face softened into her best comforting smile. “It’s okay. I got a little nervous before my wedding, too. It’s totally normal.”
I nodded and tried to catch my breath, but Vanna had a look that said she knew this was about more than just a few wedding day jitters.
“Jesse may be our family, but, you know, you can talk to us. You’re our friend now, too.”
Tears threatened to start streaming down my cheeks, but I knew it wouldn’t be a subtle, silent kind of cry. If I started crying at that moment, I would burst out into hysterical sobs. If I hadn’t had the guts to tell Jesse what was really going through my head the past two weeks, I certainly couldn’t blurt it out here to these women in this room right before the wedding. If I didn’t go through with this, it was his right to decide how to explain it to his family. This was obviously about more than just a contractual agreement or whatever my legal rights may have been. If that’s all it was, I would have bought my way out the moment my newly acquired millions hit my bank account.
Every day after we were at the hospital for Adrienne’s birth, I kept telling myself that would be the day I would tell Jesse everything. I would tell him about the money I inherited and that I was very sorry, but that it obviously removed any reason I had for moving forward with the arrangement. But each time I rehearsed the words in my head, a nagging question would follow. Did it remove any reason I had to move forward?
The answer that kept resounding through me was scary. No, I didn’t have a reason to carry forward with the arrangement, but what about the rest of it? Jesse would be screwed. This whole thing would be a total waste of his time, and even if he wasn’t furious with me, then what? I couldn’t imagine him saying, “Oh, that’s okay. Let’s just be friends.”
I would lose him. That was the thing that kept me quiet and the thing that was making it hard to breathe in my ridiculously expensive wedding gown. Vanna, Tara, and Liz gawking at me didn’t help matters one bit because all of that meant I would lose them, too. My fear of losing these people I had somehow come to care so much about in this short amount of time didn’t make it okay for me to walk down that aisle knowing that I didn’t really want to. However, it did make it impossible to see any other solution.
“Do you love him?”
Everything stopped. I didn’t even know who had asked the question, but it made everyone stop their frantic rush to see that I was okay. They all turned to me with wide, expectant eyes. We were all holding our breath.
“Yes,” I exhaled. My voice cracked, and the first tear finally escaped and made its way down my cheek.
There was a collective sigh of relief through the room. Saying I loved him didn’t calm my nerves. It made everything worse because, as I said it, I knew it was true, which brought another huge glaring problem to light.
If I walked down that aisle, it severed all possibilities of me telling Jesse how I really felt. If he felt the same, he would have said it by now. Even if he did feel the same, it wouldn’t be enough to make him want to give up his playboy lifestyle. Even though I knew I couldn’t play along with this fake marriage, given how I really felt about him, I also knew that I couldn’t confess my love after we had said the vows. It would make everything impossibly awkward. Someone was going to get hurt—probably me.
I would have to spend the next five years at least pretending to be married to a man who I really loved. We would kiss, hold hands, and pretend to share a life together. It was a cruel joke, but it turned out that the joke wasn’t on his family and friends, after all. It was on me. I was about to make the final commitment to torture myself with playing out something I might actually want but couldn’t really have.
My head kept spinning with all the impossibilities before me. There was no right way out of this and no way to protect my heart. How had I managed to let myself fall for this man? This whole stupid arrangement had made me let my guard down. I thought it would be so improbable to find love this way that I assumed it wouldn’t happen. I had rested in the comfort of knowing I would never be foolish enough to have real feelings for him. The very thing I thought was protecting me was what made me lose myself in him, after all.
I should have known by the way we kept ending up in bed together, or by the way my body buzzed when he was around. The way my heart fluttered when he smiled or held my hand. I felt breathless when his name scrolled across the caller ID on my phone. The moment I saw him standing on the sidewalk on the night we met, it was over. Some part of me fell for him right then and there, but I was so busy avoiding it that I buried myself in this deep dark hole. Now there was no way out.
“It’s time,” Margo smiled as the string quartet started playing from the ballroom.
The music echoed through the lavish halls of the building and seeped into my safe little hideaway. Soon, there would be nothing left to hide behind. Any options I had left were rapidly slipping through my fingers. I stood and braced myself, repeating in my head that I could do this. I could walk down that aisle. I felt like I owed it to Jesse.
What about me, though? What did I owe to myself?
23
Jesse
I stood at the altar, watching the door at the end of the aisle while everyone I had ever known was gathered in the room, watching me. Dominic and Jason were by my side, but Eric had gone MIA. Not surprising for him. He was as unpredictable as I was, which I’m sure is what everyone else was thinking as they stared at me. No one expected to be there watching me getting married, maybe ever.
I thought when the day came, I’d be happy to know that my grandfather was sitting in his wheelchair on the front row, beaming at me proudly. The doctors and our grandmother worried he wouldn’t be well enough to make it to the wedding, but he insisted on putting on his tux and showing up. It may have been one of the last big events he ever attended, and he was delighted that it was for the wedding of his last single grandson. His dying wish had been fulfilled.
The satisfaction that brought me was nothing compared to my nerves about seeing Maya walk down that aisle. Part of me wanted it to be real. I wanted to be making some grand confession of love to her in front of everyone, just not like this. Not while she didn’t know how I felt, and I had no way of knowing if she felt the same.
Even that was getting buried under layers of new fears as the clock kept ticking. She was supposed to be here fifteen minutes ago, and the crowd was getting restless. Their collective nervous shifting in their seats and the whispers echoing through the ballroom were only adding to my panic.
“I’ve got to go talk to her,” I murmured under my breath.
Dominic heard me and leaned into my ear. “She’ll be here. Don’t worry. The bigger question is, where is Eric?”
“He was here earlier,” said Jason. “I don’t know where he ran off to.”
“If she’s having second thoughts, I need to go talk to her,” I said again, not really talking to anyone but myself.
If she was unsure, would my confession make any difference? Was it even right to be doing this at all without telling her that I really loved her first?
I was
two seconds away from bolting out the door to find her to tell her everything, but then I considered what might actually happen. I had no reason to think this was anything but what we agreed to for her. Just an arrangement, a contract. Her weird behavior over the past couple of weeks probably had more to do with how little she actually felt for me than it did about her loving me back.
Then what? There was no way we could go ahead with this if she knew I had real feelings for her. If she wasn’t already backing out, she definitely would then. I glanced over to my sickly grandfather, who was doing his best to sit up straight in his chair. Even though he was so ill, he was smiling ear to ear. He seemed oblivious to the fact that everyone else was starting to have their doubts about whether or not Maya was coming. Then there was Dominic and Jason right behind me, who seemed to finally respect me for the first time in my life. Everything hinged on their seeing Maya walk down this aisle and seeing us say our vows.
I took a deep breath and stayed firmly planted at the altar. I would wait. Maybe I would tell her everything after, or maybe I wouldn’t. None of it changed the fact that I had to go through with this wedding. I would figure the rest out later, even if it meant a hasty, poorly explained divorce after my grandfather’s death.
Footsteps came scurrying across the red-carpeted aisle behind my brothers and me. We turned to see Eric, finally sneaking his way back in. He awkwardly smiled at the crowd as he worked his way to the front of the line, placing himself next to me.
“Where is she?” I hissed.
“Uh…just a touch of cold feet,” he said nervously. “Nothing to worry about. She’s on her way.”
“What kind of cold feet?” I fretted out loud.
Was it the same kind of cold feet I was having? The kind where we knew we weren’t supposed to feel anything for each other, but we did, and that made the whole wedding a million times more complicated. Everything was happening out of order. You were supposed to realize you loved your fiance before you proposed, and you were supposed to have the talk before you were standing in front of hundreds of family, friends, and acquaintances to commit to each other for life. At the very least, you should at least be on the same page with each other, and our page, as far as I was concerned, was now way off from any contract we signed.
