Pretend I'm YoursA Single Dad Romance

by Vivian Wood

  He watched her eyes flutter, full of calculations and misgivings. “Okay,” she finally said.

  Don’t push it too far, he thought to himself. One issue at a time.

  “So,” he said as the beignets arrived. He’d ordered the oysters for himself. He watched as she stared at the oysters and picked at her beignets. Harper began to spread the starter around her plate. “Eat it, don’t play with it,” he said.

  She took the smallest piece possible and slid it between her lips.

  As she swallowed, he said, “I accepted the job with Connor today.”

  “Really?” she said. Her eyes lit up and she speared another portion of beignet.

  “Yeah. I figured it would be good. Besides, if it doesn’t work out, it’s not like it’s that tough to get another job in a shop.”

  “Well. Good for you,” she said. The light in her eyes had faded. Why isn’t she more excited? She’d been the one to initially push after dinner.

  Harper put down the fork. “You need to eat more than that,” he said. “You barely touched it.”

  “I’m full,” she said sharply. “I don’t normally eat carbs.”

  He was taken aback by the sharpness in her voice. “Okay, calm down,” he said.

  She widened her eyes but didn’t say anything. Instead, she sipped on the martini with tiny slivers of ice that floated at the top.

  The waiter arrived and whisked away the appetizers before Sean could protest. When their steaks arrived, pulled out the black box that had been tucked inside his jacket and held it on his lap. “Harper, I didn’t bring you here just because,” he said. “There’s a reason.”

  “I knew it,” she said. She’d just scraped the butter from the steak and pushed it to the far side of the plate.

  “You know?” he asked. Maybe they were more on the same page than he thought.

  “You … you want to stop, right?” she asked. Harper rolled her eyes. “Break up, or whatever you want to call it.”

  “What? No,” he said.

  “No?” He saw the real Harper, the one that had been vacant from dinner simmer below the surface.

  “No, I … I think we need to talk about where this is going, though. You’re beautiful, and intelligent—”

  “This sounds like a breakup talk,” she said.

  “Don’t interrupt me,” he said.

  “Sorry, sir,” she said. Harper put down the knife.

  “What I’m trying to say is … well, I think this says it better,” he said.

  Sean put the box on the table and moved it towards her. Harper glanced from the box to his eyes, suspicious.

  The thick black ribbon fell off with a single pull. He watched her mouth open as she lifted the delicate rose gold choker. “It’s … it’s beautiful,” she said. “But I don’t understand …”

  “For you, I didn’t think a regular sub collar would be right.”

  “A sub collar?”

  “You know. Like the couple at Miss Mary’s, or at the rooftop viewing.”

  “You mean, like with a leash?”

  Sean laughed. “Traditionally, yes, a lot of people use a leash. It’s not really my thing, at least not in public.”

  “Oh. So does this mean—”

  “It’s my way of asking you to be my sub, exclusively. Monogamously.”

  “Just I would be monogamous?” she asked. Harper ran a finger along the thin gold. “I mean, I am, already. But …”

  “Both of us,” he said. “And, just for the record? I am, too. I have been since we met.”

  She looked down at the collar, her brow furrowed.

  “So, do you accept?”

  “I … I don’t—I have to go.” She stood up suddenly, the largely untouched plate before her.

  “Harper, what the hell? Where are you—”

  “I have to go,” she repeated, and started briskly towards the door, collar in hand.

  “Harper!” Sean started to get up, but instantly three waiters surrounded him.

  “I’m sorry sir, but you can’t leave. Not until the check is paid.”

  “Fuck off—”

  “Are we going to have a problem?” One of the waiters was massive, at least six-foot-five. He looked more like a wrestler than a waiter

  Sean sized them up and could see Harper had already exited out the front. There was no way he could take them all on. Rage boiled inside him, but there was a logical overlay that kept him in check. The last thing you need is to get arrested. Not now, not with everything else. Not with the new D.A. on the case …

  “No,” Sean said coolly. “Just take the goddamned card.” He shoved a credit card into the waiter’s chest.

  “Do you want me to box this to go—”

  “Fucking run the card!” Sean said.

  He paced back and forth while the fellow diners either stared agape at him or snuck glances between hushed conversations. Harper would be long gone by now, swept away in a taxi. If he knew her, and he thought he did, she wouldn’t go straight home either. She knew he’d follow her.

  That’s the problem. I thought I knew her.

  Sean looked towards the exit as the waiter slowly approached with the receipt in hand.

  How in the hell had that conversation gone so off-course? He thought she would have been pleased.

  He shook his head. Maybe I don’t know her after all.

  “Sir, your box?” the waiter asked.

  “I said I didn’t want—”

  But when he turned around, the waiter held out the black box to him. The collar. If she was so upset about his proposal, why did she take the collar?

  What the hell was she up to?

  29

  Harper

  She’d driven around downtown, then made her way to the Pacific Highway until the gas light flickered. By the time Harper pulled up to the house, all the lights were out.

  She kicked her shoes off on the front porch and tip toed to her bedroom.

  On her bed was a stack of brochures and a Post-It note with Helena’s elegant handwriting. “I’ve been there,” Helena had written.

  The brochures showed smiling, happy women behind bold fonts. ANOREXIA: THE SILENT KILLER. BULIMIA, NOT JUST PURGING. THE FACTS ON ORTHOREXIA. Each brochure carried a stamp at the bottom for in-patient and out-patient rehabilitation facilities in the area.

  No way, Harper thought. There’s no way I’m going there. I’d definitely be the fattest one.

  Still, something about it being the witching hour made her open them up, one by one. She’d expected them to be stuffed with stodgy information, shock material that had nothing to do with her. Instead, in each brochure, it was as if it was written just for her.

  “Do you avoid social situations because food and drink are often involved?” Doesn’t everyone?

  “Do thoughts about food or your size consume your thoughts to the point it interferes with relationships?” Well …

  “Have you used excessive exercise as a means of burning calories? Although ‘bulimia’ is often synonymous with purging (forced vomiting), purging is only one way bulimia may present itself. Many people are surprised to learn that bulimia is any method of ‘erasing’ calories by extreme measures. However, a lot of people who practice one method of bulimi (such as purging) also utilize other methods such as excessive exercising. A lot of people with bulimia also exhibit symptoms of anorexia, orthorexia, binge eating disorder (BED)—”

  Fuck.

  Harper picked up the phamplet on orthorexia. “Orthorexia is a relatively new term in the eating disorder (ED) community, and not technically an eating disorder—yet,” the brochure started. “However, it will likely be added soon. Orthorexia is an obsession with clean eating or healthy living. It’s the eating disorder that can hide in plain sight thanks to societal approval. You might suffer from orthorexia if you use popular diet ‘lifestyles’ or fads such as the Paleo diet, unhealthy trainings to intense degrees (such as running several miles daily to lose weight instead of genuinely trainin
g for a marathon)—”

  “Oh, my God,” Harper said aloud.

  Of course she’d known. Deep inside, she’d known since she was a teenager. Reading Wasted, it was like someone had opened up her insides and turned it into a book. But there were all kinds of excuses to be made and lies she could tell herself.

  “Not everyone with an eating disorder ‘looks it’,” warned another brochure. “Many people with an eating disorder might appear ‘normal’ or even overweight. You can’t judge whether or not a person has an eating disorder by their appearance.” Well, that’s just fucking great.

  Harper opened up her laptop and went to her usual thinspiration sites. Hidden in the underbelly of the internet were pro-ana forums and message boards. Here, girls—well, mostly girls—could find a dark solace amongst their peers. There were times these starving girls were Harper’s only allies. On days where she was tempted to eat more than four Atkins bars, low-carb, low-sugar and totaling just 750 calories, she could pour her heart out to them.

  “Don’t do it!” a poster would immediately respond. “You’re stronger than that.”

  The forums were where she’d learned the fastest ways to make herself vomit. And the importance of purging outside when possible, especially in older houses with plumbing that might not be able to handle it. “Remember, proper purging is done when food isn’t anywhere near digested. It can sometimes clog the pipes, and when a plumber is called it’s not just expensive, but a surefire way to expose you to whoever you live with.”

  She scrolled through the posts. Over twenty were posted in the past twelve hours. Girls shared their own thinspiration photos, photoshopped models with waists the size of their calves. Harper knew they were photoshopped, but that didn’t stop the desire inside her to mimic it.

  Other photos clearly weren’t. She could tell when someone was skeletal. I’m not that bad, right? she thought. Some of these girls were seriously fucked up. I don’t want to look like a skeleton. Not totally. Maybe just the shoulder and collarbone area …

  She’d always loved the look of the emaciated collarbone, deep enough you could serve soup from it. One of the girls in the house had broken her collarbone as a teenager. The result, in addition to being incredibly thing, was a collarbone that looked truly alien. It was beautiful.

  Harper picked up the brochure again. “Sometimes body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) can accompany an eating disorder. Although BDD is a separate mental disorder with its own markers, common signs include being unable to self-identify your own aesthetics. Anoretics in particular, when asked to draw an outline of their body to scale, tend to drastically exaggerate their size.”

  Huh. That might be true. There were days Harper was sure she’d become grossly fat. She could feel that her stomach protruded and the extra weight she carried in her ass. Yet as she double checked her jeans, that fit loosely, they were still a size zero. And numbers don’t lie. Do they?

  Jeans can stretch. They enlarge to fit. And then there’s vanity sizing. That’s why Harper tended to trust her measuring tape over anything else. Sometimes, when she looked in the mirror and swore she saw a double chin or rolls of fat, all it took was a few measurements to snap out of it. She’d look again, and suddenly she’d be a little more normal.

  She groaned and fell back on the bed. Helena was right. So were the doctors—not that she’d gathered the courage to see them in months. Every time she went, there was the scale. It wasn’t fair. Even though she always scheduled appointments first thing in the morning, so she could go in without eating or even brushing her teeth for fear of accidentally swallowing water, they only let her take her shoes off. She’d watch the nurse inch the scale upward and want to scream to take off her clothes. Otherwise, the weight wouldn’t be right.

  Then there were the doctors who looked at her chart, confused why she was “so tall and thin with cholesterol that increased with every appointment.”

  “Does high cholesterol run in your family?” one doctor had asked.

  “I … I don’t know.”

  “Huh. Maybe lay off the junk food and we’ll see next time.” Lay off the junk food? Fuck. If a doctor just called her fat, it was official.

  It didn’t matter that she’d researched “underweight and high cholesterol” only to find that it was a common side effect of anorexia. One that doctors didn’t realize unless they specialized in eating disorders.

  But if I stop, if I go to one of these places … I’ll get fat. She’d heard the stories. Tube-feeding and those things had 1,500 calories. No exercise allowed. They even served pizza and hamburgers, not even healthy food.

  I can’t do this any longer. She looked at the pictures of the smiling girls on the cover. No gaunt faces or biceps the same size as their forearms. She wanted that. That freedom, that joy, the ability to say yes to a dinner invitation from a friend.

  I’ll tell Sean the next time I see him. I swear I will. Even if he dumped her for it. She might have already messed everything up anyway, running out of the restaurant like that.

  Harper picked up the delicate collar and sat in front of the mirror. Engraved on the inside was, “For my sweetheart.” She ran her finger over the etching. It was stunning and fit snug. She wanted so badly to believe what he said. And the collar, it fit right. It looked right. She wanted to be his.

  But what if he can’t accept who I really am?

  30

  Sean

  “She just flipped, I don’t know,” Sean said. He looked at Ashton, tucked neatly in the crisp hospital linens.

  He’d arrived at the hospital as soon as visiting hours started at seven in the morning. Of course, his first thought had been of Harper—but after a restless night he still couldn’t figure out his next move.

  Was it the collar? The asking to be monogamous? How he’d forced her to eat? Maybe it was all of it.

  “I think … man, I think she has anorexia or something,” he said. “There are these clues, you know? But maybe it’s all in my head. The whole modeling thing and all.”

  Sean looked to Ashton for advice—not that he offered it up much back in the day. The more he thought about it, the more he realized they’d been drinking buddies at best. Even in college. But isn’t that how we all are when we’re teenagers?

  After last night with Harper, he’d started to think that maybe he never really knew anybody.

  “Anyway, I wanted to—”

  One of the machines hooked up to Ashton started to beep rapidly. Sean had never heard the sound before, and was sure he’d been around enough in recent weeks to be familiar with all the hospital noises.

  “Ashton?” he asked. “Nurse!” he called. The machine got louder. Sean searched the complicated wires for some way to call them.

  He scrambled to his feet and looked into the hallway. It was vacant, save for what seemed to be patients or visitors. “Fuck.”

  Sean jogged down the hall to the reception desk where a large woman was kicked back in scrubs covered with pictures of puppies. “I understand, ma’am, but you need to realize—”

  “Hey! Excuse me,” he said.

  The woman glared up at him. “I’m on the phone,” she mouthed.

  “I don’t fucking care! My friend is—something’s wrong.”

  “They’ll need to fax that order to us. Yes, I can tell you the number …”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Sean said. He wanted to reach across the desk and rip the phone out of her hand.

  “Can you excuse me for just one moment?” the woman said into the phone. “Sir, if you don’t calm down, I’m going to call security—”

  “Fucking call them!”

  “Are you alright?” Sean turned to see a tiny woman with an R.N. tag. “No! My friend is—”

  “What room is he in?”

  Details had slipped out of his mind. “He’s just right down there—”

  “Ashton Lee?” she asked.

  “Yes, how did you …”

  “We already have a team working on it.�
��

  Sean turned to leave, but she placed a child-sized hand on his arm. “You won’t be allowed in there,” she said. “They’re transporting him as we speak.”

  “But I was just there—”

  “The doctor was notified.”

  “Is he okay? Is he—”

  “He’s awake. Sir? Do you need to sit down?”

  Sean realized the fluorescent-lit walls had started to spin. “No, I … I’m okay.”

  “Would you like me to have someone call anybody for you?”

  Sean saw the woman on the phone glare at both of them.

  “No, it’s … it’s fine. Thanks. When … when can I talk to him?”

  “I don’t know, it’s too soon to tell anything. We have no idea yet what condition … well, nevermind about that. You can call and ask for updates any time you’d like. Are you family?”

  “No,” he said softly.

  “That’s okay. You can still get updates.”

  He was in a stupor as he made his way to the car. Ashton was awake? And what did she mean by “type of condition?”

  Sean drove to the apartment on autopilot. He wanted to call Harper, desperately. She was the first person he thought of. With his head in his hands, he heard the phone start to ring. It was like they were connected.

  But it was Bill’s name on the screen. “Look, I don’t have time for whatever this is—”

  “You’ll make time,” Bill said. “Did you know Ashton woke up?”

  “Yeah. How did you … it was just like an hour ago …”

  “The D.A. called me, that’s how I know.”

  “Oh. And?”

  “And Ashton’s pointing the finger at you for that night.”

  “Fuck.” Yeah, he was awake alright. And apparently pissed as hell.

  “This is … fuck, Sean. The D.A. is seriously taking a second look at charging you now.”

  “Has he?”

  “No,” Bill said, clearly exasperated. “Not yet. But obviously the statute of limitations are still well within bounds. He’s fucking mad, Sean. Ashton, not the D.A. The D.A. is thrilled.”