by Ali Parker
“Are you ready?” Neil asked Kristo, and Kristo glanced at him and nodded. His eyes had taken on a glassy hue, as though he was having trouble thinking straight. Neil straightened his shoulders, put his briefcase on the counter, and clicked it open.
“Then, we’ll begin.”
Kristo jerked his head for me to join them, and I tried to ignore the pit in my stomach that told me this conversation was going to blow my life wide open, and there was nothing I could do to stop it happening.
46
She looked so worried, I found myself wanting to go to her and comfort her, to tell her everything was going to be all right, but the truth of the matter was that I had no idea how things were going to be. My lawyer had called me up when I had been out trying to figure out what the fuck I was going to do next, and he had sounded seriously worried.
“Wait, let me just grab a beer first.” I held my hand up to stop him. I had no idea what was going to come out of his mouth next, but I had a feeling it would be a whole lot easier to handle if I was at least a little drunk.
“Could I have a glass of water?” he asked, and I poured him one and handed it to him as I cracked open my own bottle and took a swig. Amaya reached for it, and I couldn’t help but grin as she took a swig, despite the clear annoyance directed at me written all over her face. I didn’t blame her. I’d just hit the bricks out of nowhere as soon as my father had been out of there, but if she knew what had been going on in my mind, there was no way she would have expected me to stay.
I had just walked as soon as I was out of the apartment, driving to the center of the city and walking around for hours until my legs hurt and my body ached, and I knew I had no choice but to go home and rest for a while. It felt as though the world had come tilting out on its axis in the last few hours. I had lain there in bed with her and been so sure, so utterly convinced, that I was in love with her, and the world had seemed a whole lot brighter as I focused on that, on what we could build together as soon as I got up the nerve to tell her. I would have told her that morning over breakfast if it hadn’t been for the rude arrival of my father and the reminder that whatever I believed I was feeling for her, it was only going to end badly for the both of us.
Because my father had believed he was in love, and now his world was falling apart, and he was rounding the corner of his fifth divorce. Five times, he had believed it would work out, and five times, it had broken down despite his best efforts. How many times would he put himself through it before he gave up? Whether it was him or the woman, things always went to shit, and he had fought long and hard and simply proved he couldn’t make love last. And if he couldn’t do it, then I was arrogant to think I had some kind of special key that would make it work for me.
Still, I found myself grinning at her as she handed my bottle back to me, our fingertips brushing for the briefest moment. I remembered last night so vividly, a redo of that night we had ended up married, and I would have gone back and done it all again if it had led to this moment. Despite the uncertainty, despite the doubt, I loved her still. I just didn’t know what the hell to do with that knowledge. Or how she felt about me.
Neil took a long drink of water and then started pulling out papers from his briefcase. He had sounded shocked on the phone, and I had offered to come down to the office the next day to take care of it, but he had insisted this was the right choice, that he needed to speak to both Amaya and me at once.
“Okay, so I was looking over the papers you’d given me,” he began, and he glanced up at the two of us and paused, as though he really didn’t want to be having this conversation and would have done anything to get this over with.
“Yeah, of course.” I nodded.
“In order to set up a trust fund for Amaya’s sister and to confirm the details of the, uh, other contract, I needed to confirm that the two of you were married,” he continued, and my heart started to beat a little faster. Amaya shot a look at me, and I knew she was stunned by the discovery that I was setting up the fund for Jolene. I knew it was a lot and that she had never asked for anything like it in the whole time we had been together, but there was no way I was letting that girl not get taken care of after I was out of the picture. My nonna would have killed me even more than she would for the divorce if she discovered I had just kicked Jolene to the curb at the end of this year.
“So I had to confirm the exact details of your wedding,” he went on. “And I tried to. I went back to the hotel you were staying at and contacted as many of the local registries as I could.”
“Yeah?” I prompted him. He was shuffling papers nervously as though the last thing he wanted was to have to come out with the next part of this. He was never normally this withholding, straight-to-the-point by his very nature.
“And I couldn’t find anything,” he blurted out at last. My heart stopped.
“What?” Amaya demanded. Her voice was a mess of emotion, anger, betrayal, confusion, upset. I knew how she felt, but I couldn’t get a word out.
“Eventually, I started looking beyond the registries that were currently functioning,” he went on, ignoring Amaya’s question. “And I found this one.”
He pulled a piece of paper from his briefcase and slid it across the table toward the two of us. Both of us lunged forward to look at it. My heart felt as though it had slid down all the way into my shoes, and it was taking everything I had in me to stay upright and not just keel over on the spot. Amaya put her hand on my shoulder for support, and I took a swig of my beer, hoping it would take the edge off. It didn’t.
I scanned the document as quickly as I could. It appeared to be a copy of a marriage certificate between the two of us signed by a witness who had presumably been present at the time. I glanced up at Neil again, furrowing my brow.
“Yeah, what about it?” I demanded. “What’s wrong with this?”
“There’s nothing wrong with the marriage certificate,” he told me, picking it up and putting it back in his briefcase so we were both forced to look at him again. “But the company that issued it to you.”
“What are you saying?” I demanded impatiently. I just wanted to know one way or the other what the hell was going on, yet Neil was playing this as though it was a reality TV show and we had another ad break before he could give me the news.
“Fantasy Registry was shut down a few weeks ago for violating marital law in the USA,” he explained, pulling a news article he had printed off from the papers in front of him and handing it to me. “They never had a license to marry people.”
Amaya staggered back from the counter, and I felt as though someone had punched me in the mouth. This couldn’t be happening. There was no way in hell, not after everything that we’d been through together, no chance, no way, no—
“So you’re saying …?” Amaya breathed, clearly putting the pieces together at the same rate that I was. Neil nodded, and then he finally spoke the words I had been praying I wouldn’t have to hear come out of his mouth.
“You’re not married, and you never have been,” he finished up for her in his traditionally brusque manner. I had hired him because he was no-nonsense, but right then, I could have used a little pussyfooting around.
I turned to Amaya and saw she had gone nearly gray. I wanted to reach out and hold her, but I couldn’t. I was rooted to the spot, frozen, and I felt as though the world was splintering to pieces around me as I stood there and looked at the woman I had been sure was my wife. She opened her mouth, lifting her eyes to look at the two of us, from me to Neil and back again.
“We’re not married?”
And as soon as she spoke the words, the situation switched into high gear. This was just about to get seriously complicated.
47
I lay next to her in bed and turned to look at the sleeping woman next to me.
Just a few hours before, I would have described her as my wife in my head, and I would have liked that. It might have seemed silly now, but just knowing she was my other half, that the two of u
s were bound in a sacrament that was deep and old and important, made me feel better. I had done a lot of things wrong in my life, that was for sure, but marrying Amaya was something I’d managed to do right. Even if I had only achieved that by stumbling ass-backward into a wedding while the two of us were too drunk to stand.
But since my lawyer had come by, I knew that wasn’t true. We had never gotten married. Well, we had gone through the motions and made like we had, but in fact, that marriage wasn’t valid thanks to the place we had gotten it from. They had been conducting illegal ceremonies for months and had long-since had their license stripped by the time we got to them, but they had gone through with our wedding for whatever reason. Now, the two of us were coming unstuck at the seams since it had come out.
I brushed a strand of hair back from her sleeping face, and she turned her back on me and faced the other side of the room with a little snuffling sound. I sighed. Even asleep, she didn’t seem to want to face up to what had happened. Not that I blamed her. This was hellacious, the worst thing that could have happened to the two of us. I had gone into this marriage because I needed someone to cover me with my family and get them off my back about settling down, and she had needed the cash I’d offered to stick around. It had been a perfect arrangement until it hadn’t been.
Maybe this was appropriate. After all, we had been conducting this fake marriage after a fake wedding. Everything about the relationship was fake, fake, fake, and realizing that stung deep down in my soul in a way I hadn’t expected it to. I wanted to lie down next to her, to pull her into my arms and keep her close to me, but that wasn’t how this worked. Now that we weren’t married, I had no idea what the rules were. Those gray areas we’d been exploiting together seemed to drip away, leaving the two of us with nothing but grief and hurt for what might have been.
I had no idea how she was able to sleep at a time like this. I felt as though my eyes had been peeled open, and they were never going to close again. As soon as the lawyer had finished up and gone, I had turned to her, eyes wide. Before I could so much as say a word, she had ducked into a long shower and left me by myself. I waited for her in bed, but as soon as she emerged, she draped herself in her nightgown, slipped beneath the sheets, and closed her eyes, letting me know without words that she wasn’t going to talk about this no way, no how. She had been faking sleep at first, I could tell that, but now her chest was rising and falling steadily, and I was jealous she had been able to let go enough to get some rest. It was already close to morning, and the most I had managed was some fevered half-sleep. I turned my gaze to the window where the sun was beginning to creep in opposite me, and normally, it’s brightness would have soothed me a little. Today, it was a glare, a torch turned on the dark truth behind the two of us that I had never wanted to come out.
What happened now? That was what had been running through my head over and over again since I had found out the news. Did we break up? The contract that had been keeping her here had to be null and void now that it had turned out we weren’t even married. That wasn’t even taking into consideration what she wanted now that things had begun to move between us. Because we hadn’t kept this strictly platonic, despite efforts on both our parts to do just that. Just a few weeks ago, Amaya had told me she loved me and packed her stuff to leave. I’d managed to coax her back, but in doing so, I had found myself falling for all the things about her I had tried to ignore for so long. Her sweetness, her kindness, her sense of humor, how humble she was, how smart. How good she looked in a dress. It had been all too easy to slide into these feelings for her when she was around all the time, and the two of us had picked up where we’d left off with our physical relationship. Even now, lying in bed next to her, I found myself wanting to wake her with a kiss, to guide her on top of me and forget any of this had ever happened.
But I wasn’t sure she would want me to lay so much as a finger on her now that we weren’t married. Perhaps she would cut that all off and leave. But we were so entangled in one another now, emotionally, physically, financially, and familially. Both our families had met and promptly formed bonds with each other, and to cut them off from that now seemed unnecessarily cruel. Or maybe I was just looking for reasons to keep her around. I glanced down at the ring on her finger, the glowing gem I’d purchased for her just a week before reminding me of how sure I’d felt of her and of us, and my stomach churned. I tossed the covers back and climbed out of bed. I was doing no good sitting around here and brooding. I needed to get myself a coffee, and then perhaps I could work out what it was I needed to say to her.
Because I wanted her to stay. That was what all of this had been about, really. The ring, the contract, the money—whether or not I would have admitted it to myself, I wanted nothing more than for this woman to become a part of my life. Would I have married her so soon? No, and in fact, if it hadn’t been for the wedding, I likely would have run screaming in the opposite direction from the thought of commitment with a woman like her. But she was here, and I had fallen for her, and the thought of her slipping through my fingers because of some stupid mistake somebody else had made was enough to make me want to yell in frustration.
I headed through to the kitchen to make myself a coffee and wait for her to wake up. I needed something to brighten my senses, take the edge off that lack of sleep, and hopefully, by the time she came down, I would know what I needed to say to her.
An hour later, I hadn’t moved an inch except to pour myself two more pots of coffee. I was getting jittery, and I knew I should stop, but I couldn’t. I just needed something to keep me going. I felt as though I was rooted through the floor, but all this excitable energy was shivering through my system as I waited for her to wake up and come to the kitchen to find me. She couldn’t sleep through all of this, no matter how hard she tried. Some part of me wanted to remain in a state of stasis as well, but this wasn’t how it worked. We didn’t get to escape from the truth that easily. I set my mouth in a hard line and waited for her to come out, and finally, I heard her footsteps and she emerged.
“Hey,” she greeted me, her voice tiny as she just stood there for a long moment. And for that moment, I felt as though my brain had been rendered mute by everything I needed to say to her. Feelings were yelling over the top of one another, filling my head till it hurt to think, and I looked down at my coffee and cursed the caffeine for this.
“You want a coffee?” I finally offered her, and she nodded. I carefully poured her a small cup. She took a long sip and closed her eyes, savoring it as though it might be the last time she ever tasted it. Which I supposed it might if this marriage thing really was over and she was done with me. My heart picked up the pace again at the thought, and I glared down at my hands, willing myself to say something, do something to keep her here.
But nothing was forthcoming. I had spent so long hiding from love that when it appeared right in front of me, I had no idea how to ask it to stick around, and now I was paying for that. She was staring at me, waiting for me to come out with something, and I was just standing there in the middle of the kitchen like a dumbstruck idiot with nothing to say to her.
Finally, I reached out for her and pulled her into my arms. She didn’t protest for a moment. In fact, she seemed to step into my embrace with something close to relief like this was what she had been waiting for this entire time. I closed my eyes and pressed my face into her hair, inhaling the sweet, familiar scent of her, willing myself to say something now that I had her here. But my brain was still empty. I held her tight, cradled her familiar body in my arms, and hoped that everything I needed to say was coming through in the way I was holding her. We had been through so much, the two of us, and I needed her to stay. Facing up to this alone was hellish even in theory, and I wanted her by my side to do it, no matter how crazy it seemed. I could feel her ring on the back of my neck, the symbol of a bond that had never existed, and I closed my eyes and focused on her here with me. She wasn’t leaving. Not yet, at least.
When she p
ulled back, I reluctantly unwound my arms from her and looked her in the eyes. I could see that hers were glassy with tears, and knowing she was hurt made my chest ache. She stared at me for a long moment and finally spoke.
“Can we keep your family away for a while?” she asked softly. I knew at once what was going through her mind. This shock had been heavy enough that it would be hard not to let it show in front of the people who knew us best. I nodded.
“Anything you want,” I promised her, and I pushed that same stray strand of hair back behind her ear once more. She leaned into my chest, and I held her close. What the hell were we going to do once the truth was out?
48
I drove to work and tried to remember the last time I had been so relieved to be getting to my job.
Since the lawyer had dropped the news, Kristo and I had been going through the motions. Polite, sure, but that was it. Neither of us seemed to be able to muster up the energy to talk about what had happened, and frankly, I was more than all right with that. The thought of admitting this was real, that this was happening after everything we’d been through together … no. I couldn’t handle it.
The only time either of us seemed to be honest with one another was when he hugged me in the kitchen the morning after. But as I held him, I couldn’t tell whether he was holding me to let me know he needed me here, that he wanted me to stay, or if it was, in fact, just a hug goodbye. The thought of that made me choke up all over again, and I pushed it through the back of my head. No. I couldn’t let myself get stuck on that, not today. I had so much to do, so much to distract me, and I didn’t want to give away the tiniest bit of what was going on in my head.
