The Roommate's Baby

by Penny Wylder

  Mandi, my roommate and best friend, walks in and plops down on the couch beside me. She looks worn out and stares at the blank TV screen with her brow furrowed.

  We’ve been friends most of our lives, and surprisingly, we’re still friends after rooming together for a year. She’s the worst when it comes to cleaning up after herself, so I do it for her. Which is a fair trade considering she makes more money than I do and picks up my slack when I can’t pull my weight with the bills. Weird thing is, I don’t even know exactly what she does for a living. Whatever it is, she always has money. Lots of it. I’ve asked, but she always manages to skirt around the answer. My guess would be stripping. In the last year she’s gotten breast and butt implants, her lips done, and hair extensions. Each time she gets some new augmentation, I ask her why, and she always says, “It’s for work.” What other kind of job requires that kind of upkeep?

  I don’t push her for answers because a. It’s none of my business, and b. I don’t want her to feel ashamed.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask, when she continues to sit there without saying anything.

  “Oh, just work stuff.”

  I raise my eyebrows as if to say, ‘That’s all you’ll give me?’

  “Alright. If you want to talk about it, you know where to find me,” I say and get up to go to my room.

  “Wait, Sylph.” I stop and turn to face her. She looks worried.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “I need a big favor.”

  I slowly walk back toward her and sit on the couch. The tone of her voice tells me I might not like what she has to ask. “With what?”

  “Work stuff.”

  My eyebrows shoot up. Is she finally going to reveal what she does for a living? A tendril of nervousness coils in my stomach. If I’m right, and she’s stripping for money, what could she possibly need my help with? I certainly don’t have the assets she has. I barely fill my B cup bra; my ass is shapely but small. I’m not exactly built for the kinds of things I fear she might ask me to do.

  “What kind of work stuff?” I ask hesitantly.

  She cringes, and now I’m scared. “The kind where you pretend to be married to someone.”

  I just sit here, blinking, wondering if I heard her right. “You want me to pretend to marry someone …” I test out the words to see if they make sense when I say them out loud versus the way it sounds in my head. “… for money.”

  This is a thing? I’ve never heard of it before and I can’t believe Mandi has kept it from me all this time.

  Mandi shrugs. “Easy, right? And the pay is good.”

  Just thought of marriage, pretend or otherwise, fills me with anxiety. I was married before, when I was eighteen. Divorced by the time I was nineteen. It left a bad taste in my mouth and I don’t ever want to go through anything like that ever again.

  “I’m sorry, Mandi, I can’t.”

  I start to stand, but she grabs my arm, her eyes pleading. I’ve never seen her desperate like this before.

  “I know it sounds crazy, and I would never ask you to do something so bizarre if I weren’t absolutely desperate.”

  “This is your job, pretending to marry people?”

  “Believe it or not, it’s a high-demand business. And ten thousand dollars per week isn’t bad pay.”

  I choke on nothing. There is literally nothing in my mouth and yet it feels like I swallowed a jawbreaker. “Ten thousand a week? That’s what these men pay you?”

  All the things I could do with ten grand a week flash through my head. Mostly images of Greece come up, but there are other things too, like rent, and my phone bill, and food. I imagine stress-free days lounging on the couch instead job hunting. I can stretch 10k long enough to figure out what I’m going to do with my life.

  “How long do the jobs last?” I ask.

  “A few weeks, usually.”

  A few weeks. Again, my head is flooded with images of more money and less problems. How hard could it be to pretend to marry someone, unless …

  “Do you have to sleep with these men?”

  “God, no. I’m not a prostitute. All you would have to do is meet with the guy, come up with a plan about your history together, meet the family or the people he’s trying to either impress or get off his back, have a pretend ceremony to make those people happy, then when the client is ready to exit the marriage, you part ways with a fat check in hand.”

  “I guess that sounds easy enough,” I say.

  Maybe too easy. The guy is probably a troll. Anyone who has to pay someone to pretend to be their fiancée must need a bag over his head to get laid, but I suppose that doesn’t matter. I don’t have to sleep with him. All I have to do is pretend to be his bride and I get paid more in a few weeks than I have in a year.

  “I’m in,” I say. Though the money sounds amazing, I’m still skeptical. It sounds too good to be true.

  Mandi squeals and wraps her arms around my neck in a bone-crushing hug. “Thank you so much. You’re saving my skin.”

  Mandi goes over the client’s information with me. Heath Starre is a billionaire heir for a huge international real estate development company. He’s never been married, has never had a real girlfriend of any kind. I bet he looks like Lord Farquaad from Shrek: short, so hairy he would be shot in the woods during hunting season, and probably an honest-to-god asshole too. People with that kind of money don’t have to be nice. All they have to do is wave some bills around and people will do whatever they want. I can already picture the kind of shit-show I’m getting myself into. I just have to keep my eye on the prize. I need that money. Do it for Greece, Sylph.

  “You ready for this?” Mandi asks.

  I shrug. What choice do I have? My job prospects are basically nothing and I’m drowning in debt. If I’m not careful, I’ll find myself homeless, or worse, back at my parents’ house. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

  “Good. I’ll arrange a meeting for you at his office. He’ll go over the details for the background of your relationship and the things he needs you to do going forward.” She sounds far more excited about this than I feel.

  “Okay.” I square my shoulders and take a deep breath. “Let’s do this.”

  2

  Heath

  I look down at my watch again. I’m surprisingly nervous about meeting with the woman who I’ve hired to be my make-believe wife. Her name is Sylph. It’s a different name. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anything like it before. I wish I knew more about her going into this since I’m going to have to spend several weeks with her—or more, depending on how long my family decides to stay in town. I can’t help but wonder what she looks like. Probably plastic. Big fake breasts, bleached hair, too much makeup, too much surgery. Maybe I’m being too harsh or too judgmental about her looks, but that’s just what I picture a girl-for-hire would look like. That might be what most men in my financial position prefer—a swimsuit model with a thirst for the finer things in life—but that’s not what I’m interested in.

  Those tend to be the types of women who throw themselves at me at any given time. I can’t go to the gym or dinner with potential clients without women shoving their numbers in my pockets. Those aren’t the kind of women I would ever dream of calling my wife. I want someone who’s down to earth, who I can have actual conversations with, who sees more than a bank account when she looks at me. I’m starting to think maybe a woman like that doesn’t exist.

  Maybe this was a bad idea, hiring someone to pretend to be my wife. I got the idea from a friend of mine who hired a girl because his dying grandmother wanted to see him happy and married before she passed. He said the process was easy and the girl was reliable. But will she be a good enough actress to fool my family? By nature, my brother and sister—twins a couple years younger than me—are suspicious. Neither of them have real jobs, and they don’t contribute one minute of their time to the family business, but they are very concerned about the money.

  Whenever I’ve had girlfriends in the pas
t, the twins are always the first to interrogate her. I guess that’s a good thing because they are like bloodhounds and have a knack for sniffing out gold diggers. But I know they don’t do it out of the kindness of their hearts or to make sure their older brother isn’t being taken advantage of. They’re concerned about me getting married without a pre-nup and losing half my fortune to an ex. I’m the heir to my father’s empire and when he dies, I will be in charge of their allowances and they want to make sure no one messes with that.

  I straighten the papers on my desk, check my tie for the tenth time. When I look at my watch again, it’s exactly ten. I take a deep breath. It’s time.

  3

  Sylph

  The man sitting behind the desk is not who I’m expecting. This can’t be him, but this is the office the secretary led me to.

  “Hi …” I say timidly as I step into the pristine room. It’s a stark gray space with a few shelves with books on them. One of the walls is a big blue print. Everything is modern and sleek, made with different metals and hardwoods. I feel under-dressed in my t-shirt and jeans. “I’m looking for Heath Starre. I think the secretary may have sent me to the wrong office.”

  The man behind the desk looks up at me. His blue eyes pierce through the shadows under his deep-set brow. His features are starkly handsome, a razor-cut jawline, straight nose, high cheekbones. It’s the face of a demigod, a replica of Achilles cut from marble. When he stands, I have to look up to meet his gaze. I doubt the top of my head would even reach his shoulders if I were standing right in front of him. He’s wearing an immaculate gray suit with a blue tie that makes his blue eyes stand out even more. Even though he’d been sitting, there’s not a single crease in his suit.

  The more I look at him, the more intriguing things I find about his face, like the little dimple in his chin, and the scar on his right eyebrow that cuts it in half. His dark hair is combed back, not a single strand out of place. I’ve never really thought about men in suits being attractive. I’ve always preferred a more rugged man, I guess. Could be because that’s what I’m used to. There weren’t too many billionaire business men where I grew up. But damn, this man wears that suit well and he might very well be the sexiest man I’ve ever seen.

  “I’m Heath, and you’re late,” he says.

  I’m taken aback by the curtness of his words, though I’m not sure why I’m so surprised. He’s so crisp and polished, it makes sense that his personality would be the same.

  “Am I?” I look down at my phone screen. “It’s only ten-oh-five.”

  “Our meeting was at ten.”

  I watch him carefully to try and figure out if he’s joking. He’s not.

  “In business you’re either on time or you’re late. Half the time you’re even late when you’re on time. It’s always best to be early,” he says.

  I wonder if that stick up his ass is made of platinum or gold.

  “Oh. I’m sorry. I’ve only worked fast food. If you’re late, you’re still there before your boss.” I smile and try to lighten the mood. This is not going at all how I expected. I was expecting him to be a hideous troll and that’s why he needed to pay for a bride. Now I see that it’s just his personality that keeps him single—definitely not his looks because he’s gorgeous.

  I clear my throat when he presses his lips together, unmoved by my attempt at humor. He has probably never worked at a fast food restaurant and therefore wouldn’t understand.

  “The bus was late this morning. It’s normally on time. It won’t happen again,” I say.

  “Don’t you have a car?”

  “Um, it’s in the shop. Is that going to be a problem?”

  My car has actually been fixed for about a week now, but I couldn’t pay the mechanic, so he’s holding it hostage until I can come up with the money. I was planning on selling it once I got it back because insurance and gas are just more bills I can’t afford to pay.

  “I’ll arrange for your transportation,” Heath says.

  “Or I could just catch the train instead. It’s just down the street from my apartment and it’s never late.”

  I would’ve taken it, but it has this funk, a mix of body odor and grease traps that seeps into your clothes and is impossible to get out. I didn’t want to stink for our first meeting—I was saving that for the third and fourth meeting when it would be too late for him to back out.

  “No,” he says. “Once we go public with our relationship, I don’t want anyone seeing you on public transportation. I have a certain image to uphold.”

  Wow, what a snob. I wonder if he realizes how insulting that is to me. I’m guessing by the way his expression doesn’t change, he’s unaware. Oh well. He’s paying me, so it doesn’t really matter if he doesn’t think I’m good enough for his precious image.

  He reaches behind his desk into a filing cabinet and pulls out a folder the size of a text book.

  “I’ve compiled the details of our relationship. This is our history together. We need to go over a few things.”

  “You want me to remember everything in this folder?”

  “Yes.”

  For real? I know I have a stricken look on my face, and I know through my rocky history in school that learning everything in that folder is going to be nearly impossible for me, but I nod anyway and keep repeating ‘ten grand’ in my head over and over to comfort myself. When Mandi told me she had a job for me and then told me what that job would be, it sounded so easy. Just playing pretend. Like when I was a kid playing ‘house’, and there was the wife and the husband (usually a neighbor boy) and then we could get called in for dinner and go our separate ways. How hard could that be? But now it seems as though it’s actually work, and I’m going to have to earn every penny of that money.

  He slides the folder toward me. I pick it up and thumb through the pages. He watches me carefully as I skim through the details. This is going to be harder than I thought. Everything in here is exotic and so beyond my life experience that I wouldn’t know the first steps in how to play the part of this girl he wants me to be.

  As I turn the pages I see words like Cabo San Lucas, Carmel (not to be mistaken for caramel, which I’m very familiar with), Venice, and all these other places I’ve heard of but have never been to. I catch a glimpse of a page mentioning a Tiffany necklace he had made as a gift for me, and how we went scuba diving in the archipelagos of Con Son, Vietnam, and how he proposed to me on a fucking glacier near Juneau, Alaska. WTF is this life?

  I feel like I might puke. According to this we met in Belize at a five-star restaurant I don’t know how to pronounce. We looked at each other and it was love at first sight. The very night we met, he whisked me off on his private jet to Quebec, Canada where we ate strange, exotic food and made love every night. I’m really hoping that is just part of this story and not something I’m supposed to tell his family. There’s no way I’m talking about my sex life with anyone’s parents, even if it is a fake sex life.

  Says here I’m an assistant to a major fashion designer (he has a friend who will vouch for this if questions are asked) and enjoy the finer things in life. Only problem with that is I don’t even know what the finer things in life are to him. I know what that means to me: splurging on a lipstick at Sephora once in a while instead of Walgreens where I usually buy my makeup, and celebrating at Trujillo’s on special occasions with a $12 margarita. I have a feeling our definition of ‘finer things’ are worlds apart. I’m a simple girl from a simple town in Northern California where my family raised sheep on a farm and I spent my childhood barefoot in treehouses.

  Regretfully, I put the folder down. “I don’t think I’ll be able to do this job, I’m sorry.”

  His eyes narrow. “Why not?”

  “I don’t know how to be this girl.” I point to the folder. “I’ve never even been out of California.”

  He leans forward, clasping his hands together. God, he’s beautiful. It’s almost uncomfortable being this close to him. I feel the same way in muse
ums and art galleries, like I might taint a painting’s perfection by standing to close to it.

  “It will be impossible for me to find another girl on short notice. I’m a business man, I know how to negotiate. So let’s come up with a story together that we can both be satisfied with. How do you think our first date might have gone?”

  For me to even pretend to marry someone, our backstory would have to be romantic. It wasn’t with my first husband. We were thrown together by mutual friends on a blind date and we had a few things in common. I didn’t think he was all that handsome when I first met him—definitely not love at first sight, or even, hmm, he’s kind of cute at first sight. In reality, I didn’t like the way he looked. He was a couple inches shorter than me. He chewed tobacco, so his teeth were stained and his gums were receding so it made his teeth look way too long. There was something false about his smile, the way it never reached his eyes. I should’ve known something was up with his personality during our first date when he kept complaining about his food and sending it back to the kitchen. How he talked down to our waitress, then left only a penny for a tip after threatening to not pay the bill.

  Back then I thought he was a perfectionist, and that a man like that gets things done. I thought a man like that would be a good provider. I was wrong. In the short year that we were married, he’d been fired from three jobs and developed a bit of a drinking problem.

  “Well,” I say, trying to think of a scenario that was both plausible and romantic, “I suppose your job is stressful, so one day you decide to take a walk in the park to unwind.” He leans back in his chair, arms folded in front of him as he listens.

  I continue. “And I was in the park too. I’d been house sitting for a friend and was walking her unruly dogs when one of them got loose. You, seeing someone in distress, managed to wrangle the cocker spaniel and bring him back to me. I pay back your kindness by buying you a hotdog at a cart, and we end up talking all night under the stars.”