My Ex's Wedding: A Fake Boyfriend Romance

by Annabelle Costa

  A smile twitches at his lips for the first time since that night I saw him at The Glass Shoe. “You poured it over his head?”

  “Yeah. And there was a lot of it. I kind of soaked him.”

  “So basically,” Alex says, “you defended yourself against getting sexually harassed and got fired for it.”

  I shrug.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s illegal,” he says.

  “Funny, nobody is excited to take on a case for a girl who has zero money.”

  “Some lawyers work on contingency.” When I look at him blankly, he adds, “That means you only pay them if you win.”

  “I don’t know,” I mumble.

  At that moment, the plane jerks in the air. It feels like we hit a bumpy road in the sky. There’s a ding and a light has gone on, instructing us to put on our seatbelts, although I’m not convinced a dinky seatbelt will be effective if we drop forty-thousand feet out of the sky. I may as well tie myself to the seat with a string of licorice. Still, I dutifully sit back in my seat and buckle my seatbelt with shaking hands. It’s just turbulence. Not an engine going out. We’re not going to plummet to our fiery deaths.

  Probably.

  Alex is eyeing my fingers, which are gripping the armrest so tightly, they’ve turned white. “Are you scared of flying?”

  “No.”

  That smile again, just barely touching his lips. “Yes, you are.”

  “I’m not!” I loosen my fingers just enough that they stop tingling. “I just… like, I don’t understand what’s keeping this plane in the air.”

  “Airplane wings are shaped to make air move faster over the top of the wing,” he says. “When air moves faster, the pressure of the air decreases. So the pressure on the top of the wing is less than the pressure on the bottom of the wing. That difference of pressure creates a force that lifts the wing, as well as the rest of the plane, up into the air.”

  I blink at him a few times. “Oh my God, how do you know that?”

  “I don’t know. Doesn’t everyone know that?”

  “No.”

  “Well, now you do.”

  Except I couldn’t repeat what he just said to save my life. I’m not sure if it reassures me much either. I’ll be reassured when this stupid plane lands and I’m not dead.

  “Listen,” Alex says quietly, “thanks for helping me out at security.”

  I turn to stare at him. Is he actually thanking me or is this some sort of fear-induced hallucination? He’s not looking at me, just looking straight ahead, but that could be because his neck doesn’t move very well.

  “Also,” he says, “I don’t want you to pretend to be my girlfriend.”

  The plane has stopped jerking and the seatbelt sign flickers off. My heartrate reluctantly slows down. “Alex…”

  “There’s no way I can stop you from coming on the trip at this point,” he says. “And… I admit it might come in handy for you to be here.” He takes a breath. “But I don’t want you to fake having feelings for me. It… it makes me feel like shit. So, please. Don’t do it.”

  He doesn’t sound angry anymore. He’s resigned to what’s going to happen. “So who should I say I am? I mean, if someone asks.”

  “Christ.” He shuts his eyes for a moment. “They’ll probably all assume you’re my nurse. But yeah, if they ask, just say you’re a friend. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I agree.

  His eyes dart in my direction. “Thanks, Nellie.”

  “No problem.”

  He chews on his lip. “Can you put my headphones back on?”

  I glance at the headphones, lying on his lap. They are inches away from his hand, but that doesn’t help him. “You really want to watch this movie?”

  “Sure. Nothing else to do.”

  I’d been hoping we could talk. But I have a feeling he just wants to be alone with his thoughts, so I put the headphones back over his ears and try to take a nap.

  Chapter 16

  Alex

  We’re staying at the Venetian Hotel.

  I can’t imagine a worse choice if I tried. There are lots of things I have to worry about in a given hotel—if the room is wheelchair accessible, if the elevators are functional, how I’m going to open the door to the room, etc. But in this hotel, I get to worry about my wheelchair possibly careening into a body of water. At any other hotel, I’d at least know that no matter what, I’d be on dry land. Instead, we’re staying at a hotel where the ground is a fucking waterway.

  Nellie, on the other hand, is charmed by it. “They have gondola rides!” she shrieks. “Inside the hotel!”

  She’s almost as excited as she was when she saw our seats in business class.

  “You’ve never been to Vegas, huh?” Doug is amused by her excitement. I am too, but the water is making me too uncomfortable to focus on anything else.

  “Never.” Nellie shakes her head. “And look! The people steering the gondolas are wearing black and white striped tops… with fedoras!”

  Doug grins at her. “If you want, we can get a ride on one of them.”

  “But how will Alex get down there in his wheelchair?” she asks.

  Doug blinks at her a few times, confused. It was a genuine question on her part. She doesn’t get it.

  “He meant the two of you would go on the gondola,” I explain to her. “I obviously wouldn’t be able to go on it.”

  “But why not?” A crease forms between Nellie’s brows. “Maybe if we ask…”

  I don’t want to go on the gondola. Not like this. My heavy power wheelchair would sink it for sure, so it would have to stay behind. But there’s no kind of back support in the gondola, so just sitting up in the damn thing would be a challenge. Maybe they could rig it up, but it would almost definitely be a big production that would make me wish I’d stayed on dry land.

  But back in the day—before—it would have been fun. I can imagine hopping onto a gondola with Isabelle and cozying up to her as the gondolier steered us through the waterways. It would have been romantic.

  “It’s okay,” I mumble.

  Except Nellie’s not giving up. This is the most aggravating woman I’ve ever met. “They probably have some accessible location where—”

  “I’m not going on the fucking gondola, okay?” I snap at her. “You couldn’t pay me a million dollars to get on that thing.”

  She flinches and takes a step back. So much for our tentative truce from the plane, but she needed to be shut down. I can tell how hard she’s trying to be nice to me, but somehow, that just makes it worse. I like it better when she’s a bitch to me. Because if I’m a jerk to her and she’s still nice, I know she’s only doing it because she feels sorry for me.

  I miss when women used to feel things besides sorry for me.

  Doug got Nellie an adjoining room to the one he and I will share. He slips the bellboy a twenty for helping us with our considerable luggage (amazingly, none of which got lost), then starts pulling out supplies we’ll need for the first night, which quickly takes up the entire bed. As for me, I watch him since I obviously can’t help at all.

  “Nice hotel, huh?” he says.

  “Yeah.” Aside from the fact that I have a twenty-five percent chance of drowning in the next few days.

  I wonder where Isabelle and Parker are staying. I bet they’ve got a gigantic suite somewhere. Actually, I hope they have a gigantic suite. With separate bedrooms. Is there any chance Isabelle is saving sex for after the wedding?

  No, there’s no chance of that. Parker has definitely fucked Isabelle. I have to accept that. But maybe I can still keep him from ruining her life.

  “You feel like gambling a little?” He lifts the freezer bag filled with my pill bottles from my carryon bag. “Or we could go to a bar and get a drink. Some of the guys from Coleman are meeting downstairs…”

  I don’t know why he would even suggest this to me. Is he out of his mind? The last thing I want to do is hang out with a bunch of my ex-colleagues so they could gawk at me
and make awkward conversation. “That’s okay.”

  “Or just the two of us.” Doug flashes me a smile. “What do you say?”

  “I’m really wiped, Doug.” I guess it’s easy for him to forget it takes me three hours to get ready in the morning, so my PCA had me up at the crack of dawn to be on time for our flight. “I just want to go to bed.”

  “It’s only nine!”

  “And I’ve been up since six,” I remind him. “And I didn’t sleep on the plane, like you did.”

  “Come on…” Doug rubs my shoulder. “Just an hour downstairs. It’ll be fun.”

  I am tired—that much is true. But also, I don’t feel like going downstairs. I don’t feel like going to a card table and having Doug help me attempt to gamble. I don’t feel like having everyone stare at me. And I don’t want to risk running into that group of Coleman guys and getting coerced into having a drink with them. I’m here to talk Isabelle out of this goddamn wedding, and that’s it.

  “Please just get me into bed,” I say.

  Doug lets out a sigh, but he does it, like I knew he would. We start the whole night time production. Brush teeth, swallow pills, swap urine bag for larger nighttime bag. Even though Doug is experienced with this, the process still takes a fair amount of time. Time that he could be downstairs having fun, but instead he has to spend it taking care of me.

  “Leave the shirt on,” I say as he starts to remove my shirt. I’d rather sleep in it, just in case it gets unexpectedly cold.

  “Whatever you say.” He shrugs then leans me against his shoulder, grabs the waist of my pants, then shifts me over to the queen-sized bed in one swift pivot.

  The benefit of traveling with Doug instead of my parents is he’s strong enough to do a dependent transfer without a lift. I can’t help at all, even to put my arms around his neck, so he has to do a hundred percent of the work. Luckily, it’s something he’s done many times before, so I’m not nervous he’s going to drop me.

  Doug stretches out my legs for me. We’d both rather skip this process tonight, but I know my limbs will be tight as hell tomorrow if we do. My nighttime routine isn’t negotiable.

  “Do you want to watch TV?” he asks me. “I can put it on for you.”

  “How late do you think you’ll be out?”

  He shrugs. “Couple of hours.”

  If Doug turns on the TV and sits me up, I’ll be stuck like that till he returns. “I think I’ll go to sleep now.”

  “Are you sure? It’s still pretty early.”

  “Yeah.” I glance at my phone, which is charging beside me on the nightstand. “I’ll have my phone. Maybe I’ll listen to an audiobook.”

  “Okay.” He glances at the door to the adjoining room. “I’ll leave the door between the rooms unlocked, in case Nellie needs to come in to help you. I’ll let her know I’m leaving.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” I say as Doug fits one of my wrist splints onto my right hand. Aside from family and my PCAs, nobody’s seen me in those splints.

  “For fuck’s sake, Alex, she’s here to help.”

  I don’t want her in here, but Doug unlocks the door and there’s not much I can do about it. Given Nellie and I aren’t exactly BFFs, I’m sure she won’t be eager to come in here.

  Doug leaves the room, dimming the lights enough that I’m not in complete darkness, but I could sleep if I want to. I’m not going to lie—it makes me nervous as hell to be all alone in this hotel room. At home, I know all I have to do is instruct my phone to “Call Mom” and my mother will be in my room in minutes. This comes in handy when, for instance, I wake up at three in the morning with a pounding headache that turns out to be from a clogged catheter. Granted, I can call Doug, but he’ll have to get all the way back to the room. And what if the bar is noisy and he doesn’t hear the phone? What then?

  I should probably get Nellie’s number. Just in case. I hate to ask, but since she’s here, I may as well take advantage.

  Even though I woke up early and I’m lying down, I don’t feel quite tired enough to sleep. I compose a text message to my mother, letting her know we’re safely at the hotel. Just as I send it out, the phone rings. I recognize the ring tone as that of my boss at Techmark, Zachary Milton. I better answer this one.

  “Hey, Alex!” Milton’s voice booms through the tiny speaker on the iPhone. He only has one voice volume: loud. “How’s it going? Didn’t interrupt anything important, did I?”

  “Nope,” I say. As I mentioned, Milton knows nothing about my situation. And since all our interactions are on the phone or online, there’s no reason for him to know. It’s none of his business. “What’s up?”

  “I wanted to congratulate you.” I can hear Milton’s smile on the other line. I know what he looks like only from his photos on the company website—he’s tall with a shock of white-blond hair. “You’ve got the number one sales this month—again!”

  “Thanks.” I grin to myself. Maybe I don’t have the mobility I once did, but I still know how to talk to people. It feels good to be successful at what I do.

  “So I’ve got a proposition for you,” Milton goes on. “And I’m not sure if I’ll take no for an answer.”

  I laugh. “Okay, shoot.”

  “You made that huge sale to that company in Toledo, right?” he says.

  That was one of my biggest sales. It took a lot of sweet talk on my part. “Damn straight.”

  “Well, they love you, Warner,” he says. “And they want you to come out there and talk them through the product. Help them with the setup. And they said if they’re happy, they’re going to double their order.”

  My breath catches in my throat. Go out to Toledo? Meet the people I was talking to on the phone? It’s out of the question.

  “I, uh…” I clear my throat. “I don’t think I can…”

  “I had a feeling you’d say that,” Milton says. “But like I said, I’m not going to take no for an answer. This is a big deal, Alex! You’re my number one sales guy right now, but I need you to occasionally touch base with the clients. That’s why I don’t outsource my sales.”

  “Zack…”

  “You want to advance in the company, right?” he presses me. “All my other salespeople make these trips occasionally. Now, I admit, you’re kicking their asses without doing that. But think how effective you’d be if you were face-to-face with the clients.”

  “Uh…”

  “All your expenses will be paid.” Damn, Milton isn’t giving up. “I’ll even fly you first-class—how about that?”

  He has no idea. If I were capable of doing this, I’d be jumping at the opportunity. Of course, if I were capable of it, I’d still be at Coleman, earning ten times as much. Anyway, I’ve got to shut this down. Even if I worm out of this trip, he’s going to keep pushing me.

  “I can’t do it, Zack,” I say.

  He lets out an irritated huff. “Give me one good reason why not.”

  “Well, the thing is…” I swallow, bracing myself. “I’m… um, disabled. So, you know, traveling is difficult for me.”

  There’s a long pause on the other line. “You’re… disabled?”

  “I use a wheelchair.” I almost choke on the words, even though it’s a watered-down version of my limitations.

  “Oh.” For once, my boss’s voice sounds muted. “I had no idea. Did… did you tell me that before?”

  I didn’t. “I’m not sure.”

  “Shit,” he breathes. “Shit, I didn’t know.”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “Well,” he murmurs. “I guess… you’re probably right. It’s better you don’t go.”

  “Yeah,” I mumble.

  “Sorry I was bugging you… I didn’t realize…”

  “It’s okay.”

  Another long silence on the other line. I predict all the easy interactions I used to have with Zachary Milton will now be awkward. But my sales are good, so my job is probably safe. For now.

  “Well, uh, enjoy your night then,”
Milton says.

  “Thanks.”

  I close my eyes in the silence of the darkened room. I knew I’d eventually have to disclose my disability to Milton if I worked there long enough, but it wasn’t a fun conversation. At least he doesn’t know all the details. But I suspect a time will come when that too will come out.

  Then again, what’s the point of concealing my disability? It’s part of who I am. If I keep my mouth shut, I’m just putting myself in uncomfortable situations where I’m asked to do things I’m not capable of. I may as well be honest.

  I hear a knock at the door connecting our room with Nellie’s. I feel like shit right now and the last thing I want is her company. “Don’t come in!” I call.

  Sure enough, the doorknob turns and the door swings open. So much for privacy.

  She bursts into the room, her short black hair loosely framing her face. Her skin has been wiped clean of makeup, which makes her look younger somehow. She’s wearing an oversized T-shirt, and I can’t help but wonder if she’s still got shorts on underneath. That thought effectively stifles my anger for a few moments, but then it returns.

  “What the fuck?” I snap at her.

  She blinks a few times. “What? You said to come in.”

  “No, I said don’t come in.”

  “I only heard ‘come in.’” She smiles at me, flashing that crooked incisor. “If you didn’t want me in here, you should have said ‘go away.’ That would have been harder to misinterpret.”

  “Okay, go away.”

  Except Nellie doesn’t budge. She looks around the room, taking in the two queen beds, the desk, the large-screen television, oblivious to the fact that I want her gone. “Your room is bigger than mine.”

  “Well, it’s for two of us.”

  She stops looking around the room, and instead, her eyes rest on the splints strapped on my hands. The look on her face is exactly why I didn’t want Doug to keep the door unlocked. Her eyes rake up and down the one hand resting on my thigh and the other resting on my stomach. I wish I could hide them under the covers, but Doug placed my arms on top of the covers so that’s where they remain.