A Bad Case of You

by Taylor Holloway

  Faith McNamara [1:41 p.m.]: In her book that still beats a Protestant any day of the week. I nearly got disowned the time I brought home a Methodist.

  I laughed at my phone. Apparently, texting was the way to go with Faith. I’d learned more about her in the past five minutes than in the past five months. I guess she didn’t mind talking to me as long as she didn’t have to look at me while she did it. That wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement for my chances with her, but things were going so well that I decided to get really bold.

  Eric Carter [1:42 p.m.]: Well in that case, will you go out to dinner with me tonight? I really think we should at least get to know each other a little bit and talk before doing anything, and I promise to be on my best behavior.

  Faith took a very long time to reply.

  Faith McNamara [2:10 p.m.]: I guess so.

  Not exactly an enthusiastic reaction, but I knew that I was facing an uphill battle with Faith. I’d take whatever I could get.

  6

  Faith

  What does a woman wear on a date with her husband of exactly one day? I posed the question to Caroline over text. She texted me back almost immediately.

  Caroline Riley [7:01 p.m.]: Something very tight, short, and sheer.

  I stared at my closet full of scrubs. Eric had already seen my sexiest dress, I was wearing it last night. Everything else was Mass-appropriate or better suited for a daytime outing. I settled on black ankle pants, a button-down blue silk shirt, kitten heels, and a sparkly necklace. Honestly, next to scrubs anything felt and looked glamorous to me. I dressed, took a picture and texted it to Caroline.

  Caroline Riley [7:05 p.m.]: Looks pretty sharp. Are you going to consummate your marriage tonight?

  Caroline thought the entire idea of my real-but-now-fake marriage to Eric was completely hilarious, although she was put out that she missed it. Once she’d finally woken up from her hangover, I’d called her and filled her in on all the gory details. She’d laughed so hard that she nearly threw up again.

  Faith McNamara [7:07 p.m.]: Not a chance. I barely know him. I’m not that kind of girl.

  Caroline Riley [7:10p.m.]: You’ve known him for a year, you slept with him last night, plus you’re married to the guy. What kind of girl are you exactly?

  Faith McNamara [7:12 p.m.]: The kind that learns from her mistakes.

  Caroline Riley [7:13 p.m.]: Only you would describe waking up next to a guy that hot a mistake.

  Caroline was my friend, but she didn’t know or need to know about my unusual… condition. The truth was that I never intended to stay a virgin this long. It just never happened for me. I never met a guy that I liked enough to sleep with, and I guess I must have internalized some of what I heard every Sunday because I just couldn’t stomach the idea of giving myself casually away. I wanted my first time to be special, and with someone I really liked and trusted.

  Which was exactly why I wouldn’t be ‘consummating’ my marriage to Eric. He clearly saw me as a means to an end: his promotion. I thought he was hot, and he seemed nice enough professionally, but I definitely didn’t know him or trust him very much. But I was willing to go out with him, if for no other reason than it would be good for me to know what I’d gotten myself into.

  In fact, there is no other reason, I told myself as I touched up my hair. I only want to know my partner in crime a little bit better. All of this is pretend.

  I’d almost convinced myself that was true when a knock on my door jolted me out of my delusions. The butterflies in my stomach sure felt real all of a sudden. They were moving around so much that they made my hands shake. In my rush to put my earrings on with wobbly hands, my mom beat me to the door. Actually, she’d probably been lurking there since I told her I was going on a date this evening, so she could get a look at him. I stared from a couple of feet away and mouthed ‘please’ while repeatedly pointing pleadingly at her room, but she ignored me. Instead, she happily opened the door.

  “Hello Mrs. McNamara,” Eric said, beaming at her with such a megawatt smile that I just knew she’d be charmed. Whether or not he was shocked to find out I really did live with my mom was a mystery, because he actually looked perfectly happy to see her. “My name is Eric Carter. I was hoping to meet you tonight.”

  “Hello Eric,” she said, and then smiled a sly grin, “or am I supposed to call you Mr. Carter since you called me Mrs. McNamara?”

  In her way, she was testing his manners. He might not know it, but he was being examined like a brood mare at the county fair; sized up from every angle. My mother was nothing if not a stickler for proper manners and respect for elders. From over her petite shoulder, I watched his eyes widen as he saw her trap and deftly side-stepped it.

  “Please call me Eric, Mrs. McNamara. I get called Dr. Carter all day long, usually by people that are extremely unhappy to be there talking to me. It’s so nice to be called by my first name instead.”

  My mother grinned, softening a bit as soon as she heard the doctor bit. Eric knew what he was doing all right. His green eyes were mischievous when he glanced my way. Did he think that I was unhappy to be talking with him when I called him Dr. Carter? The truth is he’d always been Eric in my mind.

  “Won’t you come in for a bit?” my mom asked.

  “Oh no, he can’t, mom,” I interjected, sweeping up from behind and ducking under her arm to join Eric over the threshold in the hallway. The last thing I needed was these two getting chummy. “Otherwise we’ll be late for the movie.”

  My mom pouted but nodded. She looked Eric up and down, then me. “Don’t stay out too late. Last night was much too late.”

  I suppose it didn’t take a super-sleuth to figure out where I’d been last night, but I still felt myself blushing. Eric merely smiled.

  “Yes, it was. I’m sorry about that. I’ll have your daughter home by eleven, Mrs. McNamara,” Eric said. With his clean-cut good looks, his white button down and black pants, Eric looked one tie away from a moron missionary, but he was hitting all the right buttons with my mom. I could see the wheels turning in her head. She’d gone from hostile and skeptical to open-minded, which was basically two steps away from loving him. Overcoming the hostile and skeptical phase is the hard part when it came to my mom. She was a cream puff on the inside, but the crust was a mile thick.

  “Have a good time,” she said, and then paused. “Um, Eric, why are you wearing a wedding ring?” Her gaze had narrowed in an instant.

  I looked down to see that Eric was, indeed, wearing a slim, gold wedding ring on his finger. That was new. I kept my face entirely neutral. I was a freaking sphinx. Eric, meanwhile, looked down at it and laughed.

  “Oh, I wear it at the hospital and just forgot to take it off. There are certain women out there that make marrying an eligible doctor their primary occupation.” He shrugged a casual, believable little shrug of his broad shoulders. “I figure it’s easier this way than constantly letting them down gently.”

  It was a very plausible explanation. A lot of young doctors and nurses—and even some older ones—wore wedding rings for similar reasons. Getting hit on while you were trying to work was a huge drag, especially when it was a patient you were genuinely just trying to help. I’d debated buying a cheap ring myself.

  My mom frowned at him. “I suppose. But by lying, you’ll only attract those women who would not consider your being married a barrier. You’ll only get the bad ones.”

  Eric blinked. “I’d never thought of it that way.”

  “Nothing good ever comes from lying,” my mom told Eric, looking him up and down appraisingly. This is what she always did with the men I brought home—terrified them into running for the hills. Eric didn’t seem to be remotely affected.

  “I’ll give that some thought,” Eric said to her, ignoring her imperious look without even a wince, “although at least in my experience, the type you mentioned is always going to be easy to avoid. It’s Faith that I’d rather spend my time with, anyway.” He smiled over at me.
>
  That obviously mollified her. “Hmm,” she said, “well you two have fun.” She sent me a look as she closed the door that she’d be expecting a full rundown of my evening when I returned.

  Once the door shut, Eric turned to me to say something, but I shook my head and pointed at my ear, then the door. She’s listening, my expression said. His eyes widened, and he grinned and nodded. We made our way down the stairs before speaking.

  “You look beautiful. How’d I do with mom?” he asked. He seemed genuinely curious.

  “You did pretty well,” I said grudgingly, feeling myself blushing and smiling from the compliment despite my better judgment. He also called her ‘mom’. Ridiculous. “But I wish you would have just texted me that you were outside.”

  Eric frowned like I’d asked him to honk and holler from around the corner. “I couldn’t. You weren’t the only one raised to have good manners.”

  I supposed that I could respect that. However, “yeah, but now I’m going to get the third degree from her when I get home.” She was going to demand a full play-by-play of our date, and the movie we weren’t planning on seeing. I made a mental note to Google something plausible before going inside.

  “You don’t think it would have been worse if she just saw you getting into a strange man’s car? A man who wouldn’t even come say hello to her before taking her daughter god-knows-where?”

  Now it was my turn to frown. “I suppose you’re right. I’d get the third degree either way.” I might as well admit defeat now.

  There really was no winning when it came to my mom. She loved me, she wanted what was best for me, and she drove me up the wall. Privacy wasn’t a thing I could even conceive of. That’s why hiding all this from her was going to be a disaster.

  Eric opened the passenger side door of the car for me, closed it, straightened, and then waved over his shoulder at the windows of my apartment. My mom dropped the lace curtain of her bedroom window, obviously signaling that she’d been watching although she probably didn’t realize it. This was all coming so easy for him. My mom, who hated all the guys I’d dated in the past, clearly didn’t hate him. The one guy who wasn’t really interested in me would be the only one to win her over. Go figure.

  Nothing good ever comes from lying. My mom’s words echoed through my brain as I waited for Eric to come around to the driver’s side. As his tall, trim figure passed in front of the windshield, I couldn’t help but hope—just a little bit—that she was wrong.

  7

  Faith

  “So, while we’re on the topic of wedding rings,” Eric began as we pulled up to the restaurant, “I was thinking you should wear my grandmother’s if we decide to do this. I got one this afternoon from a pawn shop for twenty bucks, but yours should look legit.”

  I hid a smile. “Were we on the topic of wedding rings?” The short drive from my apartment had been almost entirely silent. We hadn’t been on the topic of wedding rings for at least ten minutes.

  Eric shrugged and smiled. He seemed almost impervious to teasing or ruffling of any sort. It was completely and ridiculously unfair. I blushed if someone looked at me sideways on the bus. “So, what you think?” He fished the ring out from his pocket and extended it to me.

  I won’t lie that I wasn’t tempted. The thing was so shiny it could probably be seen from space. It sparkled even in the low light of the car’s overhead lights. “I could never wear that gigantic thing around,” I told him. “It wouldn’t fit under gloves.”

  “You could wear it around your neck on a chain,” he suggested. That was what many of the female doctors did with their huge rocks. It would feel just the tiniest bit satisfying to have a ring with side diamonds that were way bigger and more sparkly than their main one. Most nurses didn’t have big, flashy rings like the doctors (the class difference is pretty huge between us in terms of income). And an emerald the size of my thumbnail certainly didn’t hurt either.

  Still, that ring wasn’t meant for me. I frowned. “Don’t you want to give that ring to the woman you eventually do want to marry and have kids with one day? I feel like it would be really weird for me to wear it under false pretenses.”

  An emotion I couldn’t decipher flashed over his face and disappeared. “I don’t believe in marriage, and I don’t want kids.” His voice was dead serious.

  Jeez, that was definitely not something that would have gone over well on a real first date. I paused, considering how to follow such a sweeping, morose pronouncement. Eric apparently had some serious marriage hang-ups.

  “Ok.” I didn’t really know what else to say. “I still don’t feel good about wearing the ring though.”

  Eric cocked an eyebrow at me but tucked the ring away. “Because I’m going to change my mind one day and want to live happily ever after with my lovely wife and two point five kids in a house with a white picket fence in Mayberry?” His tone was sarcastic.

  I rolled my eyes at his flippant words, although of course they were true. One day he would find the right woman and want those things. It was natural. “Nothing so elaborate, but probably. Yes. Although mostly because I just don’t want to.” I frowned at him. “Do you really never want to be married?”

  Eric looked down at his own new wedding ring and spun it on his finger. “I really never want to be married.” He shrugged. “I’ve got my reasons and trust me they’re good ones, but it’s not important. Just know that you can’t spoil me or the ring on marriage. It’s already done. My future includes no wife and no children. Don’t worry about that.”

  “Well your immediate future actually does include a wife: she’s me. But that’s correctable. We can go get the annulment right now,” I told him, gesturing into the parking lot as if there were an ‘quick and easy annulments here’ kiosk sitting there. “I wouldn’t hold it against you. Part of me would be relieved. Honestly, this whole thing seems like a bad idea, like something out of some second-rate romance novel.” I sighed and shook my head. “I hate the idea that I tricked you into this somehow…”

  His lips parted in surprise. “You didn’t trick me into this. Don’t think that. We were both on the same page last night.”

  “But you hate marriage, and I… I have a Pinterest page with more than two hundred wedding dresses on it. I’ve been planning my hypothetical wedding since I was six. I probably talked you into marrying me with promises of sex or something.” I felt dumb just saying the words out loud, but now that I was considering the possibility, there was every chance in the world that I’d talked Eric into marrying me last night. I could be pretty persuasive when properly motivated, too.

  “Hey now, I don’t hate marriage,” Eric said after a moment. “I just don’t want one. I feel the same way about marriage as I do about miniature poodles. They’re fine for other people to have, and I hope they enjoy them, but I’d just as soon not. Look, last night we both definitely made a mistake, and we definitely made it together. I seem to remember getting down on one knee and proposing to you…” he grimaced at the thought. “You didn’t make me do anything I didn’t want to do.” Then he smirked. “Besides, you’re a very beautiful woman Faith, but promises of sex—even with you—would not ever be enough to convince me to get married if I didn’t want to do it.”

  I took a deep breath in and out. We were getting absolutely nowhere. It was time to change the subject before we really started to argue. “So, where are we?”

  Eric looked around. “You’ve never been to Sullivan’s? I thought it was kind of a date-night institution.”

  I shook my head at him. “I don’t eat out much. I don’t date much either. What kind of food is it?” It certainly looked fancy from the outside.

  “It’s a steakhouse. They have seafood, too. I’ve actually never been here before either, but I’ve heard good things.” He shrugged. His expression had turned somewhat nervous, like he’d wanted to impress me.

  Great. Time to be a buzzkill.

  I bit my lip. “I, um, I don’t eat meat. The smell of steak
actually really bothers me.” Even though I could probably order salad or something, the smell of the roasted red meat was going to be gag-city for me.

  Eric blinked. “Crap. I should have asked you that beforehand.” He shook his head. “I’m really sorry. Of course, we can’t go here if you’re a vegetarian.”

  “I should have volunteered it,” I replied, shaking my head. “I usually do, you know, on real dates. We really have no idea what we’re doing, do we?”

  “Not a clue. I don’t know about you, but I’m just making this all up as I go along.” Eric looked around and pointed across the street. “How about Pho instead? That place looks promising.”

  I smirked. The little dive across the street looked much more my style anyway. “Perfect.”

  8

  Faith

  Eric and I were both abstaining from alcohol tonight, which was probably a very good thing. The only drawback was that it made our conversation slow and stilted, just like it would be on a real first date.

  “So, if we’re maybe going to be married for a little while, I feel like I ought to know a bit more about you,” I told Eric over my giant bowl of noodles. These carbs were definitely more my jam than some nasty steak.

  “Ask away,” he replied. “I’m pretty boring and unremarkable.”

  Yeah right, I thought to myself. Just look in a mirror, buddy.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Fresno, California. What about you?”

  “I’m from Queens.”

  “Just like Spiderman. He’s from Queens, right?”

  “Oh yeah. Me and Peter Parker go way back.” I nodded at him. “Do you have a big family?”