Best Fake Fiancé: A Loveless Brothers Novel

by Noir, Roxie

  I just nod. I feel like a can of soda that’s just been shaken, fizzing and ready to blow.

  “It’s pretty boring,” Rusty says, sighing.

  “What happened?” I finally ask. “Did you fall?”

  Last year a nine-year-old at the playground told Rusty that he didn’t think she could jump off a swing high enough to land on the grass, a good seven feet away.

  The phrase you can’t is like catnip to my daughter. There’s no better way to make her do something. She sprained her ankle and had to wear a brace for a week.

  She made it all the way to the grass, though.

  “Um,” she says, and suddenly she won’t meet my eyes. “Yeah. I fell.”

  “I took her to the sliding rocks,” Charlie says.

  She’s leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, and she looks me dead in the eye as she says it, her face tense, drawn, her curls half-wet and half-ragged. Suddenly, I realize she’s also got a hospital gown on, the gap turned to the front.

  “I thought I said she couldn’t go,” I say, and I sound shockingly reasonable, even to myself.

  Charlie swallows, takes a deep breath, puts both hands on her head like she’s trying to tame her hair.

  “You did,” she says. “And I took her anyway. I’m sorry.”

  Rusty’s just watching me, her eyes red-rimmed, her face splotchy, her hair sproinging everywhere. For just a second, I wonder if anyone’s ever thought that Charlie was her real mom.

  I just nod. I shove my hand through my hair again, crack my knuckles, try to bite back the sudden fury riding through me, borne of panic and then relief.

  “Sweetheart, can you talk to your uncle Seth for a little while?” I ask, reaching out and stroking Rusty’s hair. “I need to talk to Charlie for a minute.”

  “It was my idea,” Rusty says urgently.

  “I know, honey,” I say, leaning forward, kissing her hair.

  “We’ll be right back,” Charlie says, and when she stands, she also drops a kiss on Rusty’s head, like it’s normal, natural, like she’s done it a thousand times.

  I walk out of Rusty’s room, past a nursing station, down a hallway. I’m pretty sure that Charlie’s behind me but I don’t even turn and check. I don’t know where I’m going, I just know I don’t want to be around other people right now.

  Finally, I turn a corner and there’s an alcove, windows, a couple of chairs, and no one else, and I stop.

  “I’m sorry,” Charlie says before I can even turn around.

  She’s about to cry, her jaw clenched, her eyes bright with tears.

  “I didn’t think she’d get hurt,” Charlie says. “I went to the rocks all the time as a kid and nothing ever happened, and I know you said she couldn’t—”

  “What the fuck?” I interrupt.

  She goes quiet.

  “Seriously. What the fuck were you thinking?” I ask, taking a step closer to her. I’m on the edge right now and I want to shout at her, yell, scream.

  She closes her eyes, shakes her head.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispers again.

  “You didn’t give it half a second of thought, did you?” I ask, my voice still low, dangerous. “You didn’t for one fucking second stop and think, maybe there’s a reason Daniel doesn’t want Rusty doing this yet?”

  “I thought you were overreacting,” she says, jaw clenching again.

  “I didn’t want her going because when he was her age, Caleb got his arm stuck on the way down and broke it,” I say. “I was ten and I still remember the way he screamed, Charlie.”

  “I never broke my arm,” she points out. “You never broke your arm. Hundreds of people have gone to the sliding rocks and haven’t broken—”

  “I still said she couldn’t go,” I say.

  “You won’t let her climb trees,” Charlie says. “Last year, when I took her to fair, you didn’t want her going on the carousel—”

  “Do you know how fucking dangerous those things are?”

  “It’s a carousel, Daniel! It goes half a mile her hour, and if it breaks loose or something you just get off it,” she says. “You can’t wrap her in cotton. She’s gonna go out into the world, and she’s gonna get hurt sometimes, and you can’t always be there to protect her.”

  “Not now,” I say. “She’s seven, Charlie. Seven. She’s only just figured out that the tooth fairy isn’t real and you’re handing her knives and letting her jump off of rocks—"

  “She loved it,” Charlie says, her arms crossed over her chest, like she’s protecting herself. I see a flash of something bright beneath the hospital gown she’s wearing and realize she’s still got her swimsuit on, a bikini top over shorts.

  “I don’t care,” I tell her.

  “She also loved the Scrambler, last year, at the fair,” she says. “And the Ferris Wheel. And that ride where you get in the car and it goes around in a circle really fast, whatever the fuck it’s called.”

  I take a deep breath, trying to corral my frustration, my anger. I put a fist on my forehead, turn, walk a few steps away, turn back. I don’t know how to make her agree with me, how to make her understand that she can’t just do whatever the fuck she wants, when she wants to do it.

  “I have to tell Crystal,” I say, simply.

  The look on Charlie’s face tells me she hadn’t considered that, either.

  “I have to tell her mom, and this is sure as shit going to come up in court on Tuesday,” I go on, and as I say it the enormity of the thing hits me. “I’m going to be the dad that got his kid’s arm broken because I let her do something dangerous. I’m already the dad who got her hand sliced open, and you can be sure as shit that both those things are going to be cited as reasons that she should be heading to Colorado next month.”

  Charlie swallows, looks away. A single tear slides down her cheek, but it only makes me angrier that she pulls this shit, then cries about it.

  “We could have gotten arrested last night,” I say, coming closer, dropping my voice. “Did you know that public nudity is a sexual offense in Virginia, Charlie? What do you think my chances of keeping Rusty would be if I were on a registry?”

  “I didn’t think about that,” she whispers.

  No shit.

  “You’re going to make me lose her,” I say.

  Charlie looks at me like I’ve slapped her. She goes white, then pink. She rubs her swollen eyes with the heels of her hands, then takes a deep breath.

  “No, I won’t,” she says.

  Then she turns. She leaves, practically fleeing down the hallway, and I watch her until she’s gone around the bend.

  I’m still furious at her: for going behind my back with my own daughter, for getting Rusty hurt, for never thinking a goddamn thing through even once in her life, for never knowing what day it is.

  And I’m terrified.

  I’m terrified that I’m right, that falling for Charlie came with the price of losing Rusty.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Charlie

  I’m a fucking mess. People on the elevator stare at me — sobbing, snotting, wearing a hospital gown over a bikini top and shorts — and subtly move away.

  I don’t care. Daniel’s right. He’s fucking right about everything, about the sliding rocks and the carousel and the skinny dipping. He’s right that I’m a walking disaster, that I’m a human wrecking ball.

  And he’s right that if he loses Rusty it’ll be my fault. The knife? That was me. The broken arm? Me. Almost getting arrested?

  Me, me, me.

  There’s a loose end in Daniel’s life and her name is Charlotte McManus.

  When I get to where I parked a few hours ago, Daniel’s car is sitting there, and for a second I’m confused and then I remember we switched cars because of Rusty’s booster seat, and fuck everything.

  Fuck booster seats. Fuck cars. Fuck rocks in mountain creeks and fuck arms for breaking and most of all, fuck Daniel for being right about me.

  For a hot second, I consider
just taking his car and letting him figure it out when they release Rusty in a few hours. Fuck, that’s probably what he thinks I’m going to do, because I’m sure Daniel has remembered that I had his car and his keys and Daniel probably keeps a spare set on himself at all times, just in case.

  I’m sure Daniel has a backup plan for getting home because he expects me to forget that Rusty still needs a booster seat, and he thinks I’m so brainless and selfish that I’ll just take his car.

  He’s so close to right, but I don’t. I crouch down next to the car and put his keys on top of the back passenger-side tire, the heat radiating off the black rubber.

  Then I text Seth, because I know he’s still upstairs, and I cannot handle texting Daniel right now. I turn my phone off before he can text me back.

  Then I turn and walk home, still wearing a swimsuit and a hospital gown. If they want it back, a nurse can chase me down.

  * * *

  Sunday morning, there’s a knock on my door. I’m still in bed, spread-eagled and face down on a pillow, staring at a pile of stuff on my bedside table because I don’t want to get up.

  I fucked up. I’ve gotten Rusty hurt twice now because I’m an irresponsible dumbass who can’t even keep track of the days of the week. It’s a miracle that I haven’t burned the whole town of Sprucevale down yet.

  And what do irresponsible dumbasses do? They stay in bed all day.

  Whoever it is knocks again. It’s not Daniel, because that’s not how he knocks — his is always a firm knock knock, and this is a more impatient, slightly softer knockknockknockknockknock.

  The third time I hear it, I realize it’s my sister’s knock, and even if I don’t answer it right now there’ll be no escaping her, so I may as well get out of bed and see what she wants.

  “Hi!” she says brightly when I open the door. “I was just popping by to see if you wanted some reusable grocery bags, since someone left literally three hundred of them in the school’s donation box — are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I say, leaning against the door frame.

  “Uh huh,” she says, sounding completely unconvinced. “You’re wearing a swimsuit?”

  I didn’t manage to get undressed last night, just sort of… laid on my bed and woke up later.

  “It’s a new thing I’m trying,” I say.

  “Are you also trying getting sunburned on only one side of your face?” she asks.

  I put my hands to my cheeks. Sure thing, the left side of my face is hotter than the right side. It’s probably courtesy of my two mile walk home yesterday.

  “Goddammit,” I mutter.

  “You fall asleep in the sun?” she asks, eyes narrowing suspiciously.

  “…yes,” I lie.

  “Where?”

  “Outside.”

  “Can I come in?” she asks, tilting her head to one side.

  I don’t want her to come in. I want her to give me the stupid bags and then leave and I want to crawl back into my bed in my swimsuit and feel bad for the rest of time.

  Instead, Elizabeth pushes the door open.

  “Let me rephrase that,” she says. “I’m coming in.”

  * * *

  She sits me down at the kitchen table and makes me coffee. She finds a comfy t-shirt in a pile — probably the clean pile but I’m not 100% sure — and puts it on me. She raids my fridge and makes us breakfast, and she doesn’t even comment on how much of the stuff in my fridge is past its expiration date.

  “I fucked it up,” I say, shoving away a half-eaten plate of eggs and toast, my other hand locked around a mug of half-drunk coffee. “God, I fucked it up so bad.”

  I take a deep breath and push the heels of my hands against my eyes again, like I can stave off tears, but all I can think about is how easy it would have been not to fuck it up and how I didn’t do that.

  Across the table, Elizabeth sets her coffee mug down with a light clonk.

  “You’re supposed to say no, you didn’t, Charlie,” I tell her. “Maybe also he won’t be mad forever, he’ll forgive you, love will conquer all, shit like that.”

  “How bad was the break?” she asks instead.

  “Not what I asked for.”

  “Sorry,” she says.

  “It was just a hairline fracture,” I say, still rubbing my eyes. “She put her hand out and it got sort of stuck between two rocks for a second and jerked the wrong way.”

  Elizabeth sucks in a breath, and I think about Rusty’s scream, the way it felt like an icicle to my heart.

  “That’s how I sprained my ankle,” she says, matter-of-factly.

  “It got stuck?”

  “At the sliding rocks,” she says. “I was kinda sliding off-track, so I kicked a rock, only my foot got stuck and got yanked the wrong way. Mom just about had a heart attack, made the doctors do about fifty x-rays because she was convinced it was broken, but it wasn’t.”

  “You called Mom?” I ask, feeling like I’m one step behind.

  “I was five,” Elizabeth says. “She’s the one who took us. You don’t remember that?”

  Slowly, I shake my head.

  “I guess you were only two,” she muses. “You gave me your stuffed bunny Arthur, so he could make me feel better, but I was really grumpy and told you that bunnies were stupid and ate their own poop and we got in a big fight about it.”

  “That doesn’t sound like us,” I say sarcastically, and Elizabeth laughs.

  “Come on,” she says, standing up and taking my half-eaten plate. “Finish that and go put some real clothes on. Also sunscreen.”

  “Why?” I ask, taking a gulp of coffee.

  “Because we’re gonna go do some fun shit, dumbass,” she says. “Come on.”

  “Bossy,” I mutter under my breath as I put the empty coffee mug into the sink and she turns on the water.

  “Call me whatever you want, just go change out of the swimsuit you’ve apparently been wearing for twenty-four hours,” she says.

  I do it.

  Big sisters, man.

  * * *

  “How is this not stupid?” I ask, staring at the enormous tire, perched at the top of a grassy hill.

  Elizabeth rolls her eyes.

  “Just get in, loser,” she laughs.

  “How did you even find out about this?”

  “Jeff’s students,” she says, a trifle evasively. “Come on, it’s fun.”

  “How do you know?”

  Elizabeth shrugs, grinning, and I narrow my eyes. Her husband Jeff is also a teacher who teaches English at Sprucevale High.

  “Which students?” I demand. “The college-prep class or the remedial class?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes,” I say, looking at the old tractor tire that Elizabeth’s standing on its side, its diameter about six inches less than my height.

  “Listen, Chuck,” she says, sighing. “The remedial English kids do know how to have fun.”

  I cannot believe my sister, a teacher, is saying this to me.

  “You’re the worst role model,” I tell her.

  “Oh, the college prep kids will be having a much better time four years from now,” she says. “But they’re not the ones rolling down a hill in a tractor tire.”

  “But you think I should.”

  “I think you should take your mind off the fact that your boyfriend is being kind of an uptight dick right now,” she says.

  My stomach squeezes. I press my lips together, look away, and the voice in my head says he’s not being a dick, he’s being right because you can never be what he needs.

  “Chuck,” Elizabeth says. “Shit, Chuck, I’m sorry. C’mere.”

  She ducks through the middle of the giant tire, and it falls away from me and hits the ground with a whump.

  “We can’t even be friends now,” I say as she steps out of the tires and wraps her arms around me, my voice going sky-high at the end. “How the fuck are we supposed to even be friends after I know what he looks like naked?”

&n
bsp; She holds me, rocks back and forth.

  “I’m sorry,” she murmurs, one hand stroking my hair.

  “It was so dumb,” I say. “This whole thing was so dumb. I mean, who even lies in court anyway? Dumb. And it was dumb to say I’d go along with it and then it was dumb to actually fall for him, because, you know, if it was for real, we’d have done this ages ago—”

  I break off, sucking in air.

  “Not necessarily,” Elizabeth says. “You needed a kick.”

  “He still wishes he’d married Crystal,” I say suddenly, the words spilling out of me before I even know what they’re going to be, like someone’s got a string and tugged at it. “He got drunk and told me that one night, that he thinks he should have married her so they can have a dog and a fence.”

  I gasp for air again, because I’m trying to keep control of myself, keep from sobbing again next to this giant truck tire that my sister wants me to get inside of.

  “He said that?” she asks, sounding genuinely baffled. “About Crystal?”

  I just nod. I breathe deep again, trying to maintain control.

  “Daniel Loveless said that he wishes he were married to his trash-ass babymomma?” Elizabeth says. “He said those words? To you?”

  I look at my sister in some alarm.

  “Don’t use your murder voice,” I say.

  “I’ll use my murder voice if I’m going to kill someone,” she says. “Come on. Sit down.”

  She tugs me onto the grass, and I more or less crumple, lean back against the hot rubber of this massive tire. It smells like asphalt and dirt and grass out here, and Elizabeth gets on the ground next to me, one arm around my shoulder.

  “He didn’t say that,” I admit. “He just sort of said it, what’s the thing where someone doesn’t say what they mean but you’re supposed to understand it anyway?”

  “Subtext?”

  “Yeah, he said it in subtext,” I say. “Like, he thinks that if he’d married her when he knocked her up everything would be great and perfect and she’d love Rusty and they’d, like, have family movie night and shit, and she’d be in the PTA and bake cookies and knit sweaters and they’d go to Disney World on vacation and everything.”