The Billionaire's Fake Fiance

by Annika Martin

  I keep Theo updated on my search for the perfect subletter to take my place living with Mia, and we discuss my worries about my current top contender. I tell him about my walks with Mia up along Ninth, sometimes Tenth, to her delivery job. I’m spending as much time as I can with her. I’ll miss her like crazy.

  I tell him things I’m afraid to tell Mia. Like my worries that Mia will find a new friend, or that she and I will grow apart. Eighteen months is a long time.

  On one of the calls, Theo tells me that he has a long-distance friend from college he texts with all the time. He thinks their friendship has stayed strong because they keep up with each other’s everyday minutia. He reads me a few texts he sent. One is about running-shoe laces, and I give him shit about that, but it makes me feel better.

  Theo tells me about his struggles with the formula, using super layperson’s terms.

  He’s just so intensely driven, almost like he’s racing time. It’s noble, but I still don’t like the grim, hard-ass pace of it.

  One of the articles that’s out there about him suggests he could’ve cashed out way bigger if he’d gone with big pharma, but he decided not to, because he didn’t want to lose control over the pricing, and he couldn’t get a guarantee that it wouldn’t be inflated.

  I ask him if that part’s true, too. He lowers his voice, like he’s making this big confession, and tells me that it was more that they wouldn’t meet his demands that microwave popcorn would be banned on the premises where Vossameer is produced.

  I laugh and tell him to screw off.

  He goes on about something else, but I’m lying there, phone in hand, thinking that’s a little bit heroic, too, to not want the price high. He’d admire it if it were anybody else, but Theo lives in a different world where the bar for goodness is harshly high.

  Sometimes he pushes it, though. Like when he presses me on whether I really, really have to go. And I have to explain my reasons all over again. A free place to live and cater out of while I renegotiate the debt and save money. The fact that I can’t start making money without a bakery space, and I can’t get a bakery space without repairing my finances. Especially not while living in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

  The decision is hard enough without him questioning it.

  One time, he texts me a rental listing of a space that would be perfect for me. His message says, “Let’s figure this out. We can make this work.”

  I grit my teeth. Is this not what I asked him not to do? Like a masochist, I click through it, looking at each and every picture, wanting just to cry. I call him up. “Don’t do that. Don’t send me these.”

  “It’s the perfect space.”

  “The perfect space they’d never rent to me. And I couldn’t afford it even if they did say yes.”

  “You could afford it if I invested. Cosigned.”

  “You mean if I let you be my sugar daddy and rent it for me? And then you’d be able to take it away on a whim?”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Theo—”

  “It’s ridiculous to move away when you don’t have to.”

  “It’s not ridiculous to me,” I say. “Do you not understand why I need to do this on my own? However you dress it up, this plan would give you power over my existence. I know it seems unreasonable to you, but I want you to respect it’s a thing with me. Okay?”

  He sighs.

  “Don’t show me any more real estate.”

  He’s silent. Then, “I won’t show you any more real estate.”

  I meet him out at hotels during the day a lot. He always sends a car unless it’s within walking distance of where I am. What with these fancy hotels, I feel a little bit like a cross between a princess and a call girl, which I can report is a highly sexy combo.

  Our sexy games never get old; they just get more exciting. We do endless variations on stern boss and impudent employee. Sometimes it’s angry client and wake-up-call girl. Other times it’s suit-on-the-street driven crazy by my hotness and sassy tone. Or “what the hell are you doing in my hotel room?”

  I sometimes wear my prairie dresses, like offerings to the savage dress-ripping god. Sometimes I wear lingerie. We have hot sex. Outrageous sex. Wild sex.

  The one thing we never have is sweet sex as ourselves. Like that’s just too bold—for me, at least. Because I’m not ready for a relationship like that, and I’m leaving, anyway.

  Theo would go for it. He sometimes does, but I always pull us back to the sassy game.

  Maybe I’m a coward. It’s just that sweet sex is a boundary I can’t cross with him. It’s too much risk, too much heartache.

  So we keep meeting in strange hotels, sexy thieves, stealing what isn’t ours.

  I think about him alone in bed at night. I think about him when I’m waiting for the subway, or interviewing possible subletters.

  I think about him when I’m waiting for something to come to a boil at the catering gig. Sometimes I’ll slide a finger over my arm, my cheek, and I’m back with him. Or I’ll remember a conversation. I’ll smile at something he said.

  I thought he was so oblivious, so antisocial.

  I was so wrong.

  When it’s nice out, Theo and I walk around together outside the hotels where we meet before going back to our lives. Now and then, he asks me to come to his place, but I always say no, because that’s a line in the sand for me. The hotels keep everything out of reality.

  But reality does creep in.

  Like the afternoon we’re stuck in the back of Theo’s town car on the Third Avenue Bridge. We’re going back from a hotel, and his whole demeanor changes. I think it’s the traffic that’s getting him down, but then he lowers the privacy partition.

  “I’m sorry,” Derek says. “There was construction over on…”

  Theo’s voice is calm. Too calm. “Ask next time.”

  “I really am sorry.”

  “It’s fine. Next time...”

  “Absolutely,” Derek says.

  Theo raises the shield.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  He gazes away, bitterly, almost. “That would be out of the fuck buddies purview.”

  “Theo,” I say.

  He shakes his head. Says nothing.

  That’s when I know. This is the bridge.

  It’s not just something I know, it’s as if I can feel his heart, still raw about it, twisted in on itself. I reach over and take his hand. I squeeze it, sensing his pain so acutely.

  What’s happening to me? I vowed to myself not to get close to a man, especially not one as personally powerful and consuming as Theo. But here I am. So close.

  After a long while, he squeezes mine back.

  Traffic moves at a crawl.

  “The spot they went through is back there,” he finally says. “All this metal, and he managed to find the one loose part, the one damaged part, to blast through.”

  I stay holding his hand. Theo doesn’t like a lot of chatter when he’s feeling emotional. We’re starting to move. He looks over at me. “Screw it. Okay. Okay, then.”

  “What?” I ask.

  He lowers the partition. “Take us down to the water once you’re off.”

  “Will do,” Derek says.

  “Down to the water?” I ask when he doesn’t explain.

  “We’ve come this far,” he says simply.

  And I wonder: does he mean this far in terms of distance to the bridge? Or this far in terms of being honest with each other?

  A few minutes later, we’re parked near a giant docking and loading area for barges. It seems deserted. Maybe because it’s still cold, maybe because there’s not a lot of freight traffic today.

  He grabs two beers out of his back-of-the-car cooler. “Come on.” He gets out and walks. I follow, pulling my jacket tight. The afternoon sun doesn’t do much to cut the chill from the wind that blows off the Harlem River.

  Everything around us is huge and hulking. There are piles of cement things here
and there, and a large sign for the river traffic that we only see the metal back of. I catch up to him and follow him along the railed edge of the concrete slab and down some steps toward the dirty green water.

  He puts out his coat on the lowest step. I sit.

  He hands me a beer, then he turns and lifts his in a toast, as if toasting to the bridge.

  I toast my own beer, and then hold it in both hands on my knees, waiting solemnly for whatever he wants to say.

  He’s showing me a piece of himself, and that means a lot. Because in spite of everything, I want to be connected with him, whether it’s the hottest sex or the deepest, darkest pain. I never felt like that with a man before.

  “I didn’t take you here to feel sorry for me.” He swigs his beer. Stays standing.

  “I know,” I say.

  He nods. He knows I know.

  “See the third section? And how the bridge is darker right down from it? That’s the repaired part. You can still tell.”

  “Where they went off. The accident.” It’s not really a question.

  “It wasn’t so much an accident, really. Accidents are unexpected. This was inevitable.”

  I wait. Listen.

  “You could see it coming from miles away,” he says. “My dad, the world’s most high-functioning drunk. He kept a good job. Managed to handle his responsibilities, but couldn’t resist driving. He just loved to drive us around. I don’t know what the hell was in his head. It especially terrified Willow. She’d cry when he’d make her ride. He saw it as a criticism, and he’d just do it all the more.”

  I stare out at the bridge with its crisscrosses and thick, gray geometry. Cars streaming over, right past the spot where his parents went off. None with any idea of the lives that ended just feet away.

  “That’s why Willow worked so hard for those scholarships,” he continues. “I mean, she was in her bedroom programming from morning to night when other girls were doing whatever girls that age are supposed to do. It was her ticket out. The shit he’d say. Those terrifying rides. Willow and I always hated rides at the fair. Roller coasters. That type of thrill was never fun for us. We had the real-life version.”

  “Sounds like,” I say softly.

  Seagulls screech nearby. One swoops into the air with a hunk of something in its mouth. The others chase.

  “When I was fifteen, I started standing up to him and taking away the keys. I’d refuse to ride. Refuse to let Mom ride. Sometimes hide the keys and just take what came. But he was still a lot bigger than me. I could sometimes stop the rides, but not always.”

  He’s silent for a while. I want to go up next to him and put my hand on his arm, but I know not to. That’s not what he needs.

  “At one point, Dad went out of town on a business trip, and it was just Mom and me. We were out of his orbit long enough that we felt what it was like to be free of his power. I had my mom talked into leaving. It was going to be just us. Build our own life. I had enough savings for a place in Queens. A sad little studio in a piece-of-shit building, but it would’ve been ours. I really thought I had her on board, but then he came home, and nothing changed. Except the fights over the keys got worse. Finally I left. I managed to get a job.” He turns around to face me, leaning back on the railing, picking at the edge of the label on the bottle. “I was so damn angry. At him, but also at her.”

  He says nothing for a while, just looks at the river.

  “I glowered at her as I left, angry that she was too weak to come along. That was the last time I saw her. Because she was too weak to take the keys away from him herself. And I knew that.”

  “Theo—”

  “That was my role. Getting the keys. It was how I kept the three of us alive.”

  “Like it was your fault? She was an adult. She could’ve taken the keys.”

  Cars whiz past up there in the distance. “In theory, yes. In reality, she couldn’t have taken them any more than she could’ve pole-vaulted over the house.”

  “So you think it’s your fault?”

  The look he gives me breaks my heart. It’s a yes, tattooed deep in his heart. “It was inevitable.”

  “That is such shit!” I say. “It was her job to take away the keys. To be watching out for you.”

  “In a perfect world,” he says.

  “In this world.”

  He’s silent.

  “What does Willow say? Surely she agrees.”

  “She doesn’t know. I mean, she knows they went off. She knows I left, but she’s never thought it through in terms of cause and effect.”

  “Maybe because there isn’t any cause and effect that involves you.”

  He keeps peeling his label, and I know with every bit of certainty inside me that I’m the first person he’s confessed his guilt to.

  His supposed guilt.

  I get up and stand next to him. “You should tell your sister.”

  “I’m not going to tell my sister. Especially now. She has problems of her own.”

  “You can’t carry it like this. You need to talk about it.”

  He looks over at me, then. “Isn’t that what fuck buddies are for?”

  “No, actually.”

  It’s here I wonder—is that why he’s so crazy to get the formula? Is there some invisible balance sheet he’s trying to even out?

  He gets off some of the label and shoves it into his pocket. A river full of litter and he won’t add to it. “They always tell that story like I’m a hero. You can see now why I’m not a fan.”

  “God, Theo.”

  I slide a hand onto his arm. I really want to hold him, but he’ll resist. This is the most affection he’ll tolerate right now—a small touch.

  “I’m going to come back to your place with you,” I say. “And make you some nice hot cocoa.”

  “I don’t want a pity visit.”

  “It’s not a pity visit. I just want to.” And I don’t want him to go back to work tonight. That’s what he’ll do. It seems wrong. “You think you can stop me?”

  His eyes lower to mine. “Yeah.”

  “You think you’re the boss of me?”

  His lips twist. This is one of our sexcapade lines. “I don’t have stuff for cocoa,” he says finally.

  “I do. In my bag. From the caterers.”

  He touches the lip of his bottle to the underside of my chin, tips my head up. “You just want more of my savage and uncivilized loving.”

  And just like that, we’re back on familiar ground. And we both pretend that sex is what my visit will be about, or at least, I do.

  Because it’s easier than acknowledging the significance of us.

  Thirty-One

  Lizzie

  * * *

  Theo lives in an ultramodern building with giant windows and large balconies. “Which is yours?” I ask.

  He points to the top. Penthouse. Of course.

  The doorman lets us into a lobby that could double as a mod lighting showroom. A woman in a uniform—some sort of concierge, I suppose—comes out from behind the desk with a silky black garment bag for Theo. He groans when he sees it, then he takes it and thanks her, and we make for the elevator.

  The black bag has some sort of European-style crest on it, and when I look closer, it’s the name of a dry cleaner.

  “Do just you despise dry-cleaning?” I tease as we head up.

  “It’s a tux for a ridiculous banquet. I despise ridiculous banquets.”

  “Too kumbayah for you?”

  “Pretty much.”

  The elevator opens into a small, sleek foyer. He hangs the dry-cleaning bag on a hook, and we head through an archway into a huge, airy space.

  I spin around, taking it all in. It’s as cool, severe, and utterly gorgeous as Theo, a somber mix of natural wood tones with browns and blacks and whites, and some crystalline lighting. And the black-and-white photography. The sand he told me about. The only actual color in the room is the bright blue sky out the window.

  I go look down
over Central Park. You can see a faint haze of green on the sea of brown trees. Spring is coming. “I’ve never seen it from so high and near like this. The paths look even curvier.”

  He comes up beside me. “They made them like that so there wouldn’t be horse and carriage races,” he says.

  “Doesn’t slow the bikes.”

  “No,” he says, sliding my hair over my shoulder.

  We head to his kitchen, which is lots of steel and crisp white tile. I find the kettle. “You can’t blow off the banquet?” I ask.

  “No. It’s one of the hoops I have to jump through for the Locke Foundation partnership.” He takes the kettle from me and fills it with water from a special drinking spigot. “They want to ensure that I’m good in public. Not an asshole and all that. Apple pie and smiles for everyone.”

  “Oh, you are so apple pie and smiles for everyone.”

  He sets it on the burner and turns on the gas. “I can be when I have to be,” he says, eyeing me. “When I want something.”

  “Because you always get what you want.”

  He smiles.

  We drink our cocoa, and later we order Chinese and eat it while we watch an Avengers movie on his couch. It’s the most couple-ish thing we’ve ever done. When it’s over, I stretch out and lay my head in his lap. “What should we do now?”

  He looks down at me, and for once I can’t read his expression. My belly tightens as his hand slides onto my cheek. He leans down and kisses me, all spicy and sweet; then he kisses the crook of my neck.

  There’s no forbidden game to it at all. I’ve never felt so naked with him. We feel like a couple, exactly what we can’t be, for oh-so-many reasons.

  “Why do you even need Locke so bad?” I ask, forcing us off the romantic slippery slope. “You have wads of money and your own company.”

  He stills. “They have partnerships and trust built up with charitable organizations across the world,” he says. “It’s a lot less hassle to jump through their PR hoops than to set up my own network. Giving is actually more complicated than people think.”

  “Well, the Locke people should be grateful. That’s what I think.”