Acquired: A Billionaire Auction Romance

by Charlotte Byrd

  3

  April

  “Stupid beautiful Isabelle and her stupid long legs.” My fat around my stomach was soft to pinch in my fingers. I could see the stretch marks around my sides starting to turn from pink to white. “And stupid Tom and his stupid beautiful fiancé and their stupid happy picture on my stupid Instagram feed.”

  Travis came back in the room after his phone call and sat on the edge of my bed.

  “I have stretch marks now, Travis.”

  “You know, those are considered beautiful in some cultures.”

  “Not helping. They aren’t beautiful in this culture.”

  “No, really.” He started brushing my brown hair with his soft fingers. “People call them tiger stripes. It’s something you earn.”

  “That’s if you get pregnant.” I groaned and showed him the picture. “Look at these two stupid happy people.”

  “She is hideous.” He lied, smiling over at me. “Not nearly as pretty as you are.”

  “You mean not as pretty as I used to be.”

  “April, shut up.” That’s what gay best friends are for: living with and telling you to shut up. Travis has been the nicest through all of these changes recently. He was the first to offer to find a new place with me, the first to lend me a helping hand (with some money in palm) and the first to actually visit me in the hospital. “If you really feel that bad about a little weight go to the gym.”

  “I have been going to the gym.”

  “Well, go more then. And eat healthy.”

  I sighed again and rolled over. My laptop showed that I had a new email from Cosmo. I had been waiting by my laptop day and night waiting for a reply to my article I submitted.

  “Cosmo wrote back.”

  “Oh! Good news?”

  I opened the email. “Nope. They rejected it.” Apparently “How to please your man in Bed” was an overused topic and it needed more zest in order to be published. I groaned again, as that seemed to be my communication method.

  “I bet dumb Isabelle doesn’t have a bad day at work.”

  “What does she do?”

  “Dumb executive assistant for a dumb Universal Studios hot shot. Hopefully they have an affair and call off the wedding. And then dumb Tom can go to dumb Google and do whatever dumb thing he gets paid for and be unhappy at work.”

  “This dumb wedding.” Travis jabbed at me. He left my room and let the door creak behind him.

  “I bet she doesn’t live in a dumb ugly apartment” I muttered under my breath. Normally I wasn’t this ungrateful, I couldn’t even afford this apartment with how freelancing had been going as of late. Pasadena isn’t exactly cheap and the landlord won’t take my fat as payment.

  “Wait, where are you going? Can’t you see I need you?”

  “Sorry, doll. I have to go to this dumb audition to make dumb rent.” Travis was an actor, and supposedly a good one at that. Maybe that could be my next career move. I can play everyone’s fat best friend. “I’ll come home right after. We can get dinner and I’ll bring wine or something.”

  “Make it arsenic, or maybe just rat poison will do.”

  “Never lose that sense of humor, April.”

  And with that he was gone. I turned the TV on and tried to do some crunches while watching a reality show. Realities shows were great for making me feel better about having a personality and being a decent person while simultaneously making me feel horrible about my body. I often did a quick workout routine when watching TV since I wasn’t up early enough to do those morning yoga shows.

  After I was all crunched I flipped open my laptop and skimmed through all the freelance jobs available. I preferred article writing, pop culture and feeding into it really is my strong suit, but at this point I would take any job that is offered to me. I have written vacuum reviews, made lists until my brain has fallen out, and still I am too broke to pay for anything.

  This apartment is nice enough to live in but not nice enough to stay. As soon as I get a regular paying job Travis and I are out of here and into somewhere where the water comes out of the faucets completely clear and the paint isn’t chipping off of the ceiling. I will miss the inspiration that all the characters we live next to give me, but I won’t miss their loud banging or arguments or the elephants that live upstairs.

  I often think about moving away from the west coast, or at least just out of California. I don’t think that will ever happen though. It was hard enough to leave Santa Barbara when I had to. I was born and raised there, as was dumb Tom. Why does my family have to be friends with his family? How do you friend break up with a whole group of people that have been there through diaper changes and growth spurts?

  You don’t. And you can’t. The Middletons were closer family than some of my aunts and uncles. I should have known better than to have fallen in love with someone so close to everyone. They were there for the accident, but that caused the collateral damage of my un-engagement. Life has been more glamorous for me before than it is now. At least I worked off some of the extra weight.

  I got in this car accident. I’m fine now, but I was bed ridden and put on heavy pain medication for a while. I gained 70 pounds, and I have lost 30 of them. I’m still 40 pounds heavier than I want to be, and I’ve been at a plateau for a while now.

  I did another set of crunches in between applying for different article writing gigs. Hopefully some magazine would take as much pity on me as I have.

  4

  April

  Even when I’m not eating, sometimes my brain default thinks about food. It makes it incredibly hard to keep the weight off and even harder to not just give up all together. I didn’t have much money, the accident put me out of work for a while, so I was struggling to get by to a point where food was scarce. I didn’t have the stamina to get a part time job on the street but also had too much pride to ask my parents for help. It didn’t take a therapist to recognize that I was a mess. This is the lowest point my life had had, and it was affecting every aspect of living.

  After the accident I couldn’t eat or sleep, and talking was even difficult. I had been driving home from a concert at night. It was a really really good day. I am thankful for that, that it was at least a great last day to have. While flipping through the stations on the radio a drunk driver coming from the opposite direction had gotten in the lane just enough to bump me. When I tried to turn the car, and keep some of it from bashing into the other drivers I over adjusted and turned it right into a tree. I was going 60 miles per hour, the other driver was going 80. He spun out and went down hard into a ditch. They tried to revive him for a few hours after, but eventually either he lost the will to live or his BAC got the better of his body.

  Even though I was the victim of that accident I had a tremendous amount of guilt. I was upset the other man died. Even if he was being a jerk, I didn’t want his family to have to deal with that loss. I was sure he was going through something bad if he had been driving after drinking. They said he was three times over the legal limit and almost bound to die anyway. When his parents visited me they told me about his life. He had found out that his wife had been cheating on him. He didn’t want to tell anyone, he wanted to keep it from his kids so that they could work it out in private. She wouldn’t admit to it and it drove him mad, making him unsure of what to do. That night they had a huge argument and he was going to finally decide to break it off. His mom was crying very very hard. She was upset that he made a dumb decision. She said he had talked about how depressed he was, and how he almost didn’t have the will to go on. She had wished she had listened better and gotten him a therapist.

  When I learned all of this instead of making me feel better it made me feel much worse. I thought of him a lot, especially after Tom called the wedding off. I should have seen it coming. He had never wanted to set a date. We had dated for six years before that, all through college and then after graduation. We were happy with each other, but when we lost the spark I knew that the engagement was a way of trying to
fix a broken relationship. I swore we would both get over it, that all couples go through this kind of thing, and most do. And then it all changed with the accident. I saw him less and less. He talked stopped talking about our future, and stopped talking to me. When he broke it off I thought maybe he just needed some time away. Maybe my accident was causing us both to be depressed. It was depressing him, but he didn’t want to fix things. Instead he started a dumb new relationship last June with lady long legs.

  That’s why the worst part about all of this was the collateral damage. I gained the 70 pounds because I was bedridden and almost addicted to painkillers. As I healed I was dealing more and more with problems in my personal life, and one thing that was always there for me no matter what was food.

  When he left he never really left my life. My parents had known the Middletons before I had ever met Tom. When we started dating it just made them better friends. They all swore that it was destiny or part of some greater plan. I was foolish enough to believe it. We had a good time at the University of San Diego. I loved that he was different than me. I was incredibly expressive, I tried auditioning for plays and graduated with a major in English and Creative Writing. Tom was a Computer Scientist.

  We were really exciting to each other. He kept me thinking critically and taught me a few new things about the computer. If I ever wanted new software or couldn’t figure something out I had a professional on standby. When it came to computers I was about as useful as an 80-year-old Grandma that lived on a desert island. He liked that I was artistic and that I was a little bit insane. He told me all the time that I was the most exciting girl he had ever met.

  The more we got to know each other the less we had in common. The less we had in common the harder we had to try to make it work. Six years was a really long time to be dragged along. You don’t get dragged that long without severe carpet burns and an excellent sense of what the bottom looks like. He probably felt the same way. None of our friends liked each other. One of the few friends of mine left was Travis.

  Travis came in the door, envelope in hand, waving it above his head. I quickly tried to make it look like I wasn’t laying like a lump on the floor.

  “What’s in there?”

  “My check from that commercial a month ago,” he sang, skipping into the kitchen. Travis had worked with one of the local companies on making a commercial. He had to do really cheesy dialogue and it would air overnight, but it was still acting. He swayed back and forth, probably texting his boyfriend about the money.

  “Congrats!” I was very happy for Travis. He was getting a lot of work and doing really well in his field. It made me feel pathetic when I saw his progress in an almost impossible job field and my lack of progress in the easiest field of work.

  “So what are we eating tonight?”

  “Air. I don’t have money. I can look at your food, though. Sniff it a little maybe.” I crawled back onto the couch and hid under the blanket. “This will be good for my diet. Being broke might be the best thing to happen to me.”

  “If you don’t start cheering up I am going to force feed you cocaine.” Travis shot me daggers from his eyes. He was very motivated, happy, and athletic – my exact opposite. Instead of it helping me live a healthy life style it made me more upset at myself. “I just got paid. Dinner is on me.”

  “You really don’t have to do this, Travis. You’ve done too much for me.”

  Travis walked over to the TV and changed it to the Food Network. “Yum. Look at all that. Maybe we should have Chinese. Maybe Italian. Ooh, how about sushi?”

  “Did you ever study methods of torture?” The food on the television looked divine. When your will power is low but your bank account is lower it is hard to pass up free food. “And let’s get salad or something. I really don’t need something heavy.”

  “You deserve good food. You already lost 30 pounds. That’s amazing. You should be congratulated.”

  “I have had enough congratulations.”

  “Well, not from me.” Travis sorted through our cabinets of take out menus.

  “How does Italian sound?”

  “It sounds like the most delicious thing ever.”

  “Great, it’s settled.”

  “No, wait!” I thought about my diet. “Isn’t that super heavy in carbs?”

  “Okay, not Italian. How about Mexican?”

  “Too greasy.”

  “What about Thai?”

  “Aren’t noodles heavy in carbs?”

  “It’s food, so yes. Do you want to eat paper?”

  “I don’t want to stay fat.”

  I was not having the best day, but I was trying to be more positive. It was hard with the wedding and debt.

  “If you want I can help train you. We can get you back in shape. Then if freelancing doesn’t work out, maybe you still have some acting skills that we can get you jobs with.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Let’s start by walking to get Thai.”

  5

  April

  “I’ll just have the water, thanks.” We sat at a table by the windows. It was a gorgeous night out. All the beautiful people were out walking, enjoying the sunshine and shopping. I envied them. One day I would have a life style that was hopefully close to theirs. I wanted to be able to write, for fun and for work. I wanted to have a nice condo or house. I wanted to have enough money to buy a meal.

  “No, we will each have a glass of Moscato.” Travis handed the menu back. This guaranteed that I was only going to have a salad. “Alex told me that this place has the best white wines.”

  “How is it going with Alex?”

  “Best sex I have ever had.” That was enough in Travis’ book to be marriage material. He was practically a sex addict. He didn’t let it take over his life, just drive the motivation for it. “How is your freelancing going?”

  “Not great. I’ve been broke for God knows how long.”

  “Two months.”

  “Two months. I am thinking about giving it up and looking for other work.”

  “Ooh, like what? Stripping?”

  “Not with this muffin top.”

  “Where are you going to work, then?”

  I took a large drink of wine. It was almost like a juice. “I was thinking maybe doing something more mainstream. I sent my resume out to a few administrative assistant positions. I did some secretary work at USD so hopefully that is enough experience to get me into one of them.”

  “Have you heard back from any of them?”

  The waitress brought our food out. “Not yet.” My life was sadder on paper than it felt. I was sitting across from a great guy that maybe if he weren’t gay, I would date him. Too bad for me, he already had a boy toy.

  “Well, you have to keep at it. Persistence is key. I don’t do acting full time. It hardly pays the bills.”

  “You’ll make it soon. You’re getting a ton of work.”

  “Yeah, it’s going well right now, but it hasn’t always been this way. That’s why I still work as a hostess. Someday I won’t have to show people their tables; I’ll just be able to become characters.”

  “You’ll make it soon.”

  “You just said that.” We ate the dinner and I was stuffed afterwards. Travis insisted we get dessert, but I couldn’t fit another bite in me. We went back out and walked around the plaza area.

  “So how about this wedding thing?”

  “And just when I got it off my mind.”

  “Sorry. I just don’t want you to show up empty handed. You’re walking now, that’s the first step. We can get you hot before then. You can’t show up empty handed.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ll be a laughing stock.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ll look pathetic.”

  “I know.”

  “They will all feel so bad for you.”

  “Hey, yeah. I get it.”

  “So how is the dating situation going to work?” Travis and I walked into one of the
boutiques. He looked at all the shoes, showing me several pairs he thought would look great on me.

  “Well, still single. My closest male friend is a gay guy that Tom would know I’m not dating.”

  I tried on a few of the heels. I was happy that they didn’t break under my weight.

  “We can’t all have ourselves so figured out. And it’s not like I have many lady friends to choose from either. Maybe I should just fake sick and stay home.”

  “They will feel even worse for you.”

  “It’s better than facing them.”

  “That’s too bad.” Travis’ hand breezed over some fabric. “Just when I had an idea.”

  “Oh?” I was beginning to get excited. I could see some of these dresses being perfect for the wedding, the empire waist slimming down my stomach and pumping up my boobs.

  “And don’t get mad about this.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “So Alex has this friend.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I think he could be a great solution.”

  “Get to the point. Who is he?”

  “Have you ever heard of an escort?”

  “Oh my god.”

  “Hear me out.”

  “No.”

  “He is really hunky.”

  “No.”

  “And he could probably get you a discount.”

  “Oh my god no.” Is this what I had become? Unable to get a date for myself and having to pay for a man to spend a weekend with me? Curling up into my bed forever had never been more appealing, not even when I was bed ridden. “I would rather die.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic.”

  “What if they knew him?”

  “Then you would know that they pay for sex and you would have a leg up on them.” Travis handed me a few dresses. I wanted to throw them all at him. I wanted to hide in the racks like I was a kid again. When was my life going to stop going down hill?

  Maybe a therapist could help me with all of these things. Travis was great to talk to. He always comforted me and told me the truth. He wouldn’t sugar coat things, he knew that that was what I needed to hear. I had enough time being coddled by my friends in the hospital. He was the one that kept me realistic and reminded me that things would get better, even if they kept getting worse. That didn’t mean I didn’t hate him when he was telling me the truth.