by Tiana Cole
“Entertainment?”
She shrugged. “That’s what you called it.”
“Me?”
Her nod wasn’t reassuring in the least. “Yes.”
“What about you? Were you entertained?”
“You should look at it and see what we are talking about.”
“I will—in a minute. I need to work up my nerve.”
“You think you know? You remember?”
“I’m guessing and hoping I’m wrong.”
She shook her head. “At the time I thought it was weird, but you wanted it—a lot. Well, last night my judgment wasn’t that much better than yours or I wouldn’t have I agreed.”
“And now?”
“This morning it’s harder to see what made it so clever, or even a reasonable thing.”
The folder was substantial and when he turned it over, he saw an oval picture of Elvis Presley in the center. A chunky, overweight Elvis, wearing his white fringed Vegas show outfit. Across the top, in gilt lettering was written Welcome to Graceland West.
He swallowed hard, fairly certain he knew what this was. His hand trembled slightly as he opened it. Inside, in the left pocket was a DVD in a plastic case; the right pocked held a laminated document. Slipping the document out of the pocket he saw a picture of three people: Deja, the man who looked like Elvis, and himself. He was wearing sequin-studded sunglasses and holding a champagne glass. The stupid grin on his own face sent a chill through him. “We had our picture taken with an Elvis impersonator?” he asked hopefully.
“After,” she said, sounding uneasy.
“After what?”
“The ceremony. Flip it over.”
He glanced at her and saw the alarm in her eyes. She was definitely worried what he’d think. When he turned over the picture he stared dully at a wedding certificate in their names. According to the document, they had been married in a ceremony at the Church of Graceland West a mere six hours earlier. A stab of pain ran through him and he resisted the urge to turn and demand an explanation. He already had her explanation.
The DVD slipped out of its pocket. Another picture of the three of them graced its cover. He held it up. “What the fuck is this?”
“A video of the ceremony. It’s actually more of a performance than a ceremony, with Elvis ranting about his ideas on love and singing songs—it’s a bit like being in a musical. They do manage to get in the required legal stuff.”
“Songs?”
“Elvis tunes. His rendition of Love Me Tender wasn’t bad, but I guess he’s had a lot of practice at it. They were cranking couples through that mill.”
He dropped the DVD on the dresser and walked to a chair, sinking into it, feeling as if he’d been struck with a club. He’d gotten married—they’d gotten married. As absurd as it sounded, he knew it was the truth, it had happened. Seeing the picture of Elvis brought back new images of the night. The music, the hokey impression of Elvis, which was, he remembered, what made him think the idea was so funny.
The evening had been surreal and he’d gone with it, including this wedding. The night reminded him of some sort of weird drug trip…at least the way sounds and images and emotions swirled around him resembled what he’d been told it was like when you took drugs.
He stared at this girl, who was part of whatever happened, who had been with him in this insane night. “We got married?” He wanted to hear her say it.
She grimaced. “Yes. You insisted.”
That didn’t make sense. Even having lost control. “I’m inherently a logical person—it’s who I am—and logical people don’t do things like that. I weigh the pros and cons of things before I act. Can you tell me why I wanted to marry a girl I just met? There has to have been a compelling reason.”
She looked distressed and he wondered if he’d hurt her feelings. Not that her feelings mattered all that much at the moment. What did matter was finding out just how much shit he’d gotten himself into.
“James, you didn’t explain your reasoning, if you had any. All I know is that we were having a good time. A really good time.”
“What do you mean?”
“Okay, I skipped a bit. After your friend left with his girl, you were really excited.”
“Excited?”
She made a face. “Sexually aroused. Like I said, you couldn’t keep your hands off me when we danced, and when you suggested we leave…well, I was getting hot too. You’re a sexy guy. I was still sober enough that it embarrassed me. I didn’t like being pawed in public that way. I thought getting out of there would calm you down, but when we got outside, you started kissing me.”
“Me?”
“Well, it sure looked like you.”
“Sarcasm isn’t going to help. I’m trying to remember things and put it all together.”
“Maybe you’ll remember that while we were kissing you started telling me how hot I was, and how I turned you on. Then you pushed me up against a building, hiked up my dress, pulled my panties aside, and screwed me up against the wall of some casino.”
It came back to him, and he heard how she’d gasped. He looked at her face and suddenly he could see her up against a concrete wall, her mouth open. And he remembered the warmth of her breath, smelling of alcohol, as he kissed her, and the warmth of her cunt as he fucked her, with her legs hooking around his as he pressed her into the wall. He’d never done anything like that in his life, not until then. “I…”
She smiled. “Not that I objected in the least. At the time, I was so worked up that I wanted it as much as you did.”
“Okay. I went nuts, or we went nuts.” He remembered that it happened, but still missed out on enjoying it. “What happened then?”
“I said it was late, but you sure weren’t tired. You were talking about how good it had been and how you wanted the good time to go on and on. You told me you wanted to screw me against every wall in Las Vegas and then bring me to your room and do me again. I told you that I had to go home, I had to work the next day.”
Part of the night came back, and he could hear her words in his head. Even muffled by time and booze they were clear enough. They weren’t exactly the words she told him now, and he wasn’t so sure she had wanted to call it a night, not seriously, but the gist was right. He’d definitely wanted to keep the evening from ending.
“So I decided we get married?”
“We were in a casino, playing machines here and there, and we came across Elvis. I was still telling you I needed to get home so I could work the next day. Suddenly you got the bright idea that if we got married, I wouldn’t have to work. My job would be to make you happy, and we could spend the rest of our lives screwing. When I suggested that might take some thinking about, well, you told me that you are a doer, a person who makes things happens.”
“I am. Most of the time that’s a good thing.”
“So you did make things happen. You said that a thing like that, getting married so we could have endless sex, had to be done tongue in cheek. I guess you had an attack of whimsy, and since it was all about having a good time, you decided Elvis was the perfect minister, although I’m not a huge fan of the late singer.”
“And they videoed the ceremony?”
“You paid extra for that option—as a memento of this solemn occasion.”
“Do they keep a copy?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
He turned to her waving the DVD. “If this is the only copy, then I can destroy it and no one will ever see it.”
She shrugged. “Except that you gave old Elvis permission to upload it to their website. While we watched, they added it to their playlist of happy couples they joined in matrimony.”
“I told him he could that?”
“Your words were, ‘Hell yeah. Go for it, Elvis.’”
“So now it’s on the Internet, where anyone can see it.”
“Yup.”
The enormity of what had happened fell on James like a failed business deal. If Liang saw that video�
�� “I wonder if I can get it taken down.”
“It wasn’t that bad, you know,” she said. “The video, I mean. We kinda slurred our ‘I do’s and all, but otherwise it was just cornball.”
“Cornball? Disaster is the word that comes to my mind.”
She looked surprised. “What’s the problem?” He heard a note of real concern in her voice and when he looked at her, he could tell that she had no idea what the problem was.
“I came to town for business. Yesterday I pitched a business deal to a very conservative man and tomorrow he is supposed to tell me his decision. No matter how this abrupt wedding came about, it doesn’t show conservative judgment on my part.”
“He isn’t likely to run across it, especially before tomorrow. That doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who’d spend his day trolling through wedding chapel videos.”
“No, but I have competitors who would happily point it out to him.”
“How would they find it?”
“Any number of ways. It’s common enough for companies to have interns who spend their day searching for their competitor’s names just in case something comes up that they can use for leverage. Or it could be…well, I’m still dealing with what happened last night to have time to create scenarios about what might happen.” He sighed. “If my name is attached to the video, they’ll probably find it and make sure he sees it.”
She was looking more nervous now. “It isn’t like you did anything illegal.”
“It’s about character. I doubt Shen Liang would consider a man who married a woman he’d just met, with Elvis presiding over the ceremony, was serious enough, was the kind of person he wanted to be in business with.” He rounded on her, feeling his anger building. He’d fucked up, big time. He had trouble believing he’d drunk enough to go off his rocker like that, but apparently he had, and there was a video to prove it. If his head hadn’t been pounding so much, maybe he could sort this out, turn his anger into something constructive, but that wasn’t the case.
The girl he found in his bed this morning was partly to blame for all this. Maybe she hadn’t made him do anything, but she’d been the inspiration. Besides, there wasn’t anyone else to focus his anger on. “You encouraged me,” he told her. “You enticed me.”
“So now I’m evil because you found me sexy?”
“You didn’t have to go along with it.”
She laughed. “You are allowed to exercise what you are calling bad judgment, but I’m not? Why can’t I be stupid too? And if you didn’t want to marry me, you didn’t have to suggest it and you could have stopped it at any point.” She looked away.
“Maybe it won’t be a total disaster. I wonder if these marriages are made public anywhere besides the government archives and Elvis’s website.”
She frowned. “I don’t remember the name of the casino, but the chapel you picked is affiliated with that big one that has a circus in it. I noticed that they post the names of the bride and groom and clips from videos on a screen in casino to attract more business. That’s where you first saw it, how you knew about it.”
James dropped his face in his hands and let out a low groan that combined pain and frustration. That was the casino Liang was staying at.
* * * *
Deja was a lousy liar. Lousy by temperament and lousy due to a lack of practice. She’d never gotten away with lying and didn’t like lies or liars, so she was just as glad. Most of the time that removed any temptation to do it. She preferred saying only things she believed to be true. It was okay to be wrong about something, but not to lie. For most of her life she’d considered that an asset. Everyone who knew her quickly learned that when she said anything, she was telling. As a result, she had no poker face at all.
At the moment, that lack made her situation somewhat dangerous. Not that she was in any physical danger, at least she didn’t think she was, but if James asked her the right questions, the truth would probably all come pouring out, along with tears and recriminations and massive regrets. If he probed, it wouldn’t take him any time at all to realize that she’d skirted the facts, never quite lying, except by omission. That was why she mostly let him work out the story himself. It gave her a chance to skip over things that she didn’t want him to know. It wasn’t telling the whole story and she couldn’t let him know the whole story—that would end her chance to do what needed doing. It would all have been for nothing.
But it galled her. Living a lie, even if she wasn’t actually lying, was a balance beam she didn’t much like walking. She didn’t want to get good at skirting the truth but she needed to do it well now—for an entire week. That was the deal.
She couldn’t lie, but she could lead him to the conclusions that suited her. Because he was a strong man, a person who made things happen, it was easy to convince him that he was responsible for most of what happened. That he insisted on them happening. While that was true to a large extent, the whole truth, as they said in court, was that there was more to it than that. She had urged him on. She had helped spin things to her advantage and helped him reach the conclusions she wanted him to reach, and make the decisions that wound up with them married. She’d deliberately manipulated the man.
She exaggerated her own foggy thinking. She hadn’t had more than a few sips of alcohol during the entire evening but had made him think she was drunk. She didn’t much care for alcohol, and doing her job was hard enough with her head clear. Part of the truth was that she’d known his judgement was impaired. When push came to shove, if she hadn’t been working him, she wouldn’t have married him. Saying no would have been rather simple.
Now, hearing his concerns, she realized she’d been lied to. There had to be a lot more going on that evening than she’d known about.
The problem was that everything she knew about James and what was going on came from Alan McCabe. He’d met her at the hospital when she was waiting for the nurse to finish with Barbara. He came up to her and acted profoundly sympathetic, especially about her need for money. Then he’d said they could help each other.
“It’s a prank,” he’d said.
“How can I help you with prank?”
“My buddy is in town. He’s working on a business deal, but he’s working far too hard. It’s going to ruin his health. Some of his other friends and I think he needs a wakeup call. He needs to learn a lesson about that kind of overdoing. See, it will affect his judgment, and sooner or later he’ll want to blow off steam. Who knows what will come of that?”
“What sort of lesson?”
“We let him see what happens in a controlled way. We want to show him what could happen if he doesn’t slow down. And you, my lovely, are the key to the prank. You will seduce him, and get him to marry you. I’ve got it all worked out.”
“Marry him?”
Alan’s smile wasn’t reassuring. “Yes.”
When he spelled it out, the plan sounded innocuous enough. The basic idea was to have James wake up, finding himself married. “It has to be a real marriage,” Alan pointed out. “He’ll check.”
The next morning, Alan would pretend to sympathize, and his friends would give him contradictory advice, while they had big laughs at his expense. To ensure that he got the message, she would need to stay married to him, keep him from finding out about the prank for seven days. The point was to watch him thrash about, trying to figure out how to extricate himself. She was supposed to make him think she wasn’t going to go away quietly. They wanted him to sweat.
After a week of that, they’d let him in on the joke and the marriage would be annulled. He’d learn his lesson; what was done would be undone, and life would go on.
“You need fifty thousand dollars, don’t you?”
There had been no sense in denying it. “Yes.”
“That’s what I’ll pay you.”
“This prank is worth that much money?”
“It is. I’ll give you a thousand dollars the next morning, and the rest at the end of the week.”
; It was wrong, but being so desperate for money kept her from examining the ethics of the deal too closely. All she could see was getting the money. That she’d have to agree to sleep with a man she’d never met bothered her, but not having the money bothered her more. How could she turn her back on the only solution to her problem?
Now things didn’t seem so simple. Hearing that their insane marriage threatened a major business deal told her she’d been kept in the dark. There was far more to things than Alan had told her.
Some of what Alan said had been accurate. He claimed to be James’s friend and they’d come in the club together. Later James had told her the same thing. In fact, everything Alan had said about James seemed to fit. He admitted he was a workaholic. He did need to cut loose.
But Alan had neglected to mention a business deal that he certainly had to know about. That set off alarms. If she was being used to skewer James…well, she liked him, and that was a terrible thing to do. It might even be criminal.
Business law wasn’t something she knew anything about, or cared to know. Then, she’d thought he was drunk, but in the light of day, seeing him come back to himself, as it were, she wasn’t so sure that’s all it was. And his sexual stamina didn’t fit either.
Worse, regardless of Alan’s motives, regardless of whether it had been intended as a joke or a business ploy, she felt guilty as hell. She’d participated in a con and she felt a powerful rush of shame for what she’d done. Yes, James had been all over her that night. He’d been incredibly horny and eager—he’d wanted to fuck her. She’d told the truth about all that. What pained her was that she hadn’t mentioned how she’d encouraged him. She left out the fact that she’d made a point of exciting him, brushing her hip and ass against his crotch when they danced, and blown kisses at him.
And then, when he put her back against the wall and kissed her, just as she told him, she had reached down to unzip his pants. Leaving that out put it all on him, but when he’d hiked her dress up, she’s already taken his hard cock out of his pants and was stroking him. And when he buried his face in her neck, she’d hissed in his ear that she wanted him to fuck her. And he had. It had been exciting, almost sinful the way he took her against that wall.