Nuptials for Sale
Virginia Jewel
Also by this author
Christmas in Hell
Across the Pond
Second Chance
For Janet
1.
Just get to class, Mel.
You can do this.
Just pretend like you don’t see them all pointing and laughing at you.
God, my knee really hurts!
My thoughts were running rampant as I stopped in front of the door and checked the number above it with the one on my paper. A wave of relief washed over me as I walked into my second period classroom. I plopped down in a desk near the back.
My first day at Nelson High wasn’t going exactly as I’d planned.
I shuffled my papers and books, trying to make myself look busy and hide the grimace I could feel forming on my face. My knee really was starting to ache. The humiliation replayed over in my head.
Somehow, on my way down the stairs from my first period class, I had managed to trip over something and tumble down the last few steps. I felt my knee scrape across the anti-skid surface as I fell to the ground. My books and papers scattered across the tiled floor. Everyone around me turned to look and laugh.
Now, sitting in the back of the classroom, I tried to hide and pull myself together. I looked up as other students started to trickle into the room. A lively group walked in together and I looked down to avoid eye contact. Seeing the comfortable way they interacted made me homesick for my old friends. I’d tried hard not to think about them since the move, but at times like these, it was too hard not to.
I must have been too deep in my own thoughts to notice as he walked past me. I didn’t even know there was someone sitting behind me until he leaned forward and spoke to me.
“I pissed my pants.”
I turned my head.
That’s when I saw Josh for the first time. He was smiling a broad white smile. His blue eyes sparkled and the blonde curls on the top of his head swayed slightly with the wind from the open window.
“Excuse me?”
“In fifth grade,” he said casually, as if we had spoken many times before, “I pissed my pants in front of everyone.”
I studied his face for a second, then said dryly “Thanks for sharing.”
I turned back around to face the front of the classroom.
A quiet laugh came from behind me. The sound of a desk scraping across the floor followed.
This time the quiet voice came from even closer, “I just thought that maybe if I told you about something embarrassing that happened to me then you wouldn’t be so embarrassed about your little trip down the stairs.”
I whipped back around.
He was leaning forward across his desk, still smiling broadly.
Later, when he insisted that I sit with him at lunch, he introduced me to the group that would become some of my best friends during my time at Nelson High.
“Who’s this?” Tyler, the high school state champion wrestler, asked as I sat down next to Josh.
“You look familiar. Were you at the party last weekend?” Haley, the girl who would never really accept me, asked before Josh could answer.
“She’s a model. You’ve probably seen her in magazines or something.” Josh said nonchalantly as he stole a chicken nugget off my tray. He said it with such authority that even I believed him. I sat timidly between Josh and his friend Greg.
“Are you really?” Greg asked after a few seconds of silence.
I shook my head.
Josh grinned, “Trip, this is the gang. Gang, this is my friend Mel, but you can call her Trip.”
“Trip?” Tyler asked.
“Oh my God! You’re the girl who fell down the stairs, aren’t you?” Haley’s face brightened as she realized how she knew me.
“Hey, a girl needs to make an entrance, and I think Trip did a fantastic job of it.” Josh gave me a wink and then abruptly changed the subject.
Everything about my life changed that day. If I had been careful on the stairs, then none of this ever would have happened. Thinking back on it now, it’s hard to believe that one clumsy move set this whole thing into action.
2.
“Broke and bored is no way to live.” I plopped down on the couch next to Josh. My boredom inspired trip to the fridge left me empty-handed and in a crappy mood. Another Saturday night on the couch in our awful apartment is not what I wanted, but it was all we could afford.
“Let’s go out then,” Josh said without taking his eyes off the television. He had tried to cheer me up by challenging me to some video game, but after five minutes, it stopped being fun for me and I gave up.
He kept playing.
“Josh, we don’t have enough money to pay our bills much less enough to go out.” My voice was a little more abrupt than I’d intended it to be, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“We don’t have to go somewhere that requires money, Trip.” He jerked his hand to the left in an attempt to beat his gaming opponent.
“Where can we go that doesn’t require money?”
“We could go to the park.”
I sighed, “We can’t go to the park. There’s been some trouble there recently and the cops are patrolling it several times a night. I don’t want to get arrested for swinging.”
His opponent fell and Josh did a silent victory cheer.
“We could go to the mall and just walk around.”
He shut the game off and tossed the controller across the room.
“Ugh! Too many teenagers to deal with at the mall! Besides, I don’t really want to walk around and look at all the things I can’t afford to buy.” I threw my head against the back of the couch. I was really starting to be a pain in the ass, and I knew it, but I just couldn’t seem to stop myself.
“Come on,” Josh hopped up from the couch and held his hand out to me. “Let’s go. You’re starting to annoy me and I’ve got to get you out of here.”
I made a face at him and crossed my arms against my chest. He wasn’t daunted. He reached down and grabbed my arms, pulling me up from my seated position.
“Where are we going?”
Josh pushed me out of the apartment and into his car. I kicked the trash piled up on the floor around to make room for my feet. Josh was a blast to be around, but he wasn’t much for keeping things clean. When I’d moved into his apartment a year ago, it had taken me an entire week to clean the place so that it was suitable for human habitation.
Josh and I had known each other for almost ten years, ever since my first day at Nelson High. We’d both stayed close to home and graduated from the state college just an hour away. We’d always been close, so when Stephen broke it off with me a year ago and left me with nowhere to go, Josh had taken me in. That’s the way it had always been with us. I’d get into a tough spot, and Josh would be there to help me out.
“We’re going to SuperMart. We don’t have to buy anything and, at this time of night, the people walking around that place are more entertaining than any movie on basic cable.” Josh smiled at me then turned his attention back to the road ahead.
My mood lightened as we drove down the road. The wind was blasting warm air in my window and making my hair blow all over the place. Josh turned the radio up and sang along loudly. In less than a minute, I joined in and couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.
The parking lot was near empty as we pulled into a spot close to the front.
“This place isn’t usually this empty. What’s going on?” Josh turned off the car and pulled the keys out of the ignition.
“Haven’t you seen the news lately?” I shook my head at him. “Some reporter went undercover and got footage of some of their employees’ more unsavory practices. It’s
been all over the news, how did you miss it?” I stood at the end of the car waiting for him to meet me.
He came around his side of the car shoving his keys into his pocket. His blue eyes sparkled under the dim light of the parking lot. The blonde hair that had once sported playful curls was now shorter and darker with age. I watched him with a smile. I could always count on Josh to make me feel better.
Once inside the store, we wandered through the clothing sections. I was looking at some tank tops when Josh came around the corner wearing a black lace bra over his t-shirt.
“That’s very flattering on you,” I said with a serious voice, but with a small smile on my face.
“I thought so too, but you know what, I think I have one like this at home already. That redhead left something very similar to this in my room.” Josh had his head down and he was staring at his chest. Each hand rested on the cups of the bra and he was squeezing and admiring his new padded breasts. “Do you think I need to go up a cup size?”
I rolled my eyes. “No I don’t think you need to go up a cup size, those look completely natural on you.”
An older couple walked past us and gave us a dirty look. I smiled sweetly at them.
“I find it very disturbing that you refer to your ex-girlfriend as ‘that redhead’. Don’t you think you should at least call her by her name?” I put the shirt I was looking at back on the rack.
“She wasn’t my girlfriend, so therefore she isn’t my ex-girlfriend.” Josh followed me and wiggled out of his bra.
“You were with her for like two months, weren’t you? How was she not your girlfriend?” I laughed at him trying to get out of the bra. “I hope you’re better at taking those off of others than you are at taking them off yourself.”
Josh pulled the bra off and tossed it into an empty basket as we walked.
“First of all, I wasn’t with her for two months. We spent some nights together over the course of two months, but we weren’t together.”
Josh grabbed my arm and stopped me from moving past him.
“As for that second thing, I’d be happy to demonstrate my skills on you anytime. You just say the word and I’ll have it off of you in a heartbeat.” He wiggled his eyebrows at me and grinned.
I rolled my eyes and kept walking.
Josh was always saying things like that, but he didn’t actually mean them. For a few months, back in high school, I’d actually thought he’d liked me. He’d been so nice to me when we’d first met and he was always trying to make me laugh. Unlike any other high school boy, Josh had never tried anything with me. After months of waiting for him to make a move, I finally gave up and realized he was never interested in anything but friendship.
After that, things with Josh seemed much easier. I laughed it off when he flirted, it would never lead to anything, so it was harmless. In college, several of my girl friends had tried to get things going between us, but I knew that if Josh had felt something he would have already made it clear. Eventually, we just settled into our comfortable friendship with no danger of it crossing over into anything else.
We spent the next hour at the store playing with the toys in the toy department. He chased me through the aisles pretending to shoot me with the toy guns that were still in their boxes. He tossed bouncy balls at me and knocked me over. We both hopped onto the toddler bikes and rode them up the aisle until an employee caught us and gave us a look.
Tired from our recess in the toy department, we sat on the floor in front of the wall of televisions for thirty minutes and watched an episode of friends that was playing on the store’s DVD player.
“Are you ready to go?” Josh asked as I fidgeted on the floor.
“Sure, I just need to go to the bathroom first.” I stood up and wiped my pants off.
“I’ll meet you up front, Trip.”
As I made my way towards the front of the store, and towards Josh, I thought about how he had really turned the night around. A few hours ago, I was sitting on our couch complaining, and now I was in a great mood and ready to head home.
Hanging out with Josh was always an adventure. When he got it into his mind to be funny, there was no stopping him. It was common practice when we went out to eat for him to arrange for someone at the table to be serenaded for their birthday, even if it wasn’t. For my twentieth birthday he arranged a surprise water balloon fight in my honor, so that as I walked out of the English building after class I was bombarded with a hundred water balloons.
Nothing surprised me about Josh.
“Attention SuperMart customers,” a familiar voice called out from the speakers above. “There is something that I need to say.”
A smile widened across my face.
“There’s a beautiful woman walking around this store right now looking for me, and I’d like to tell her that she can stop looking. You’ve found me, but more importantly, I’ve found you. I know we’ve only been dating for a few months, but Mel, we’ve known each other for almost ten years.”
Everyone in the store seemed to have stopped to listen.
I picked up my pace. I pushed past an older woman and saw Josh standing at a register with the phone in his hand.
He turned and caught my eye, a smile spread across his face.
“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. We may not have much money, and I can’t give you a ring right now, but I promise that we’ll always have each other and we don’t need anything else to have a good time.”
Several of the women around me started to sigh, sniff, or giggle.
Josh dropped to one knee and looked up at me from across the store. “Mel, will you marry me?”
I tried hard to suppress the laugh that was building up inside me. I stopped being embarrassed by Josh’s antics years ago, but this one felt a little sillier than usual.
“Well, honey, don’t leave us hanging! Are you gonna marry the boy or not?” a pajama clad woman beside me yelled out.
Several other customers clapped and laughed.
There was no other choice but to play along, so I stepped forward and nodded. Josh dropped the phone and leapt off the floor. He wrapped his arms around me and lifted me off the ground as everyone around us cheered.
“You are insane,” I whispered into his ear as he spun me around.
“Come on, are you going to deny that you’re having fun?” he whispered back. He put me down and leaned his forehead against mine, staring into my eyes with a very convincing look of adoration.
We spent the next few minutes receiving well wishes and congratulations from all the other shoppers. We walked out of the store as several people whistled and giggled at us.
Josh played it up by smacking my ass.
“That was fun!” Josh said with a laugh as we pulled out of the parking lot.
“Yes, but I think the smack to the ass might have been a little much.”
He grinned at me.
“I told you we could have fun without spending any money.”
At the apartment, I headed to my bedroom, but was stopped as Josh called out from the living room.
“What? No goodnight kiss for your future husband?”
“I’m saving myself for our wedding night,” I called back.
“It’s a little too late to play the virgin with me, Trip!”
I picked up one of his shoes from the hallway and tossed it towards the living room.
I heard him laugh as the shoe thudded against the floor.
3.
The next week was just as boring as usual. Wake up at five a.m., sit in a cubicle all day pretending to work, and come home to a tiny apartment with no good food. Josh kept up the husband and wife jokes for awhile, but eventually they died out.
By Friday, my bank account was in serious danger of being empty, and I was looking at another boring and penniless weekend. I sat behind my desk staring at the clock on the computer. There were still two more hours until the end of the day, and it felt like time was standing still. The buzz of my ce
ll phone brought hope to life in me. I was hopeful it was someone asking me to go out with them, even if I didn’t have any money to go out with.
Hope died when I saw the name that was flashing on the screen.
“Hi Mom,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could find in me.
“Hi Mom? That’s all you’ve got to say for yourself?”
I sat up straighter at the sound of my mom’s scolding voice. She hadn’t spoken to me that way in years. I ran through all the possibilities in my head. What could I have forgotten? Mom’s Day? Her birthday?
“Well, Melody? You don’t have anything else to say to me?” she hadn’t loosened her tone any.
I couldn’t think of what she wanted from me, so I gave up trying. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
She sighed loudly into her phone. “I can’t believe you, Melody. I can’t believe that you didn’t tell me about this. Imagine having to find out about something like this on the television.”
Clearly, I had not missed a holiday. Other than that, I was clueless what she was going on about.
“Mom, I don’t know what you’re talking about. What did you see on television?”
There was a long pause. She was probably standing in the kitchen, wearing her apron, and leaning against the sink. I had seen that many times before in my youth, but all those times I had known why she was upset.
“I saw your video on the news today,” she said sharply.
My eyes widened and my face reddened. My mind was flooded with the memory of the time Stephen, my ex, had set up a camera in the bedroom. My whole body seemed to be simultaneously frozen and on fire. How in hell had that video made it onto the news?
“I didn’t even know that you and Josh were dating, so you can imagine my surprise when I saw him proposing to you on the news today!” She was practically shouting at me.
Relief washed over me. I didn’t want to think about my mom watching a sex tape, especially one starring me.
I flopped back in my chair and sighed loudly.
Nuptials for Sale Page 1