Shopping for a Billionaire's Wife

by Julia Kent

  “It’s contagious,” I whisper. The familiar sound of Michael Jackson music is muted outside. I turn to find an impersonator on the granite sidewalk, dancing with sharp moves, tipping his hat to the audience as dark ringlets bounce with his steps. The song ends just as the light cycle changes and we creep, slowly, into the parking garage.

  We climb out of the limo, attendants everywhere, dressed in burgundy jackets, black pants, and most of them wearing earbuds. Soft, modern pop music floats through the air as Declan climbs out, offering his hand to me. I make it to a standing position and wobble. The day has been long. I purposely didn’t drink on the flight, afraid to make a crazy, nerve-jangling day even worse, but now that we’re here—really here—I just want a long soak in a big, hot tub and a bottle of Champagne for my greedy little self.

  Then about twelve hours of spooning sleep with Declan.

  “Mr. McCormick,” says the attendant who opens the door to the building, handing Declan a set of key cards. He whispers in Declan’s ear. Whatever he tells him, Declan’s face folds into a mixture of reactions. I don’t ask. I’m too tired to ask.

  We walk into a plushly-carpeted hallway, face a set of elevator doors, and a new attendant nods.

  “Mr. McCormick, good to see you.” Declan’s curt nod is all he gives. We enter the elevator and Declan lets out a long, slow exhale.

  “They all know you?”

  “I called ahead to let them know we were coming.”

  “How do they all know you?’

  He cocks an eyebrow. “Because Anterdec owns the place. I interned here in college. I’ve spent more time here than I should have.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  He washes his jaw with one hand. “Let’s just say I like the roulette wheel a little too much.”

  “You gamble?”

  “Baccarat now. High stakes only. More controlled variables.”

  “What else don’t I know about you?”

  The elevator doors ding and he pivots me to the right. “Isn’t that why we’re getting married? So you can get to know me better?” We stop at a set of double doors. The hallways are done in a mix of beige marble shades and burgundies, ornate color patterns designed to convey richness. Old world. A kind of nouveau decoration scheme that says, You’ve made it with a mix of Hey, modern plumbing.

  “You don’t gamble huge amounts of money, do you?”

  “Why gamble otherwise? The thrill is in the risk. Not in actually winning.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Only a non-gambler would say that, Shannon.”

  “I thought you play to win?”

  “Always.”

  “Then isn’t winning the goal?”

  “Sure. But the bigger challenge comes from taking the biggest risk possible and seeing it pay off. Sometimes you have to tolerate some losses along the path to reaching that ultimate achievement.”

  “And losing giant piles of money is an acceptable way to learn?”

  He shrugs. “It’s the only way.”

  “Did you ever lose a lot of money?”

  He’s immediately uncomfortable. There’s my answer.

  Declan finds one of the keys the parking attendant gave him and waves it in front of a wood panel, which opens magically. This should impress me, but it doesn’t. I’ve seen almost every form of hospitality technology you can imagine in my work with Anterdec.

  The suite is splendid, with a breathtaking view of the enormous fountain below. Gold is the dominant color, that rich shade of oak trees turning to foliage in a New England fall. Dark, stained wood and tasteful bronze accents round out the room, with abstract art that focuses on burgundies and texture, each framed oil painting signed.

  Original art. This ain’t no fifty-nine-buck-a-night motor lodge.

  Two years ago I would have been gobsmacked. Living with a man who walks through life in a cloud of money has changed me, though, even if I’m loath to admit it. The suite is beautiful. It smells like piped-in vanilla. The minibar is well stocked and Declan casually opens the tiny refrigerator, pulls out a soda, and cracks it open.

  Five bucks, I think. That’s a five-buck soda.

  I tuck the thought away, because why linger over it? I don’t live my old life anymore. I have to get used to this new reality. And I have. Slowly.

  One luxury at a time.

  One area where I have no problem living large is transportation. Not having to worry about driving, or parking, or fighting through airport security turns off the little piece of self-doubt that reminds me of five-dollar sodas. Am I a hypocrite? Yep.

  That’s the price I pay for not having to worry about my underwire bra setting off the metal detectors.

  He opens the minibar again and points to it. “Here. Grab something. You must be parched.”

  I walk over to him, pluck an empty glass off the counter and walk into the bathroom to fill it with tap water. His eyes follow me and he knows exactly what I’m about to do. While I’m in there, I take a minute to drink, pee, and freshen up, which is loosely defined as taking the “Self-Care Kit” and running a comb through my destroyed hair.

  When I come back out into the living room, the table behind the couch is covered in soda pop cans, candy bars, mini wine bottles, small wheels of brie, and three berry bowls.

  “What is this?”

  He smirks. “I emptied the minibar. Now you have to eat it.”

  “What?”

  “I know what you’re doing, and it needs to stop. Shannon, just take whatever you want.”

  I sip my water. “I’m fine.” But man, I’m eyeing that stack of Butterfinger bars like I’m on death row and this is my last meal.

  “Eat. Drink.” He cracks open a tiny little bottle of wine and drinks it in three long gulps.

  There must be two hundred dollars worth of snacks here. That the hotel will charge eight hundred for.

  “It’s my company’s hotel,” he says, reading my mind.

  “I work for Anterdec, too!”

  “It’s your company’s hotel,” he intones. “Act like it. Enjoy.”

  “This isn’t business,” I say primly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re not on a business trip, so I can’t treat this like a deduction.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Life isn’t one big business trip.”

  Blank stare.

  “Quit acting like you don’t get what I’m saying.”

  “I’m not acting. Life is business. The time I spend with you is what I squeeze in between work.”

  Stunned into silence, I listen to the sound of my breath. The fizz of his drink in the can. The noise of candy wrappers as I lower myself to sit on the bed, a few stray delights from the minibar strewn on the bed like bedtime decorations. A ventilation unit goes off. A woman’s throaty laugh is muted out in the hall.

  He looks at me, brow darkening with increasing concern, as I let his world circumnavigate my mind a few hundred times.

  “Will it always be that way?” I ask.

  His turn to be stunned. He’s blinking harder than an owl in a sandstorm.

  “That sounded really bad, didn’t it?’ he says as his frown deepens, his fingers going to his chin, his eyes troubled.

  “Yep.”

  “I didn’t—that’s not—” He stops and starts a few times, finally taking a long, slow breath and saying, “Can I have a do-over?”

  “A do-over.”

  “Right.”

  “Like a reboot?”

  “Exactly.”

  Declan’s so self-assured, so precise and confident in pretty much every way possible, that this is interesting to watch. I am not at all above the schadenfreude that comes from observing his verbal klutziness right now.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “You don’t get a reboot,” I say, my words regal and pompous. “Say what you mean and mean what you say.”

  He pinches the bridge of his nose, be
cause that is one of his favorite sayings.

  “If you like work more than me, Declan—”

  “That is not what I said, and you know it, Shannon. I said that life is what I fit in around work. We were talking about a soda or a bag of chips from the minibar and now it’s devolved into an argument about work-life balance.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Work-life balance?”

  “Right.”

  “It’s where you juggle the two to make them evenly important.”

  “How can you claim to even try if life is what you squeeze in around work? That’s not balance. That’s gap-filling. I’m nothing but a full caulk gun to you.”

  “I was using that as a way of defending against your ridiculous contention that you needed to deprive yourself of a Butterfinger because we’re not on a business trip!”

  “Ohh, low blow, Dec!”

  “What?”

  “Now you’re using my love of Butterfingers to win this argument!” Some lines can’t be crossed in relationships.

  He picks up one of the offending confections and tosses it to me.

  “Dirty fighter.”

  “Oh, I’m way dirtier than that,” he says in a voice that rumbles.

  “Sex. Again.” I sigh and shake my head. I also crouch and pick up the candy bar, because hey. Butterfinger.

  “Is that an observation or a...request?”

  Considering that question carefully, I fume, and yet, in great anger there is great opportunity. What if I just throw myself at him and end this ridiculous argument? We’ve been bickering since we got on the plane, and this is not our norm. Other couples may fight in tiny little ways with micro-insults that are all about keeping score in some fifty-years war where the victor—what? Lives?

  But I don’t want that kind of life.

  If sex will heal this rift, then maybe I need to call him on his cute little bluff. Maybe that was just a sweet little joke. A poke.

  Maybe I can’t tell, because it looks too much like a sharp stick he’s poking at me for me to know it’s really an olive branch.

  “Which do you want it to be?” I peel open the candy bar and wrap my lips around the tip of the long, chocolate-coated piece of layered processed pretend peanutty whatever that some lab rat in a candy factory created with chemicals for the perfect consistency and addictive taste.

  If this whole marketing-director thing doesn’t work out, I think I’ll become a chemical taster for candy companies.

  “I want it to be whatever gets us to stop fighting. I hate this, Shannon. I hate not feeling connected to you.”

  This is why I want to marry this man. This. Not the thousand guests, the tartan thongs, the cat as flower girl, or the forty-one bagpipe players. Not Mom’s Farmington Country Club dream, and not for the lavish gifts people brought.

  Him.

  Only him.

  “Maybe I should have sex with you,” I challenge, eyes on his, giving him the side-eye like I’m evaluating a rival before a boxing match. Except instead of hitting each other, we’re going to play an elaborate game of Battleship.

  He’s the red peg and I’m G14.

  Or pretty much any G spot on the board.

  “Maybe?”

  “Would it stop all this crazy talk about five-dollar sodas and personal shoppers and the clash between two socioeconomic systems that each make sense in-culture but that create nothing but conflict and inefficiencies when we argue?”

  “You’re so sexy when you speak like a social economist. Please,” he says, licking his lips suggestively. “Do it again.”

  “Russian cultural resilience in natural disaster resource allocation.”

  He breathes heavily. I stick the candy bar in my mouth suggestively, making him grunt.

  My mind races through sophomore-year classes. “Gunnar Myrdal,” I say. “Homo economicus. Prospect theory.”

  “I’m not sure which is sexier. The way you’re mouthing that candy bar, or how you sound when you say ‘resource allocation.’ How about you allocate some resources my way?” he adds.

  I throw a Butterfinger at him. Sure, it’s a waste, but in a pinch, you make sacrifices for a greater good.

  He tackles me around the waist like an experienced Greco-Roman wrestler and I’m on the bed, wrists pinned, his knee between my legs as it looks like we’re about to make up.

  “Why are we fighting about money?” I ask him before his mouth lands on mine, the kiss aggressive and demanding, the unraveling ends of our nerves trying to find some sense of order in the flesh.

  “We never fight about money,” he croons, letting go of one wrist so his hands can go on a peace-seeking mission.

  “We do so fight about money!”

  “Are we now fighting about whether or not we fight about money?” He collapses on me as if he’s just plain given up.

  It’s like Declan can’t even.

  “We’ve gone meta,” I whisper.

  “Is that like going emo?” His voice is muffled in my hair.

  “Worse.”

  He shudders, then rolls off to the side, propping his head in one hand, elbow on the bed. His tuxedo jacket is open, one button lost somewhere between Boston and here. His shirt is horribly stained, and he smells like a sweaty man at the end of a long day, mixed in with the nose-tickling scent of Coke. Those green eyes are sagging, tired beyond his years, and as he grunts again in frustration I realize how stupid we’re being.

  “Stupid,” I whisper. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  “I am. I know.” It’s plain from his tone that he doesn’t believe a word of that.

  “You are.” He tenses. “So am I.” He relaxes. “Why are we fighting? Is it because we’re exhausted? It’s not from lack of sex!”

  “That is our usual source of conflict,” he agrees.

  “Then what?”

  All the heat he’s generating disappears, leaving my body chilled as he walks away. The sound of rushing water from the bathroom indicates a tub or a shower’s been started. He comes back into the large living room, searching drawers efficiently. Near the fireplace, he finds what he seeks, and disappears into the bathroom.

  Two minutes go by. I close my eyes and count the nerve endings that are jangling like bells in the hands of Salvation Army bell volunteers at the red buckets at Christmastime.

  “C’mere,” he says from a distance.

  I roll on my side, nearly fall off the bed, catch myself, and walk into the bathroom.

  Which he has transformed into a glowing fairyland.

  “Oh, Dec,” I sigh. It’s a good sigh. A great sigh.

  The bathtub, which could seat twelve but hell to the no on that right now, is mostly full, covered in frothy delight in the form of lavender bubble bath. It’s the perfect size for two.

  One is already in there, buried to the neck in bubbles, his hand reaching out for me. I giggle at the sight. Masculine and demanding, authoritative and fierce, Declan’s normal countenance is quite compromised by the sight of him swimming in bubbles, glowing in candlelight, ensconced in lavender—

  And drinking wine out of a tiny plastic bottle from the minibar.

  As my eyes adjust and I strip off my dress, I realize he’s taken a bunch of the minibar snacks and alcoholic drinks and put them at intervals around the edge of the giant tub.

  “Mmmmm. Pinot Grigio is simply enhanced by the mouthfeel of the threads of the plastic screw cap,” he says, finishing off the wine and tossing the empty into the trash can on the other side of this bathroom, which is bigger than my childhood bedroom.

  Of course—of course—he nails it, the bottle a slam dunk.

  “Get in.” Declan unscrews another plastic bottle of white wine, muttering something about upgrades and quality, then opens yet another just as I’m dipping my toe in the hot water.

  “Two at a time?” I ask, laughing. Ahhhhhhh. The hot water feels like entering a different world, as if all the chaos and uncertainty has stepped back five hundred feet and is still causi
ng mayhem, but it’s doing it over there.

  “One is for you.” He hands it to me, closes his eyes, leans his head against the stuffed neck pillow attached to the edge of the bath, and just sighs, the end of the long exhale turning into a sound that has become the song of my people.

  “I can drink to that,” I say, and I do, downing the wine in a few gulps.

  “We are stupid,” he says slowly, his arm coming up out of the water, dripping as he reaches for the other open bottle of wine. “Me, especially.”

  Declan is not the self-effacing type. Ever. I say nothing. Even if I knew what to say, I would say nothing.

  “I pride myself on being calm in the middle of nearly any storm,” he explains, reaching up to pitch the now-empty plastic wine bottle into the trash can. He misses. Hah!

  “No one’s perfect,” I reply, meaning his miss.

  “It’s not about perfection. It’s about being grounded. People throw you off your game if you’re not centered. No one wants to be in reaction mode all the time.”

  “I don’t even have a framework for what that means.”

  “Case in point. You’re always reactive. With a mom like Marie, I can understand why. I try to be as grounded as possible.”

  “And with a dad like James, I understand why.”

  His eyes are closed, but his mouth twists with a grin. “We’re going to have so much fun figuring out the terrain of our respective families.”

  I slide all the way down, the heat spiking my skin, like burying myself in hot, steaming velvet. “Fun isn’t the word I would use, but okay...”

  He unscrews yet another Lilliputian wine bottle, chugs it, tosses the dead soldier in the trash, and hands me another.

  “Relaxing?”

  “Finally.”

  Declan’s not much of a drinker, but it isn’t every day you go through—ah, hell, I can’t even remember everything we’ve been through in less than twenty-four hours. Joining him, I polish off two wines before sinking all the way in to my neck, my toes finding a lovely, soft footrest.

  “Hey! I’m attached to that,” he protests, reaching down to stop my foot. His thumbs dig into my arch and I think I orgasm. I’m not sure. I’m so tired.