He sighs in delight as a cab swoops along the road. “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”
He should hire me to write his ads. That was money.
“But no, I don’t have a ring,” I say, then I wink. “Would you happen to know somewhere that I could get one right away?”
He strokes his chin, pretending to be deep in thought. “Ah, I just might know the place.” He laughs at his own cleverness and clasps my arm. “Come by at two, and Nina will hook you up with a beautiful stone and setting. You can’t be engaged without a ring from Katharine’s.”
“Truer words…”
My phone buzzes in my pocket. Charlotte’s ringtone—the Darth Vader entrance march. She picked it herself as a joke.
“Charlotte,” I say to my dad as I gesture to the phone.
“Maybe change that now that she’s going to be your wife,” my dad suggests. Then he points at me, a smile on his face. “Hey! That was my first official piece of advice to you as a soon-to-be-married man.”
A momentary spate of nerves lodges in my chest. What if Charlotte won’t go along with the plan? What if she laughs at me—as she fucking should—and tells me this is the craziest idea in the world, and no way is she going to do it?
I tell myself not to panic prematurely. This is what friends do for each other. They pretend they’re going to marry you when you need them to. Right?
The ringtone sounds again. Vader is marching closer.
“You should answer it now. Women like that,” my dad says. “Hey. That’s my second great piece of advice.”
I steel myself, slide my thumb across the screen and go into character. “Good morning to my beautiful bride-to-be,” I say in a smooth, romantic voice.
She cracks up. “Why are we playing so early? Don’t tell me you started hitting the sauce on a Friday morning? Are you drunk off your ass already, Spence?”
“I’m just drunk on you. Where are you right now?”
“Just talked with one of our suppliers. Got us an even better deal, thank you very much. Nachos are on you next time. But why are you acting like a lovesick weirdo?”
“Well, sweetheart,” I say, meeting eyes with my dad, who gives me a thumbs up as I lay it on thick for his benefit, “I’ll come see you shortly, and you can tell me all about it in person.”
“Okay,” she says slowly. “But the deal is good, so I don’t have to give you the play-by-play in person, or even on the phone. I need to go jump in the shower anyway. And no, don’t say it. I’m not literally going to jump in the shower.”
I laugh. “Of course. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. I can’t wait to see you, too.”
I almost say pookie before I end the call, but then I’d have to relinquish my balls to the Guys’ Committee. I like my balls. I’m rather attached to them.
I end the call before she can protest and then give my dad a knowing look. “The woman needs me.”
My dad waggles his eyebrows. “You must heed the call.” He rubs his hands together. “This is the best news ever. I couldn’t be happier. I’ve always liked Charlotte.”
And I couldn’t feel any guiltier. I rarely lied to my dad as a kid. I’m pretty sure I’ve never done it as an adult. The morsels of guilt zipping around inside are new to me, and they’re kind of crummy. But it’ll be worth it. The deal memo’s done; the contract will be inked in a matter of days. This little lie will help the transition go smoothly.
He grabs me in a big embrace. “Call your mother later. She’ll want to hear it all from you.”
“I’ll give her all the mushy details,” I say, wincing inside as I prep to lie to Mom as well.
I catch a cab to Charlotte’s. Along the way I text Nick to cancel. Family stuff this weekend. Gotta bail tomorrow. We’ll celebrate another time?
It’ll take him hours to reply. Nick is the rare breed of modern man, sometimes spotted in the wild without a screen in his face. He’s a pen and paper kind of guy, due in no small part to him being a world-class cartoonist.
As the yellow car zips along Lexington Avenue, I look up Bang Her, the hot bartender, then fire off a quick text: Sorry, babe. Something came up, and I need to see the fam. Another time.
Her reply arrives thirty seconds later. You have an open invitation with me. :)
Those are two of my favorite words—open invitation.
But she’s not the one I’m thinking of when I arrive in Murray Hill. It’s the woman behind a massive bouquet of…balloons?
CHAPTER FIVE
Easily, there are three dozen of those suckers. All the size of Martian heads, in every shade of pastel known to HGTV.
A centerpiece balloon rises in the middle, higher and prouder than the rest. That one is the lone bright shade. It’s blood red, and I think it’s supposed to be shaped like a heart, but it looks like a big butt to me.
I hand the cabbie a twenty, telling him to keep the change, and shut the door behind me as he screeches off in search of the next fare.
I can’t even see her face. Or her chest. Or her waist. The top half of her is entirely obscured by balloons, but I’d recognize those legs anywhere. Charlotte ran track in high school, and has strong, toned legs with muscular calves that look like sin come to life when she wears high heels. Come to think of it, they’re fuck-hot right now in white socks and sneakers. She must have been out for her morning run earlier today.
Peering down the street at her, I watch the scene unfold as I eat up the sidewalk with long strides. She tries to hand the bouquet to a mother pushing a stroller. The mom gives her a shake of the head and a sneer. As I cut the distance to ten feet, she offers the balloons to a girl who looks to be about ten.
“No way!” the girl shouts, and runs the other direction.
From behind the balloons, Charlotte heaves a frustrated sigh.
“Let me guess,” I say as I reach her. “You’ve either ditched The Lucky Spot to attempt a new career as a balloon peddler, or Bradley Dipstick has struck again?”
“Third time this week. He can’t seem to understand the meaning of the words ‘we are never getting back together.’” She yanks the balloons away from her face, but they bat her hair. She tries again to slam them away, but static cling is working against her. The pastel fuckers are relentless, and a slight breeze keeps jamming them closer to Charlotte’s hair. “These are the world’s most obnoxious balloons, and I swear the other residents are whispering about his plan to get me back, since they all know about what he did in the first place.”
“He just sent them, I take it?”
“Yes,” she says through gritted teeth, as she clutches the bouquet. “About two minutes after I called you, I was heading out to get a quick coffee, and the doorman rang to tell me they had these balloons for me. But they were too big to fit in the elevator, so could I please come take them? Even if I wanted to keep them I wouldn’t be able to get them to my apartment.”
“And you’re trying to give them away?” I ask as I extend a hand, gesturing for her to give them to me.
“I thought perhaps a child might enjoy them more than an adult woman. Shockingly, I’ve outgrown my balloon fetish.”
A bus groans to a stop outside her building, and a plume of exhaust sends a balloon straight for Charlotte’s face.
“Oomph,” she utters, as a vile cotton candy pink balloon attacks her.
I grab the tangled mess of string and jerk it away from her, then hold them high above my head. “We can’t just let them fly away into the sky? Float over Manhattan in shades of garish Easter egg?”
She shakes her head. “No. Balloons eventually lose their helium and then they float down. They get stuck on trees or fall to the ground, and animals eat them, and get sick, and that is not okay.”
Charlotte is a softie. She loves animals.
“Gotcha,” I say with a nod. “Just so I’m clear. Are you okay witnessing the massacre of three dozen obnoxious balloons right about now?”
She nods resolutely. “It might scar me a li
ttle bit, but I’m confident I can get through it.”
“Cover your ears,” I say, then grab my keys with my free hand and proceed to stab each balloon with a loud pop, including the ass-shaped one, until I’m holding a limp bouquet of broken rubber.
Sort of like Bradley.
Here’s everything you need to know about how Bradley earned his stripes as a total asshole. He and Charlotte met two years ago since they both lived in the same building. They started dating, hitting it off and going strong for a while. They talked about moving in together. They decided to buy a bigger place on the tenth floor and get engaged. Everything was going swimmingly until the day they were all set to sign the papers on the two-bedroom, and Bradley headed down early to—get this—“check out the pipes.” Yeah, that was his real excuse.
When Charlotte arrived, pen in hand, Bradley was banging the realtor against the kitchen counter.
“I never did care for those steel counters,” Charlotte had said, and I’d been so proud of her for coming up with that zinger in the heat of the moment.
Of course, in reality, she’d been devastated. She’d loved the guy. She’d cried on my shoulder as she told me the story, zinger and all. That had been ten months ago, and when Bradley finally ditched the realtor, he embarked on a campaign to win Charlotte back.
With gifts.
Abhorrent gifts.
I stuff the flaccid balloons into the garbage can on the corner. “The animals are safe now from his reign of terror.”
“Thank you,” she says with relief, as she grabs a tie from her wrist and yanks her hair off her face and into a quick ponytail. “That was like a pastel explosion of pathetic. Once you killed them, they were pretty droopy, too.”
“Like Bradley?” I ask with an arch of the eyebrow.
Her lips quirk into a tiny grin. She’s trying not to laugh. She covers her mouth. Charlotte has never been one to kiss and tell. She never shared details of their sex life—not that I wanted to know any. But she was a vault.
So the fact that she’s holding up a thumb and forefinger, and mouthing a little bit is a huge deal for her.
For me too, it turns out.
I’m a guy, and therefore I’m in competition with all men, all the time, so I can’t help but feel a surge of triumph.
That is so not an issue for me whatsoever.
“Let’s get you that coffee and I’ll tell you why I was acting like a lovesick weirdo.”
CHAPTER SIX
As she pours sugar into her cup, her eyes widen. As she adds a drop of half and half, they turn into saucers. And as she brings the coffee to her lips, her eyeballs practically pop out of her head.
When I mention the dinner tomorrow, she nearly spits out the hot beverage.
Then she clutches her belly, clasps her hand on her mouth, and shudders with laughter. “How do you get yourself into these situations?”
“I like to think it’s my wit and charm, but in this case, it might have been my big mouth,” I say, with a what can you do? shrug. Thing is, there’s only one answer to that question—I have to show up with a fiancée. Which means she has to say yes, so I turn serious. “Will you do it? Will you pretend to be engaged to me for a week?”
The laughter doesn’t stop. “That’s your brilliant idea? That’s your best solution to the foot-in-the-mouth problem?”
“Yes,” I say, nodding, staying firm to the plan. “It’s a great idea.”
“Oh, Spencer. That’s fantastic. Really, truly, one of your best ideas ever.” She leans against the creamer counter at this hip little coffee shop near her place. “And by ‘best idea,’ I mean ‘worst.’”
“Why? Tell me, why is it such a bad idea?”
She takes a deliberate pause, then holds one finger in the air for emphasis and speaks. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you want this fake engagement to work, right? You want to pull it off?”
“Yes. Obviously.”
She stabs her finger against her sternum. “And so your bright idea is to ask me?”
“Who else would I ask?”
She rolls her eyes. “You’re aware that I’m pretty much the worst liar in the universe?”
“I wouldn’t call you the worst.”
She stares at me like I’m crazy. I think I might be. “Do I need to remind you of the time in junior year when you and your friends pranked my dorm? If memory serves, I not only witnessed your prank, thanks to skipping out of The Notebook screening early, but my roomies got the truth about whodunit in about five seconds.”
“You couldn’t have caved that quickly,” I insist, taking a drink of my coffee as I flash back to college. One of my buddies had been dating one of Charlotte’s friends. The girlfriend had hung his TV remote from a fourth-story window, since she thought he watched too much TV, and to get even he enlisted a bunch of us in a little furniture switcheroo. Trouble was, Charlotte caught us in the act, so I swore her to secrecy, promising we’d return everything after midnight.
“Oh, I did. I absolutely did. It wasn’t hard to get the truth out of me,” she says adamantly, looking me straight in the eyes. “All they had to do was ask who relocated all the common room furniture to the laundry room, then tickle it out of me. If I could have made it through that movie I never would have walked in on the prank. I still blame Nicholas Sparks for my failure to protect your trick.”
“I promise you won’t be forced to sit through a Nicholas Sparks film under this fake engagement scenario. And I swear there won’t be any tickle torture confessions.”
“Look, I just think this is not only ridiculous, but also highly likely to blow up in your face.” She softens her tone. “I care about you, Spencer. I know you want to make this pretend engagement work for your dad’s sake, but of all the women you know in New York, why on earth would you pick me? Even an escort agency would be smarter. Those women know how to be believable fiancée types.”
I scoff at the idea and then clasp my hand on her shoulder, squeezing her, like a coach trying to persuade a free agent to join his team. I need to convince her she can do this. Because she can. She knows me better than anyone. Plus, I can’t just call up an escort agency and order up a fiancée for a week. “Hello, can I have the full girlfriend experience with a side of fries to go, please?” One, I don’t know any escort agencies. Two, the buck stops at Charlotte. I offered her up this morning as my bride. It’s Charlotte or nothing.
“It won’t even take up that much time. It’ll just be a few events to go to together—picking out a ring today, then this dinner thing tomorrow. You can do this. It’s you and me, babe,” I say, and she furrows her brow at the last word.
“Is that what you call me as your fiancée? Babe? Or is it sweetheart? Or something else? Snookums? Honey bear? Sweet cheeks? Snuffaluffagus?”
“I assure you, it’s not Snuffaluffagus.”
“I kind of like Snuffaluffagus,” she says, and now she’s just trying to pull my leg…or maybe avoid giving me an answer.
“I guess it’s babe then,” I say, staying the course, as she drinks some of her coffee. “I don’t know why I called you that. Except for the obvious. You’re a babe.”
She smiles again and says in the softest voice, “Thank you. So are you.”
See? Charlotte and I can both appreciate each other’s appearance. That’s one of the great hallmarks of our friendship. I can acknowledge she is a babe, and she can do the same with me, and we’re still all good. That’s why she has to be my pretend fiancée.
I gesture from her to me, confidence coursing through me. Maybe it’s a false bravado. Maybe it’s real. But it’s all I’ve got, and I need her. The clock’s ticking on the two p.m. opening curtain at Katharine’s. “My point is this. We’ve done this. It’s our game,” I say, like I’m convincing her to join the crew I’m assembling for a Vegas casino heist. “We know the drill. I play fake fiancé with you all the time, and you with me.”
She worries away at the corner of her lip. It’s kind of ridiculously cute. L
ike, if she were really my fiancée, I’d probably think that was adorable, and I would lean in for a quick peck.
“That’s for three minutes, at the most, at a bar,” she points out. “That’s just a quick wham bam, thank you, ma’am kind of thing to save each other from unwanted advances. For this I’d have to keep it up for a week, you’re saying? Under scrutiny? Of the press, your parents, your dad’s buyer, and everyone else? I just think you’re asking for trouble.”
“Yes, but who knows me better than you? You’re the only person who could possibly pull this off,” I say, and as a new rush of customers streams into the tiny coffee shop, we head out, making our way back toward her building, coffee cups in hand as we walk.
“I want to help you. You know I do. I just think everyone will know we’re not really engaged, and then that’s not helpful to you at all.”
Undeterred, I press on. “Then let’s have a debrief. Especially since I’m supposed to buy you a ring at two p.m.” Her eyes go wide, and I keep reassuring her. “Let’s go over every single thing we need to know.”
“Like what toothpaste I use, and whether you hog the sheets?”
“I don’t hog the sheets,” I say as we sidestep a husband and wife, each wearing babies in Björns and arguing about where to brunch.
“And I use minty-fresh Crest. The teeth-whitening kind,” she says. “But let’s be honest. That’s not what anyone is going to ask. Also, have you thought about how you’re going to survive a week or more without your favorite pastime?” she says, as an evil glint lights up her brown eyes.
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