The Husband Game

by Wylder, Penny

  He didn’t.

  But he did. He withdraws a flawless diamond ring on a white gold band, in what looks like a vintage setting.

  “Where…?” I breathe, confused. Stunned. He actually got me a ring?

  “It’s my grandmother’s,” he explains in a low voice. “She gave it to me years ago. She told me that when I found the right woman to wear it, I’d know. Well. I think I found her.” His eyes fix on mine, searing hot.

  Gazing into those eyes, I can’t help it. My heart tightens, and my stomach flips. This feels real.

  I know it isn’t, I know it’s all a set-up. But it feels so fucking true.

  “Lila Baker,” Charlie says, his voice louder now, back to the performance of the thing. The entire stadium is staring at us now, everyone from his teammates to the opposing team, who were halfway to their changing rooms when they stopped and turned around to gawk at the Hartford captain pulling this public stunt. Even the fans in the stands have stopped chanting, all of them leaning in a little, so they can hear. “Will you make me the happiest man on earth, and marry me?”

  I press my lips together to keep from letting out a sound—what sound, I don’t know. Part of me wants to laugh. Another part, a bigger part, wants to cry. Tears sting at the backs of my eyes, and they feel like happy tears, except that can’t be right, because I have never cried happy tears once in my entire life.

  First time for everything, I guess.

  “Yes,” I breathe, and the crowd erupts all over again, like Charlie just pulled off another stellar goal in the last few minutes of a game. “Yes, I’ll marry you,” I repeat, louder, all while Charlie is leaping to his feet and pulling me into a tight hug.

  Then our lips collide, and fuck it, I don’t care if it is fake, this is the best fucking moment of my life. I sink into that kiss, wrapping my arms around his neck as he pulls me against him, lifting me straight off my feet, ice be damned. I can feel every inch of his body pressed against mine, and on impulse, I wrap my legs around his waist to pin myself there.

  The cheers turn into whoops, and when we break apart, our faces hovering an inch apart, Charlie grins at me. “Here goes nothing,” he whispers. Then he kisses me again, slower, and fuck, I can’t wait to tear all this hockey gear off of him.

  But at the back of my mind, a little voice won’t stop whispering: What did we just do?

  10

  There’s an after-party immediately following the game, but we barely last an hour at it. The whole time, Charlie keeps his hands on me, holding my hand, then wrapped around my shoulders, then sliding down to my waist, the small of my back. Lower.

  By the time we’re standing near the punch, his hand sliding along my ass, I know it’s time to give up on pretending that we care about socializing with anyone tonight.

  “Should we get out of here?” I murmur, only to be rewarded with a flash of heat from his glance.

  “I thought you’d never ask.” He leans down to kiss my temple, and his lips linger against my skin. “I can’t wait to get you back in my bed… fiancée.” His eyes, when they find mine again, practically burn, they’re so filled with desire.

  I can’t lie, that word on his lips does funny things to me. It sends electricity shooting through them, makes me suck in a breath and go taut with want. “Charlie…”

  “We’re going,” he says, decisive. “I need to tear those jeans off of you.”

  My belly tightens with want.

  We turn for the door, and as we go, we wave goodbye to the rest of the crew. Anna lifts her drink in salute, while someone cracks a joke about us being eager to celebrate our engagement. All the while, the ring Charlie slid onto my finger earlier feels like a heavy weight. So solid. So real.

  We head out of the party hand in hand. Luckily it was being held at one of the frat houses, just a short walk from Charlie’s apartment. Otherwise I think we’d probably have to find another public garden to defile.

  I run my hand up his arm, leaning into him, as he keeps his tight around my waist. Every other step or so, he pauses to trail his fingertips up my arm, along my collar. I shiver every time he touches me, eager for more.

  We barely make it inside his apartment building before he has me pinned against the wall, and I run my hands over his shoulders, down the sculpted planes of his back, tracing every muscle.

  When our lips part, I reach up to brush my fingertip ever so gently along the bruise on his cheek. His eyes flutter closed for a moment, until he turns to press a searing kiss to my palm, and then he tugs me into the elevator.

  Inside, he catches me again, tight around my waist. We’re still kissing when it reaches his floor, so we just stumble out of it, our bodies pressed together, our lips locked, his legs pushing mine to make me walk in sync with him.

  I run my hands through his hair, and we part again, just a few steps from his door now. “Charlie…” I murmur. In the hallway light, the ring on my finger winks. His grandmother’s ring. Obviously I won’t be keeping it. I couldn’t do something like that, accept this and then keep it, when this whole engagement is a sham. But still… even just wearing it now makes me feel funny. Wrong, somehow.

  “Maybe this isn’t a good idea,” I breathe, just as he bends to kiss my neck, the edge where my jawline meets under my ear. He nips at the skin, and I let out a shivery sigh.

  “What, you don’t want me to fuck you senseless after all?” He pulls back just far enough to catch my eye, raising one eyebrow in clear disbelief.

  “No, not that. I…” I draw in a shaky breath and force myself to take a step back from him. “Just, that, the proposal, it felt… I don’t know. All those people saw us. Everyone knows now, all of your friends, and mine will hear soon enough. Especially if I keep wearing this.” I raise my left hand. The ring is beautiful, vintage and finely designed. But it’s not really mine. Would his grandmother want him to be using his family heirloom like this? As a stunt?

  Charlie frowns at me, confused now. “This was your idea,” he reminds me, though his tone is gentle.

  “I know.” I run a hand through my hair. “I know, I just… what if someone finds out this is all fake? What will they think, what would your family think about me using our relationship just to advance my career, and—”

  He kisses me again, harder this time. The kind of kiss that screams stop thinking. When he draws back, a faint smile touches his lips. The same one he usually wears whenever I’ve just said something ridiculous. “You’re overthinking this, Lila.”

  I chew on my lower lip. “Really?”

  “Yes.” He raises both hands to cup my cheeks, holding my face gently between them. Then he leans in and rests his forehead against mine, so we can gaze into one another’s eyes, mere inches apart. “But luckily, I have just the remedy for overthinking. It involves no thinking, and lot of time in my bed…”

  I laugh and swat his shoulder. But then I tilt my chin up and feather my lips across his. “You’re right. I should stop worrying.”

  “There we go.” His grin widens. “Have some fun with this. This is meant to be fun, right?”

  “Yeah,” I agree, even though the weight in my stomach only feels like it’s getting heavier with every minute, not lighter. But he’s right. This is meant to be fun. A fun article series, a love story people will follow the way they follow soap operas and dramas. Nobody’s going to find out we’re faking it. Nobody’s going to get hurt.

  People do this kind of thing all the time. It’s how people get their stories to take off. If you plot the whole story out beforehand, of course it’s going to be easy to write a satisfying story out of it at the end.

  I realize I must have started nodding again, because Charlie runs his fingers through my hair. “Good,” he says softly. Then he turns to open his apartment door, his other hand sliding down my arm to tangle his fingers through mine.

  Ever so gently, he tugs me forward, step by step, until I’m right on the threshold of his apartment. Just before I step inside, though, I swear I hear
something behind me. Another door opening, down the hall. The stairwell door, maybe?

  I turn around. But when I look, I don’t see anyone else in the hallway at all.

  Then Charlie tugs on my hand again, and I shake my head. You’re just being paranoid, I tell myself. Imagining things. Jumping at shadows.

  Without giving it another thought, I turn and follow Charlie into his apartment, and let him shut the door behind us.

  11

  You did it!! And holy WOW what a great proposal story. The page hits on this one are off the charts!!

  I wake up to that text from Fiona, along with a string of confused messages from my friends. Last night—a day after our engagement and subsequent celebratory evening together—I posted my next installment in the series. A story about our engagement, complete with about a million photos of it, cobbled together from the bystanders and Charlie’s friends who managed to snap photos of the proposal. One person even took a video, which ends with me full on leaping into Charlie’s arms.

  It looks real. It looks so fucking real that I watch it myself at least a half a dozen times before I finish describing the scene in words. The way I felt. What Charlie said to me. It’s almost exactly verbatim, minus the parts where we talked in a low voice about the truth.

  The weird part is, the sections about how I felt were all true, too. I talked about feeling stunned, and worrying that we were moving too fast, but about how this is the way marriages used to be, a traditional route—normally you would get engaged after a short period, back in the day, and you would get to know each other later, after you’d committed to one another. I wrote about how I’d always been freaked out by that concept but that now, after years of dating and never really connecting to anyone, I had finally found someone I clicked with. Someone I related to, and who I think got me, too. At least, so far.

  I wanted to see if moving fast could work. If doing what they did back in the day, and getting married quickly, could be the right move in the modern era.

  And as much as I was writing all of that to pander to the audience, to play up what we were doing… I felt it all. I wasn’t lying about that much.

  But now that the article is out there… Now that people I know are reading it, seeing it…

  My phone dings again, and my whole body tenses at the name on my screen. Mom. Uh oh. With a grimace of apprehension, I click it open. Sure enough, a wall of text greets me. I skim the first paragraph of many.

  Are you out of your mind?? Who is this boy you’re suddenly posting about? We haven’t even met him and you want to marry him? Why do you want to get married so quickly, are you pregnant??

  The questions keep coming. I skim the rest, and quickly respond. Calm down, I’m not pregnant.

  Calm down?? You’re marrying a stranger out of nowhere and I’m supposed to be calm???

  I chew on the inside of my cheek. Then I bite the bullet and dial her number. She picks up on the first ring.

  “What is going on with you? Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

  “Mom, no. I’m sorry, I should have given you a heads-up first. The engagement isn’t real, okay?”

  On the other end of the line, I hear her let out a huffy breath. But she falls silent, at least, for long enough that I can actually get a word in edgewise.

  “It’s just a… kind of like a performance piece, an art thing. An experiment, I don’t know. Fiona thinks that if I do this and write about test-driving an old-fashioned marriage, it will be a really popular article series. All I’m going to do is write about what it must have been like to get married so fast and young to someone you hardly know, like people used to do in the olden days. Then I’m going to write about how that marriage blows up in your face, as ours inevitably will, when we tank it.”

  “So it’s fake,” Mom replies, latching onto the one part of that ramble she understands. “You’re pretending you’re going to marry this man, so that… what, you can break up and write about it?”

  “That’s the gist of it, yeah.”

  On the other end of the line, she lets out a long sigh that transitions into a groan. “And Fiona asked you to do this?” Mom knows all about Fiona by now. She knows Fi is my boss, and in charge of all things at the magazine. And that Fiona has been one of the few people to give me and my writing a chance. She knows I owe Fiona everything about my career so far. Without Fi, I wouldn’t be writing full-time, at least not with enough regularity to afford not to have another day job to pay the bills.

  Without Fi, I wouldn’t have been able to achieve my dreams.

  “She did,” I reply, a little more firmly.

  Another sigh. “I worry about what people will think of you, though, writing about such personal things. Putting your whole life out there on display for anyone to consume, like you’re some kind of reality star. Don’t you worry about that?”

  I blow my bangs out of my eyes with a huff. “Of course I do, Mom.”

  “Why didn’t you talk to me about this before you agreed?”

  “Because I kind of knew you’d hate the idea.” I shift from one foot to the other. “Given your views of marriage. Which I don’t blame you at all for having,” I’m quick to add.

  “Look, your father’s and my marriage was a complete and utter disaster, I won’t sugarcoat that. He was a complete asshole to me, after all that I sacrificed for him. And I’m even more angry at him for abandoning you, because no matter what he felt about me, he should never have walked away from his children, from his relationship with his kids. But…” Another sigh, much slower this time, like she’s thinking through her next words very carefully. “Look, Lila, you can’t judge every relationship based on mine, okay? Some marriages do work out, though they’re rare and hard work. More are complete disasters because people rush into them unprepared and not knowing one another well enough beforehand.”

  “That’s exactly what I want to showcase in this article series, though, Mom. I want to show people that marriages don’t work. That’s the whole idea.”

  “But you could just write about real life failed marriages. You don’t have to risk your heart getting broken to write about something like that.”

  “Who said anything about my heart being involved?” I snap, even as the organ in question shrivels within my chest.

  “Please. I know you a little better than that, Lila. I saw the look on your face in that video, when you were staring at that boy. And moreover, I saw the way he was looking at you. You might think this whole thing is completely fake, that you’re just doing it as a performance or whatnot. But trust me, when real feelings get involved in something like this, it gets messy. No matter how fake it might be.”

  I chew on my thumbnail again. At this rate, I’m going to have no nails left by the time this whole marriage act comes to a close. “Look, Mom…”

  “It’s not too late to walk away from this,” she says. “Charlie seems like a very nice boy. I’m sure he’d understand if you told him you had to call off the fake show.”

  “He would, but that’s not—”

  “Be careful, Lila. I don’t want you to suffer the same kind of heartbreak that I did. I don’t want you to put yourself in a vulnerable position, only to get screwed over in the way you least expect. By the person you least expect to do it.”

  “I understand,” I say after a long pause, because I know she’s not going to be satisfied with anything but that. On the far end of the line, there’s a quiet moment, before she murmurs.

  “I know you do.” Then she disconnects, without another word, which is enough to tell me that she’s still worried. And that pretty soon I’ll wake up to yet another big wall of text from her, once she’s had time to think about more counter-arguments against my plans.

  To be honest, I can’t even say I completely disagree with her. This is kind of crazy. And it’s starting to feel wilder now that all my friends are texting me, begging for updates about Charlie, asking why I didn’t mention anything about him before, or how I cou
ld get engaged so quickly without even talking to them about it first.

  I leave most of their texts unanswered because I can’t deal with more questions about this, not right now. Then I return to Fiona’s text, the only truly, completely excited—rather than confused—message in the bunch. Now what? I ask her, because I’m not really sure where to go from here. I wrote the dating/meet-cute article, now I’ve written the proposal one. What’s next in the series?

  I should have guessed the answer to that. But somehow it still comes as a surprise to me when my phone dings with her response a moment later.

  Time to start planning your wedding, silly. Don’t worry about the costs. I’ve already talked to a few vendors who are willing to pitch in their services in exchange for a good write-up and review in your next article. You see? she asks, adding a little grinning emoji. This series is paying off already.

  I’m not totally sure I agree with that. It might be paying off monetarily, but my personal life is still blowing up in my face over it. But still. At least I won’t have to actually pay for any of the fake wedding hoops we’re about to jump through. Thank goodness for small favors. And hey, maybe if this wedding planning article takes off as well as Fiona seems to think it will, more brands will reach out for placement in the one after that. Maybe we could even start to charge for placements, like how Instagram models make money from their sponsors.

  It’s an interesting thought. One that should boost my mood, since I struggle to make ends meet from my writing alone. But instead, it only dampens my feelings. Because I can’t stop thinking about how this isn’t the career path I envisioned for myself. I wanted to make my living at writing, not shilling for wedding vendors.

  Still. Beggars can’t be choosers, I remind myself.

  Anyway, I can’t spend much more time fretting. My phone dings again. Another message from Fiona.

  Chop chop. Need your behind over at the office to start going over these plans together. See you in 15?