The Husband Game

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.