Best Fake Fiance (Loveless Brothers 2)

She steps in. She’s wearing a suit and her face is bright red. Her hair’s wild. She’s breathing like she’s just run a marathon but trying to pretend she’s breathing normally as she looks around, uncertain until her eyes land on me.

Relief douses me like a summer rainstorm, leaves me shivering. Pete points in my direction and Charlie walks over, careful in heels, drops neatly into the chair to my right.

Up close I can see tiny rivulets of sweat on her temples, and without being told I can see it: Charlie knowing she’s late again, knuckles white on the steering wheel, Charlie taking off her shoes and running barefoot through the courthouse, ignoring the weird looks and mutters that followed her.

I love her for it. She’ll probably never change, and she’ll probably never be on time, but I love her for the flaws, the cracks, for the fuckups and mistakes.

She scoots her chair in, still trying to catch her breath, and glances over at me.

“Sorry I’m late,” she whispers.

I reach over and take her hand. She’s got the ring on, and I lace our fingers together, raise it to my hand, kiss it.

“You’re fine,” I whisper back.It feels endless. Crystal’s lawyer talks about schools and gated communities and college acceptance rates and opportunities unavailable to the child in her current situation. He suggests that Charlie and I aren’t actually a couple. He goes on and on about the fact that she’s going to have a sibling, that a child needs her mother, that it’s a shame to raise a child in any situation that isn’t a picture-perfect nuclear family.

We hear about the knife, about the broken arm, and I look over at Charlie. She’s staring dead ahead, glassy-eyed, jaw clenched.

I can’t say anything, so I just squeeze her hand.

Then it’s Lucinda’s turn.

The report cards. The teacher statements. We hear about how Rusty is in second grade and reading at a seventh-grade level; how she’s ahead of the rest of her class in math; how she has an interest in abyssal fish and Little House on the Prairie and brain teasers.

Lucinda reminds us it’s a miracle, given how delayed Rusty’s development was when I got custody. She details every single time in the past five years that Crystal has cancelled visitation. She points at Charlie and reminds the room that I’m in a long-term, stable relationship with a suitable woman.

Then there are the questions: about my intentions with Charlie and with schooling and with the brewery, to Crystal about the move to Colorado and the new baby. I tell him what I know, and what I don’t know I make up and state confidently.

Finally, the judge stops asking questions. He looks down at his notes. He adjusts his glasses. He frowns. My heart is a kick drum in a punk band, thrashing away. It’s a wave in a hurricane, pounding against the rocks and dissolving.

“Let’s take a ten-minute recess,” he says, stands, and leaves the room.

My fingertips go cold as I watch him go. I can feel the blood draining, coming back to my heart, my brain, my lungs, my body’s stress reaction. There’s a hand on my shoulder.

“It’s a big decision,” Lucinda reminds me calmly. “It doesn’t mean you’re losing her. It means he wants to get it right.”

I nod. Charlie squeezes my hand so tight the band on her engagement ring cuts into the webbing between my fingers, her hand strong and firm in mine. I’m not normally a weak man, but I am right now.

If I go straight from here and get her from school, we could be across state lines by this afternoon, I think. We’d use cash. Go to cheap motels, stay under the radar, and we’d live like that and I’d never have to be without her…

“Tell me something,” I say to Charlie, leaning my forehead on my fist, trying not to think.

“Tell you what?”

“Anything,” I say. “Distract me.”

“The sound llamas and alpacas make when they mate is called orgling and it sounds like a jalopy trying to turn the engine over,” she says.

My eyes are still closed, and I take a deep breath.

“Orgling?” I say.

“Sounds exactly like you think it does, kind of a… bludabludabludabluda,” she says, then clears her throat, lowers her voice. “I’m not doing a very good job. Turtles squeak when they fu— uh, mate, like this high-pitched ennnhhhh. Though in most of the videos I’ve seen they were actually doing it to shoes, which I guess look like female turtles.”

“Were there feet in the shoes?” I ask.

Kidnap Rusty and get fake names, maybe Charlie will come…

“Some of them,” she says. “Apparently Crocs really look like hot lady turtles, which is kind of ironic given the name.”

“I knew there was a reason my mom hates them,” I say, and Charlie smiles.

We keep talking about nothing, or rather, Charlie keeps talking: about the weird noises animals make when they mate, about how speed walking is an Olympic event, about how President Andrew Jackson was once gifted a 1,400 pound block of cheese and threw a party at the White House so people would come eat it.