Marry Me Now: An Arranged Marriage Collection

Under all my fear and worries, there’s an undercurrent of emotion I can’t ignore. An undercurrent of… happiness. Because that’s how I feel when I’m with John. And if that’s how I feel with him, just the two of us, then how much happier will I feel when it’s three of us? When we have a family. When our marriage becomes indisputably, permanently, real.

Finally, the right words come to me. I pull the card out and prop it on the dashboard, starting to write.

I lay it all out. How I feel about him, which came out of nowhere, as unexpected as the wild night that led to our marriage. And I end with how I’m feeling now—like this could be the same situation. Something wild and unexpected… but right. Something that could improve both our lives, as long as we keep our priorities straight. As long as we’re both all in.

When I finish, signing it feels wrong. So I draw something instead. It’s been a while since I’ve set ink to paper—I used to sketch out all my set designs in detail before I worked on them, but nowadays I work from computer renderings instead. Still, it comes back to me easily enough, with the pen in my hand.

I draw John, the way I remember him best. Lying beside me in bed, his dark eyes steady and fixed on mine. Reassuring me that whatever happens, he’ll be here for me.

Just like I’ll be here for him, no matter what happens now. No matter where this news takes the two of us in life.

When I’m finished, I leave the card sitting open on my dashboard and root around for the card’s envelope. When I find it, I tuck it inside and write on the front in swirling script, John’s name. Then I grab my purse and move to climb out of my car, only to let out a gasp of surprise.

Bianca is standing outside my car, her eyes huge and round with shock, fixed on me.

No. Fixed on the card in my hand.

She moves back as I shove open my door and climb out of the car. I expect her to run away, the way she’s been doing around me ever since the night she hit on John. But she stands her ground, to my surprise, and fixes her attention on the envelope in my hand instead. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry, but I was walking past, and I saw you… you seemed a little ill, so I came to check…” But she doesn’t meet my gaze. She just stares at the envelope in my hand, with John’s name on the front. “Did I read that right?” she asks. “Are you pregnant?”

The fear and worry I’ve been battling all day turn to jagged rocks in my stomach. I press the card over my heart, like that can shield me. “What do you want?” I snap.

Her cheeks flush. “I wanted to apologize,” she says, and it’s so far from what I expected that my eyebrows shoot upward.

“What?”

She clears her throat, and finally, finally, drags her eyes up to meet mine. “I’m sorry. About what happened with John and me. I’m sure he told you; I was just so embarrassed about it all… I thought he was flirting with me; clearly, I was wrong. I shouldn’t have made a move.” Her eyes drift to the envelope again. “Do you need anything? Can I help somehow?”

But I shake my head, moving away from her. She may have apologized for hitting on John—for misreading his signals, supposedly—but that doesn’t change the fact that she hit on him after she found out he and I were married. Even if our marriage was a sham, where is the respect in that?

And then there’s the last week at work. A whole week where she ignored me, refused to even acknowledge anything had happened. And now she wants to apologize and act like everything is fine… why? Because she found out I’m pregnant? Because she pities me? “I’m fine,” I say coldly, turning toward the building.

“Good luck,” she calls behind me, but I know her well enough to hear the catch in her tone. The insincerity.

Screw her. Screw her advice, her telling me that everyone at Pitfire thinks I married John for this job. They don’t know anything, and neither does she.

Back in the building, I tuck the card into my purse, planning to give it to John later tonight. Once everyone else clears out of the building. For now, I have work to do, and thanks to my much longer than usual morning break at the pharmacy, I’ll be playing catch-up.

I bypass the workshop for once and head straight into the theater. We’ve been hard at work creating all the pieces for this play, but this week, we’ll be starting to actually assemble the stage itself. It’s an exciting step, usually my favorite part of set design. It’s when all the pieces you’ve labored on so much, all the disparate puzzle pieces stacked up inside your head, finally join together on stage into something that starts to resemble a real theater. It’s when your imagination finally gets to come to life.

But today, I’m distracted. I force a smile and a wave for Daniel, and chat to a few of our stage hands about the order of setup. I want to get the background design right first, before we start adding the smaller set pieces to it. There’s one in particular, a moving set piece, that I’m worried about making fit. It needs to be suspended over the stage on wires, but accessible, because at one part of the play, toward the end of the second act, it needs to be able to move—to swing into the set, and be sturdy enough for one of the actors to climb onto it. It’s supposed to look like a series of stars in the night sky, at least until it swings down and reveals itself to be a chariot made out of shooting stars.

It’ll be the trickiest part of our design, but I have faith we can pull it off.

I leave a couple stage hands, overseen by Daniel, in charge of getting that whole thing hooked into the strap and pulley system we designed to hoist it up. We’ll test it a couple of times, before we hoist it all the way into position.

In the meantime, I get started helping some other employees prop up the background itself. When I get in, they’re already halfway done hanging the various deer antler designs John and I sculpted by hand onto what will become the back wall of the cabin where most of the first act takes place.

My heart skips a little, touching those pieces again. Remembering the way John’s hands cupped the clay around mine, the way he shaped them alongside me… And the way he pushed them aside to run his hands over me afterward, until it felt like he was sculpting me too, tracing my body until it became real, as molded as the clay we’d been working with.

I’m lost in memories of that, of his hands over mine, guiding mine, or letting me guide him, both in equal measure, when I hear raised voices. I finish attaching the set of antlers I’d been working on to its place on the back wall of the “cabin,” and then turn to spot Bianca passing out the usual round of afternoon coffees to the crew. I hadn’t seen her do this in a while. It makes me pause, uncertain.

Maybe I was being too harsh on her earlier, ignoring her olive branch of an apology. But I just don’t trust her. Not after everything she did.

I’m about to turn away, back to my work, when I hear a shout, from the opposite side of the stage this time. I whip around and spot Daniel barking angry orders at one of the guys he was supervising. The guy is swearing, grabbing at a rope… My eyes trace the rope up, widening with every foot they travel into the rafters.

Oh, shit.

They hoisted the chariot already. Even though I told them to be sure to only test it a few feet off the ground first. To judge by Daniel’s cursing, he didn’t order this either. But there’s no time to worry about whose fault it is, because when my eyes trace the trajectory of the chariot, I realize what’s about to happen.

The ropes it’s tied to are fraying. The wooden construction is heavier than we wagered. And standing right beneath it, in the path of the thing that’s about to collapse onto her oblivious head, is Bianca, a stack of coffee in hand.

I don’t pause to think about it. I react on sheer instinct. I sprint across the stage. Somewhere behind me, I hear more shouts, even a scream. That’s enough to finally catch Bianca’s attention and make her whip around to look at me, eyes widening. Then she looks up, and now she has the sense to scream too, just before I collide with her.

The force of my body crashing into her sends the coffees flying out of her hands and splashing a

cross the stage. It also sends both of us toppling to the ground, just as, with a deafening snap, the chariot’s rope finally gives way.

We hit the ground, Bianca beneath me. My head flies past hers though, cracks against the wood of the stage. I have just enough consciousness left to hear a deafening splinter as the chariot lands on the stage too, inches from us. Then the world spins and swirls into star bursts, before it fades to black.