In the Unlikely Event

“You made it.” I turn around, wrapping my arms around his neck and giving him a peck on the lips, like punching a time card. He’s still wearing his pale gray suit from the office.

“Don’t I always?” He scrunches his nose.

He does. Callum is the most precise, trustworthy man I’ve ever dated. The exact opposite of spacey, unreliable Mal. When I look again, I see that my boyfriend has remembered to wear my favorite tie. Dark green with strings of gold. When we spotted it in the store, about two weeks into our relationship, I told him it reminded me of Ireland, and he immediately bought it.

I yank the Nikon D18 he bought me for my birthday from my purse and snap a picture of him, capturing his rich-boy, pouty smile as he searches my face for approval.

I’ve been freelancing as a photographer for Blue Hill Records ever since I got my arts degree four years ago. It pays next to nothing, but next to nothing is still better than actual nothing, which is what I got paid when I interned here for the first three years. I work a part-time job as a bartender to pay my astronomical Manhattan rent.

It’s not that I have to live the poor Manhattan girl cliché. I have an inheritance from my late father, but I refuse to touch it. Using it never even crossed my mind. I’d burn the money if I could, but that would give my mom a heart attack, and I don’t want that on my conscience.

I never wanted the money. I only ever wanted my dad in my life.

“You look gorgeous, love.” Callum captures my chin with the back of his thumb, tilting my head up.

Do I, though? I’m the opposite of what a man like Callum would usually go for. I have pale, borderline-sickly skin, big green eyes always framed by an industrial amount of eyeliner, a nose hoop, and an undying love for everything punk rock, which is probably getting a little old at my ripe age of soon-to-be twenty-seven.

Right now, my red-gold roots are showing at the top of my long, silver-ombre hair. Like strawberries in the snow, Callum says when my roots are showing. I’m wearing a messy ponytail, and I have on a striped red and white dress, which I paired with Toms and a studded choker. Put simply, I could pass as a Victorian ghost who got lost at Spencer’s.

Sometimes I suspect that’s what drew Callum to me in the first place. That eccentric, vibrant shell that could elevate his status more than any plastic trophy wife could.

“Look how open-minded and hip Callum is, with his hipster, artistic, holds-on-to-an-actual-job girlfriend. Her breasts are unenhanced, and she is not on a first-name basis with the saleswomen at Neiman Marcus.”

“I look like something from the cast of Beetlejuice.” I laugh, kissing his neck. His low rumble vibrates against my body.

Callum removes a lock of my hair that has escaped my hair tie with the back of his palm and presses his lips to the flesh he just exposed at the base of my neck.

“I like Beetlejuice.”

He’s never watched it. He told me so on our first date, but correcting him seems redundant, and like I’m trying to find non-existent issues in our relationship.

“You know who else I like?” He dips his head down for another kiss. “You, in that Tiffany’s necklace I bought you.”

Eh, yeah. The one he gave me, along with a sensible dress, because I’m cool, but not always cool enough to look the way I do next to his friends.

“Careful. I’m turning twenty-seven in a couple months. You might give me ideas,” I tease. The words feel empty on my tongue, but I know how much pleasure he takes in hearing this.

“My father told me not to threaten a whore with a dick. Do you know what that means, Aurora Belle Jenkins?”

That’s my tall, stockbroker, Wolf of Wall Street boyfriend. With his Eton and Oxford education. With his impeccable manners and dirty mouth.

The man whose only fault is being exactly what my mother wished for me.

Rich. Powerful. Well-bred.

Stable. Sweet. Boring.

What Mom doesn’t know is I like Callum despite all of those things, not because of them. It took me six months to relent to his persuasion, because I knew she’d like him, and the things my mother likes are usually artificial and shallow.

He’d been chasing me around for months. Finally, he showed up at the bar located beneath his apartment—coincidently the one I work at—and slammed his palm against the counter.

“Tell me what it’d take to make you mine,” he slurred that night.

“Stop looking put together and on the sanity spectrum,” I deadpanned. “You remind me of everything my mother wants. And my mother wants all the wrong things.”

“Is that why you keep saying no?” He frowned, confused. “I come here every night, begging for a chance, and you turn me down because your mother could like me, God forbid?”