Best Fake Fiance (Loveless Brothers 2)

The bed is made. The small desk is neat, laptop plugged in, charging. All the drawers shut on my dresser, the closet door is closed, dirty clothes only in the hamper and nowhere else. If I bent down, I’d see all my shoes under the bed in a neat-enough row, a single novel on my bedside table, a few necessities atop the dresser.

I wasn’t neat until I had a kid, but after Rusty slammed into my life like a category five hurricane, I had to control every single thing that I could, because my day-to-day was filled with things completely beyond it.

One day, I was kissing Charlie on top of a pickup truck by a bonfire. We’d been best friends since we were eleven, and suddenly — finally — our relationship took a turn to something else, something I’d thought about for ages but had shoved down, deep inside myself.

She spilled a beer on me. We laughed. We went home separately but the promise was there, hanging unspoken in the air like a harvest moon.

The next day, Child Protective Services knocked on my door and told me that a woman named Crystal Partlow was claiming I was the father of her nine-month-old daughter. I denied the claim for about five seconds, until they showed me a picture of a baby named Rustilina, and instantly, I knew.

I got a DNA test anyway, but I knew. I’d slept with Crystal a handful of times about a year and a half before, during a rough, directionless period in my life when I drank too much, did some things I shouldn’t have, and made plenty of questionable decisions. She was one of them.

CPS was there because Rusty had been removed from her mother’s home and placed into foster care due to neglect. If I was competent and willing, they’d consider placing her with me, her father, instead.

I was willing. I got competent. After a series of talks, my mom offered her help, so I moved back home. We set up a nursery. I read every parenting book I could find in the Burnley County Library, and one week after I found out that Rusty existed, I met her for the first time, in a supervised visit in the basement of an office building.

It was only love at first sight for one of us.

Rusty sat near the door the whole time, sobbing. She refused the bottle I offered. She would barely interact with me.

Same thing next day, but then the third day, she only cried for a few minutes. The day after that she smiled at me.

A week later, I took her home, and now she’s been with me for six years.

I didn’t forget about the kiss. I couldn’t. I wished I could, but the memory would pop up no matter what: while I was bent over, helping Rusty toddle around the house, when she woke up crying for her mom in the middle of the night and I did my best to soothe her, when I tried to convince her that broccoli was delicious by playing the airplane game.

Charlie stuck around. Our relationship waxed and waned in intensity, but she was always there: dropping by with dinner, inviting the two of us hiking with her, teaching Rusty cool animal facts like sharks have infinity teeth. In no time at all, Charlie was the fun aunt, we had a new relationship, and the past was past.

I couldn’t forget the kiss, but I could bury it. I could tell myself that it was in everyone’s best interest that I never think about it again and I could hide it, shove it down into a hole, only revisit the memory when I couldn’t help myself.

But buried things have a way of resurfacing, of exploding forth, of demanding to be reckoned with.

I hit the lights in the hallway, smile to myself, and head downstairs to do some reckoning.Chapter ThirteenCharlie“It’s not weird to taste wedding cakes before you’ve got a date and a venue locked down?” I ask Violet.

We’re sitting on the couch, looking at her iPad. She’s got about thirteen tabs open of different bakeries in the region, and for the past few minutes, we’ve been working up an itinerary that lets Daniel, Rusty, and me visit each of them in the most efficient manner possible this Saturday.

Violet’s getting really into the efficiency part of it. There’s a map open in a tab, and she keeps switching the order of the bakeries to see if she can figure out a way for us to drive one less mile.

“It’s weird, but not that weird,” she says, swapping the order of Francesca’s Cakes with Betty Bakes, then frowning because the total driving distance is now half a mile more. “If anyone gets nosy about it, say you’re still deciding between a couple of venues, but you expect to have the date and place locked down very soon.”