Never Say Yes To Your Fake Husband (I said Yes #4)

10. Sterling

Chapter ten

Sterling

I ’ve spent a lifetime not talking about this. No, I’m not avoiding it. I’ll never forget where I came from, but I’ve never intentionally gone there either. I don’t want to talk about it now, but Weland deserves the truth, not just because she stood up for me with her family, but because I’ve chosen this. I’ve chosen to be here with her. Maybe I spent a lifetime consciously not choosing that either—a family, a wife, and a life like everyone else has—but perhaps there was a part of me that always wanted that.

Obviously, there is. I wouldn’t be here right now if there weren’t. Everyone always told me, and not exactly in a nice way either, that there would come a day when work wouldn’t be enough. The company wouldn’t be enough. Being married to my job wouldn’t be satisfying.

I didn’t know it was here until it blindsided me. As it is, I still don’t feel like that’s true. I don’t feel like it’s not enough. But I’m here. I’m here, and I’m finding that I want something in addition to it. I don’t feel like I have to carve a part of myself out to have the other. Maybe I’m just scrambled up, jet-lagged, and having emotional whiplash. That would explain a lot of the stuff I can’t properly explain to myself.

“Everything sounds a lot like crickets,” Weland says, her tone light and breezy. She’s holding Beans’ leash while he marks yet another pole. A dog’s pee reserve is astounding. Their bladder must be the size of a water tanker, but somehow, it magically fits inside them.

“Sorry. I’m just trying to think how to start.”

“I know. It’s all good. I was trying to make a joke because I thought that might make it easier, but it’s probably not. Take your time. We can walk all morning if you like.”

The street is endless, with rows of condo complexes, apartment buildings, and houses. Cars are parked all down both sides of the street. It might be early enough in the morning, but it’s still busy enough. We’re the only ones out walking so far. I guess we're not that early, and all the morning dog walkers are probably already at work.

“You teach guitar?” I ask.

Weland blinks. “That’s right.”

“When do you give lessons? I don’t want to mess that up for you.”

“Monday to Friday in the evenings and then in the afternoons on weekends. I just took last weekend off because of the stagette. I moved the lessons. I thought I’d be more…uh…well, busier.”

“Did your friends contact you?”

She tries really hard not to let her face fall, but I can see the disappointment in her eyes. “No, none of them did. I texted Kate because I didn’t want her to think I just left and bailed on them, but I haven’t even heard back from her yet, and it’s been days. She’s busy, though. Planning a wedding and all that.”

I scoff. “Ignoring someone who is supposed to be her best friend and all that.”

Weland winces, and even though I’m trying to defend her, I feel like the bottom end of a jackass, and I think that’s all ass to begin with.

Waving a hand, I quickly add, “Sorry. Ignore me. I don’t know anything about it. I’ll tell you about me instead.”

“How bad is it?” She wraps the leash around her hand one more time like she’s preparing for Beans to tug her off her feet, but really, I think she’s trying to ground herself so she doesn’t get knocked off her feet by what I’m about to say.

“Oh, just regular bad. You’ll be okay.”

Her brows shoot up, and she gives me a wild look. “It’s not me I’m worried about.”

No, she wouldn’t be. I don’t think she ever worries about herself. She’s the least selfish person I’ve ever met. But self-sacrifice can be too far and too much as well. “My mom was a single mom. She was close to her family. She never did tell a soul who my dad was, which became a real issue later, but in the earlier years, they helped her out. She was young. She had me when she was nineteen. When I was three, she started dating again. I don’t remember, but that’s what my grandma always told me when I asked.

“Everyone always described her as being like the sun. Bright, beautiful, but a little bit unreachable and untamable. Granted, that was always coming from her own mother with a hell of a lot of hindsight behind it, so I’m not sure I can count that as accurate. I think there might have been a lot of jealousy involved too, even for my grandma. I think my mom lived life to the fullest every day and in every way. I’m not sure anyone really understood her. She dated a series of guys, as my grandma liked to put it, and one of them kind of stuck. They’d been dating for a few months, but she never brought him home. My grandma would see his bike pull into the driveway to pick my mom up and then back again at the end of the night. She didn’t know much more about him than that. Later, she knew his name because it was in the papers. She knew it from his obituary. He was a few years older than my mom but still way, way too young. Driving a bike late at night in the rain, they were hit by a truck. Neither of them survived.”

Weland makes a gargling noise in the back of her throat, and when I glance over, I see unshed tears glistening, and they turn her eyes a dark shade of blue, somewhere near cobalt or sapphire. As much as I try to feel anything about my past, all I feel is regret about what could have been and what wasn’t. I don’t feel grief. I was three, so I don’t remember any of it. But I do feel longing. Longing to know the woman who gave me life, who loved me, and who was taken from me before I could even properly recall anything about her. All my life, I wished that night never happened. I wished I had a real mother instead of a grandma and an aunt and cousins.

“I lived with my grandma for a few years after that. She was heartbroken, though, and losing my mom was hard on her. I didn’t understand it as a little kid, but as an adult, it was clear. When I was eight, she passed away. She wasn’t overly old, but I don’t think heart attacks pick and choose.”

“Good god, Sterling,” Weland gasps. “You said it wasn’t that bad.”

“That’s all the grief and losing people in my story. It’s done there. My mom’s dad died super young, when she was a teenager. Maybe that had something to do with her wild streak or why she tried to live life and love life to the fullest. I’m not sure. I’ll never be able to ask her. There was no one other than my aunt. She was five years older than my mom, and by the time I came into her family, she already had three kids. Two older and one a year younger than me. She didn’t want another, but she made room for me anyway, and she loved me in her own way.

“From what I could gather, she was so different from my mom. Her husband was a banker, and later, when she went back to work, she worked at the same bank. They were both so…proper and upright. Stodgy, I guess. I don’t know what it was, but she also encouraged the worst kind of sibling rivalry, except it was between her kids and me. The three of them against me. That’s the way it always was. Three boys. She called them her Gaggle of Greedy Gretchens. So, full disclosure: I didn’t come up with that myself. They hated that. They hated that she compared me to a saint or an angel all the time because I was quiet and never asked for anything. I never wanted to draw attention to myself, but it never worked out in my favor.

“All our lives, it was me against those three. I knew my aunt and uncle would never be a mother or father to me, and I’d never be one of their kids. They didn’t treat me like that, but it felt like it anyway. I never wanted to ask for anything, and I never wanted to need them for anything. I didn’t want to do a single thing that’ll ever give them a reason to get rid of me, which I understand now is super fucked up logic, but when I was a kid, that was how I thought.”

“Were they mean? Or just like kind of obtuse? I can’t imagine being in a family where you didn’t know you were loved beyond anything. We’re all so close, my mom and dad and brother, even though he’s so much younger.”

Beans stops and lifts his leg against a bush like he’s pissing all over my aunt and uncle’s idea of raising me.

“I think more obtuse. They had four boys to raise. That’s a lot for anyone. Maybe it was too much for them because when I was thirteen, my uncle literally ran off with this young girl from the bank. He left my aunt the house, half their savings, the car, and four boys when he moved to Switzerland to start his life over. And my aunt, to her credit, held us all together. I got a job when I was fourteen, just washing dishes at a restaurant close to the house. I held the job until I was eighteen. I worked my ass off in high school to make sure I could get a scholarship, and I did. I studied business, but music was always my passion. None of us had music lessons. My cousins were more bruisers than they were anything else, and they loved sports above all, but I had a good ear.”

Weland pulls a face. She’s already reading between the lines here. “More like one of those people who can just play anything after hearing something, am I right?”

“Kind of. I don’t know where it comes from. My aunt says my mom wasn’t musical. That she never played anything. But with genetics, it’s impossible to know. Maybe my biological father was the same way.”

“Do you sing?”

I lift a shoulder in a shrug. “Not really.”

“That would be a yes.”

“I have this kind of freaky talent for finding the perfect voice, and by perfect, I mean a voice people are going to love. I also have a really good talent for business, so I turned both of those things into a company and then into a career. I couldn’t have done it without investors, though, and my aunt saw potential in me, I guess. Because she bought most of the shares I was offering when I started my company. I needed an investor, and she had some savings. She was the financial backing, and I was the…well, everything else. My company started off with one person, me. I saw a need and I wanted to fill it. A lot of artists don’t want to work with big labels. They don’t want to lose control of their work. I never wanted to take someone else’s music from them, but I did want to help get them out there, help the world to see what I saw and hear what I heard.”

“Who do you work with, or who have you signed?” Weland pauses right there on the sidewalk. “Never mind. I don’t need you to name-drop. Your company obviously did well and is doing well because you have lots of money now.”

“Even after it took off and I tried to pay my aunt back, she never wanted to sell her shares. She was proud she invested in me when no one else wanted to. She and my uncle had put away money for their kids’ college since they were born, so she didn’t have to spend money on that. Then, she got the house from my uncle, and it was mostly paid off. As such, she wanted to keep the money invested.”

“Except her shares were worth almost nothing, and then suddenly they were worth a lot when the company blew up,” Weland says.

“That’s right. She wasn’t my mother, but she was always telling me that I should find someone to be happy with. That special someone.”

“Was she a hardcore romantic?” Weland asks.

I wrinkle my nose, but this time, there isn’t any bad smell. We might be in the middle of the city, but this particular neighborhood smells as fresh and clean as any other summer morning, and there are trees here and there lining the street. We might not be in a park or the country, but it doesn’t feel closed in or too busy here.

“You know, she wasn’t. At least, not that I ever knew. She was practical. She had ideas about how things should be done. All my cousins are married now. She liked all their wives, even if they were unlikable. She wanted them to be happy, and in her mind, that meant finding that special person. Maybe she was sad it never worked out with my uncle, or maybe she never got over that. It could be that it all stemmed from there. She never remarried or dated, so either he was it for her, and she mourned their broken relationship for the rest of her life, or she never truly loved him and regretted never finding the one for herself, and she didn’t want to see her kids make the same mistake. She was a hard lady to read.”

“How did she pass?” Weland asks quietly.

“My aunt used to say my mom was reckless and irresponsible, which she did sometimes say. Well, she lived her life the opposite. She wanted to be around for her boys, and probably me too, I guess. But when it’s your time, it’s your time, though. She never told any of us she had cancer. Pancreatic cancer. She said goodbye in her own way, but none of us knew that was what she was doing. She shocked us all. She downsized the house and sold everything off. She said she wanted to retire and didn’t need a big place, and then she went on a vacation down to Mexico.

“She was getting treatment there, but she didn’t tell a soul. She ended up passing away down there, and my cousins…god, the oldest one is a real asshole, but he dealt with all of it. All the legal stuff and getting her body back here to bury. It was a nightmare. It was the one time in my life I actually felt sorry for Joseph. Lucas and Tony were wrecks too. My aunt left them all her savings divided between them and everything she hadn’t sold. But to me, she left her shares in the company, though she did put stipulations on it. If I didn’t get married within a year and stay married for at least five years to prove it was real and not just something to meet the parameters of her will, then her shares would be divided up amongst my cousins, also equally. At the end of five years, if I were still married, then they would be mine.”

Weland stops dead. Beans sits down and looks up at her, even though she did not give him a command. He waits patiently for her signal, but she looks at me with a gathering storm of fury building in her eyes. I don’t want her to release it here on the sidewalk, so I put up a hand.

“I know what that sounds like, and for someone who lived her life quite conservatively and unromantically, it’s wild and nonsensical, but it was what it was. I couldn’t let my cousins have it. Not what I had built from nothing. I was shocked when I read the will, so I did what I’d been doing for years. I went out to a few little bars in the middle of nowhere that had live music and then lost myself in it. It was the strangest thing. At four in the morning, I was driving around aimlessly, wondering how I was going to save my company and having the crisis to end all the meltdowns in the world.

“Then, I pulled over by this park. I got out and sat on a bench just to think. It was so quiet, and I had to wreck it. I pulled out my phone, and after a little bit of browsing, there you were. You. Singing. Your songs. An angel in a sea of despair. Smitty had been my lawyer for a while at this point, but he was also a friend. I skipped over everyone else—my assistants and the rest of the office—and called him. I wanted to know two things. If you were single and if you were willing to save me. For the former, I suppose anyone could have helped me find that out, but for the latter, I needed it to be entirely secret. Naturally, each of my cousins got a copy of the will, and they’re pretty eager to get their hands on those shares. Considering they’re worth a few million dollars a piece for them, it would probably have brought the greed out in anyone.”

“But for you to just announce you were getting married out of the blue, they must have known it was fake.”

We start walking again, passing a string of houses that all look the same. Literally, they’re just different colors, but at least a row of a hundred have the same design. Two stories with porches on the front and alternating red and yellow and dark blue.

“Not at all. I’d been so quiet and private for such a long time. I’d get tired of my aunt telling me to find someone, so one time, I told her I had someone, but it was my own business. There wasn’t actually anyone, and I hadn’t really ever dated seriously because I was so busy with work, college, and then building a company after that, but she didn’t have to know that. I was just so sick of her harping on it, so the lie slipped out. Maybe that’s why she made the stipulation in her will. Hoping I’d take my happiness seriously. Or maybe she knew I was lying. My cousins believed I was seeing someone, though, and it was only natural for me to get serious about it and accelerate things to meet the terms of the will. As long as I was married and stayed married, and it appeared real, they couldn’t do anything.”

“So that’s why you were so worried about finding me and proving it was real.”

“Yes. They would have had a hard time proving it was fake. It would have been my word against theirs unless they got a hold of the contract, but Smitty would never give it up. I know I can trust him.” Two angry squirrels in a large tree across the street fill up the fairly quiet morning with a rapid burst of sudden chatter. “I’m not one of those people who live in the spotlight. I’m more behind the scenes, and even if some artists I’ve discovered, signed, and helped along the way are famous now, no one cares about the head of their label. I always wanted to remain unseen, and so I am, for the most part. I do meetings all over the world, and I have enough money now, so privacy isn’t an issue. My cousins know that. For a guy who was always half in the shadows and half living secrets before my aunt passed, it wasn’t much of a stretch to figure I did have a girlfriend and would never usher her into the fame I myself didn’t want. I guess my desire to go unnoticed was a stroke of massive luck.”

Weland stops again. She drops the leash, steps on it even though Beans stops too—the most alert dog to his owner’s commands I’ve ever met, and he barely even knows her—and thrusts her hands onto her hips. It pulls her sweater a little bit tighter over her chest, revealing curves and the swells of her breasts, and I have to pull my eyes away. My dick jumps to life, yet another reminder that all parts of me have spent years and years working and cherishing my privacy.

“Why now? Why did you just suddenly decide that now, of all times, you want to make it real?”

I’m at a loss here. I still haven’t answered that for myself. It’s not going to be adequate, but I give her the only answer I have. “Because no one who met you in person and saw your smile and heard your laugh and basked in your light could ever turn around and go back to the shadows and pretend like it never happened.”