Chapter Eleven
When Verity had woken up this morning, she’d had to force herself to be angry. She had felt like her pride necessitated that she find a little bit of outrage and aim it at him, rather than letting him see that she was physically sated and ready to crawl in his lap and purr like a kitten.
So she had brought up the indignity of it all. Had tapped into the anger that had brought her into his bed in the first place last night. But he had met it with vulnerability, and that was something she didn’t have a defense against.
Then he’d kissed her, and all of her anger had dissolved into a lavender haze. His touch, the things he said to her, the things he demanded of her, it was like he had reached into her and taken the golden threads of her deepest fantasies and spun them into a glorious reality.
He seemed to know her body better than she did.
And now this.
He was asking her for a real marriage, when they were both still breathing hard from the pleasure they’d found together. When she was still dizzy with her need for him.
“A real marriage?”
“Yes. It was a business arrangement before we slept together.”
She wanted to get huffy about that. She wanted to minimize the meaning of what had happened between them the night before.
Just like she had tried to do when he had brought up her virginity.
She didn’t want to be vulnerable about it; she didn’t want to lend any credence to the idea that.
..that it had mattered that he was the first one.
But the truth was, it did.
And the truth was, it had changed everything to sleep with him.
Even if she didn’t want to admit it. In fact, it didn’t matter if she admitted it or not; he could clearly see it. Even Alex could see it.
He had told her things about himself. Not just the facts of his upbringing, but the way it made him feel.
The image of him as a little boy in a classroom with other five-year-olds, realizing that they all went home to the same mom and dad every night, while his circumstances changed with the whims of the system, was truly heartbreaking.
She couldn’t hold her outrage as tightly as she wanted to with that picture in her mind.
But a real marriage...
She tried to drum up some of the horror she usually felt when she thought of marriage. A family. Of quiet suburban desperation.
But, Alex was not suburban. He could no more live on a cul-de-sac than he could fly to the moon. Actually, he was way more likely to fly to the moon. He was a billionaire after all, and space travel was accessible to him. Normality? Not so much.
So right there and then, she didn’t need to worry about that. The image of life with him was... Well, it was different. Different than the generic imaginings she’d had of married life, whenever she had taken the time to think of them.
And maybe some of it was that she’d already lived through the wedding. Her family was there, and there hadn’t even been a large explosion, even though she had felt like she was tearing herself into pieces to prevent it from happening.
So one of the worst parts of marriage had already been dealt with.
Are you insane?
Maybe. Maybe not. What was the alternative? The alternative was the two of them separating in six months like this had never happened. Her going on to live that independent life she had always thought she wanted.
Flashes of last night, of what had just happened, made her heart beat faster, made her body feel weak. She was just going to walk away from him when all this was done and never feel...this again?
“Six months,” she said.
“What?”
“We make the decision in six months. Just like we were going to do, as far as how well the marriage was working externally. Only we’ll be evaluating how well it’s working.
..internally.” She blinked, and noticed how scratchy her eyes felt.
“I don’t really know myself,” she said. “It comes back to that protection thing. And I’m willing to entertain the idea of my life looking differently than I thought it would.
But you’re not wildly in love with me. That’s not why you’re suggesting we stay together. ”
“You’re not wildly in love with me either.”
Her comment and his returned volley were like arrows, whizzing by, but not hitting the target. Dangerous, somehow, even without contact. Certainly not an arrow she was willing to jump in front of, not now.
“No. But that isn’t what we’re talking about, is it?
You hired me because you wanted a taste of the state that you don’t know how to have.
You wanted a sample of friendship. And I gave it to you.
Now you want to see what it would be like to have a family.
I know what it’s like to have a family, and for me, it isn’t happy or warm.
Between us, maybe the potential is there.
But that’s all we are talking about. We are talking about making plans, laying out our terms, we’re not talking about jumping headlong into an affair. ”
“You can say that after what happened last night?”
“Is that why you’re asking me to stay married to you? You want more sex? What if I would have sex with you no matter what?”
She already knew that she would. She already knew that she didn’t possess the self-control to stay away from him. Even if it would be smarter. Even if it would be the more prudent thing to do.
“I would still want more.”
“Why?”
It was almost like she had reached out and grabbed him by the throat. He looked stricken. He looked like he didn’t know the answer, and she realized right then that she had never seen Alex looking uncertain. Perhaps he had been at different times, but not so she could tell.
“Because when I think about what’s on the other side of this, I no longer find pure satisfaction in the idea of simply achieving greater financial success.
I... I tricked myself into thinking that’s what I was looking for.
It’s not what I’m looking for. There is something missing from me.
Something missing from my life, from my future.
I cannot buy it, Verity, and you have no idea how much that.
..how much that burns. Because I never wanted to be helpless, not again.
You make me feel more connected with a part of myself that I have never.
..that I have never touched before. Perhaps we are friends. ”
Friends.
Now, after he’d been inside of her, they were friends.
He had done it. Stuck the knife right between her ribs. Gotten her right where she was vulnerable.
The truth was, if he had tried to profess wild and sudden love for her she never would’ve believed him. She would’ve laughed at him; she would have said that he was manipulating her.
Friendship, though, and the chance to suit his soul, that was appealing in a way that she couldn’t quite articulate.
It appealed to the loneliness in her. Maybe that was why this made sense to them both.
They were both essentially quite lonely—wasn’t that obvious?
She had taken a job that included surrendering her lunch hour to her boss.
You only did that when you had no one else to take the hour with. So maybe this wasn’t about love.
Maybe it was just chemistry mixed with the deep desire for both of them to not feel quite so alone. She had dedicated her life to protecting herself. But that protection had only built a wall around her that had left her isolated. Maybe this was a chance to knock that down.
“Six months,” she said. “We can see how we both feel about it then.”
“And you will live with me as my wife until then?”
“Yes. Though I think we need to define that.”
“Forsaking all others. Giving yourself to me.”
“Yes,” she said. “You have to do the same.”
“Easily done.”
Whatever past affairs he’d had they were virtually invisible.
If he was a playboy, he certainly didn’t flaunt it, and so it was easy enough to believe him now.
She would ask him about that someday. What his first time was like.
How he treated sex, and lovers and all of that.
She needed to ask him so many things. Because they didn’t really know each other.
They sort of did. There was a veneer of knowledge that was a very good veneer, but it was a veneer nonetheless. It didn’t go deep.
They had started to talk about real things just recently. They were going to have to keep doing that.
“All the rules that we had when we...when we worked together, they can’t be the rules anymore. Every topic has to be open for conversation. Otherwise we can’t get to know each other.”
He stared past her. “That seems reasonable.”
“You don’t like it, though.”
“I don’t like my past. But I have shared more of it with you than I ever have with anyone, and I will answer any questions that you have.”
But he wouldn’t freely share. Maybe it wasn’t fair to expect him to simply.
..start talking about things that he had always kept guarded.
She couldn’t demand everything from him at once.
Just like she couldn’t demand everything from herself at once.
She was going to have to spend the next six months not just getting to know him, but really getting to know herself.
They were both going to have to be vulnerable.
Some secret, romantic part of her had longed for this. That felt very dangerous. The urge to romanticize this. That she had met him, and this was inevitable, whatever both of them had planned about their lives. That they would be swept into something bigger than themselves, bigger than everything.
No. She had to be honest. As Alex had. He might understand this, he might even want it, but it wouldn’t be the deep love connection that other people looked for in marriage.
And maybe that would make it safer. They could have boundaries, and discussions; it would be like working together.
Everyone would have clear roles, and they would talk about things, and it would be. ..
She imagined holding a baby. The image was visceral and raw, and something that she had never let herself think about before.
When she had decided she didn’t want family, she had included children in that.
But what if they could have a baby?
Part him, and part her.
A beautiful connection that maybe Alex would feel.
What if he didn’t?
She would. She had two whole parents who didn’t care that much about her. If her baby had one that loved her with everything, she would be doing much better than Verity. And Alex would try. She knew that much.
For a moment she had an image of Alex standing on the other side of a glass divider, looking in at herself and that baby.
That was tragic. She hoped that wouldn’t be their future.
But all she knew was self-protection, avoiding things like this, avoiding wanting too much to keep herself safe. She couldn’t plan all this out.
She couldn’t see every possible outcome.
But maybe she could hope. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.
“Is your family still here?”
“Wow. I don’t know, because I didn’t plan any of this. And you know I didn’t look at my phone even one time between last night and now.”
“Yes. My apologies. Also find out their whereabouts and send them on their way. Then you and I shall go on our honeymoon.”
“Honeymoon? Where?”
“Wherever you would like to go, Verity. Because this marriage was once about me, my company and what you would get when it ended. But now it’s about us. And so I want you to be happy. I want you to want to be with me.”
She had the briefest notion that this was all too good to be true. But she and Alex had already lived lives that seemed a little bit too tragic to not be exaggerated. So why couldn’t they have this instead?
This was a big step, a frightening one.
But the alternative was to go back.
And somehow, after everything, she knew that was impossible.
So she had to keep going forward.
Maybe this would be the key to finding herself.
Maybe she could fix him.