Chapter 20
Amanda
A s we rolled down the street, I stared out the window. The cabbie had a penchant for soul-tinged jazz. It emanated from his radio speakers, though I could see he played the music off of his phone.
I replayed all of the ‘greatest hits’ of my phony relationship with Evan. The moment I laid eyes on him, I just knew he was going to be trouble. The thing was, I really craved a little trouble in my life at that point.
The way he’d moved around the room, magnetically attracting everyone around him like magic, had made me feel even more inadequate. How could a little tiny match possibly stand up in the face of a living supernova?
Then I’d slept with him on our second meeting. That hadn’t been something I’d expected at all. The plane ride had been magical, but again I had thought it to be just a one-time thing, though a part of me yearned for it to be so much more.
After that, he’d sprung the whole fake marriage idea on me. I had avoided him at first, it was true, but then I’d gotten to know the man behind the cult of personality. I learned that Evan Jones wasn’t so easily distilled into a stereotype as he wanted the world to think.
Or so I had thought. When I’d confronted him about the faux nature of our marriage and the very real jealousy he’d displayed, Evan’s response had not been empathy. Instead, he’d decided to divorce his fake wife for real.
I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting. Evan Jones, throwing himself at my feet and professing his everlasting love? Telling me what I wanted to hear, that it wasn’t all a sham. It wasn’t all a hoax. We both actually cared for each other?
Not Evan Jones. Not the Billionaire Bad Boy, ‘right now, by God’ dictator of all that he surveyed. He didn’t know what love was. I thought maybe I would be the one to help him learn. Instead, I’d just gone and played the fool.
I rolled along in the back of the taxi, looking at the ghostly reflections of the signal lights reflected on a glossy sheen of water. Even the reds and greens seemed muted on that rainy day in the city. It was as if they dimmed their lights in respect to my ongoing misery.
The rain hitting the car window cast a gray blurry smudge over everything I viewed through it. An intangible pall hung over the entire city, it seemed. The iron sky put a grayish hue on everything and everyone.
It was as if my ill mood was infectious. Everyone seemed a little subdued, a little less lively. The city folk moved as if they were under a heavy weight bearing down on them.
I couldn’t believe that it was all about to be over. For real and for fake. The fake wedding was going to be a thing of the past once I signed those papers. Anything real between myself and Evan, imagined or not, potential or not, would be over, too.
I shouldn’t have been nervous or upset. I mean, a fake marriage ending should be about the same as ripping off a band-aid, right?
Just get it over with quickly and everything would be fine. Only, I knew that wasn’t going to be the case. I had gone and done something stupid. I had let myself get emotionally involved with a fake husband in a sham wedding.
Ironic that a fake wedding would cause so much real misery. I couldn’t figure out the exact point where it had all gotten too real. Even though I knew the start point, and the ending point, I couldn’t quite figure out where it went wrong in between those two fixed points.
I was never one of those little girls with stars in her eyes dreaming of marrying prince charming or anything like that. But after our soulless marriage, lavish but soulless, I wasn’t sure what was so different about me and those little girls.
I didn’t want a massive, lavish wedding. That just wasn’t important to me. Sure, it had been nice, and a spectacle. Who doesn’t like fireworks? Who wouldn’t want a lot of celebrities at their wedding? Who wouldn’t want a world-famous pop star to perform a live show just for your special moment?
Those sorts of things are great, but our wedding night had been nothing but heartache for me. Like life was dangling what I really wanted right in front of my nose and then giving me everything but what I really wanted.
Sorry, Amanda. No true love for you. Your wedding is a sham, but look! At least you have acrobats and fireworks. At least everyone else on the planet thinks it’s all real. Everyone else, but the two people in the wedding and a handful of close associates. It’s a fairytale wedding without the parts you actually want, but everything else but the kitchen sink is included. Pretty sweet deal, right?
All the people down on the street scurried for cover as the rain intensified. It went from a hissing susurrus to a steady tattoo of heavy impacts. The rain fell so hard it created a micro stream. The raindrops hit the surface of the rushing water and splashed back up. The kind of ‘Forrest Gump’ rain where it hit you from both sides at once, making sure that you’d be thoroughly drenched even if you had an umbrella.
The taxi slowed almost to a halt. A traffic jam. Great, I thought. Just what I needed, as if my life wasn’t going poorly enough as it was. I just wanted to get this endeavor over with so I could move on with my life .
Which, of course, meant that life was going to fuck with me. I was stuck in the slowest taxi in the most congested traffic jam in the history of ever. I had nothing to do but wallow in my own misery. I’d jumped to conclusions, and it had cost me.
Now I was on my way to sign divorce papers. Very real divorce papers for a very fake marriage that maybe blurred some lines and edges. I knew that my heart would never be the same. Maybe I could have had it all, but given all of the other strife, my abandoning the manor and Evan had been the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Oh, how ironic it all was. It brought a bitter smile to my lips. After all of my hemming and hawing, after all of my not trusting Evan and expecting that at any moment things were going to go sour, it was me who wound up tanking the relationship.
It was me all along. I remembered seeing some old black and white television show once in a motel room at like three in the morning. A magical mirror supposedly showed you the face of your assassin. In the end, the dictator using the mirror realized that he was his own assassin all along.
Now I was looking into the cab’s rearview mirror and thinking much the same thing. I’d ruined things. Me. Not Evan. Evan had tried to make things better. Evan had stopped dictating every aspect of my life and started listening to me. He started acting more like that man who made love to me with so much sensual passion on the translucent jet flight.
I felt so far away from that blessed moment in the clouds, when it had felt as if we were flying over everything, above everything, two angels locked in eternal passion. Unfortunately, what goes up must come down. I’d come down pretty hard. I’d come down about as low as I could go without being ridiculous about it.
As I drew nearer to Evan’s office building, my trepidation mounted. I suddenly wanted the ride to take longer. In fact, I never wanted the ride to end. Because as long as I was in that taxicab, stuck in a traffic jam, it wasn’t over. I wasn’t going to be able to meet Evan for the last time. I wasn’t going to be able to sign the divorce papers and make the decision final.
But despite my fervent wishes, the traffic snarl cleared up. We passed by what looked like someone changing a flat tire and the taxicab driver wouldn’t stop grumbling about it. He pulled up outside of the building and dread clutched at my core.
I paid him a good tip for the trouble and got out of the cab. I stared up at the building, mostly dark at that hour of night. When I entered the building, I found it all but empty. It felt strange walking around the darkened corridors all alone.
I rode the elevator up to the top floor and stepped off. My heels clacked unnaturally loud on the tiles as I walked down to the office suite that was Evan’s home away from home.
I opened the door and saw him sitting behind his desk. His expression was sharp and inscrutable, as always. Jenna stood flanking him to the left, and a man I did not recognize stood to his right.
“Mrs. Jones,” the man said. “I’m Rhett Bartley, Mr. Jones’ counsel. I believe you will find everything to be in order here. It’s missing only your signature.”
He placed a packet of papers on Evan’s desk. I settled into the rolling chair on the opposite side of the desk, trying not to look at Evan. I could feel his eyes on me, intense but implacable. As impenetrable as stone.
I stared at the papers and sighed. I paged through them and initialed all the little boxes where I was supposed to initial. I signed and dated all the places I was supposed to do that, too. Every time I did so, it was like another knell of the funeral bell of our time together.
Inevitably, I got to the end of the packet and signed for the last time. I slid it back over to Rhett, who stared at it for a moment before going through it page by page.
The oppressive space bore down on me like a tomb. Rhett nodded as if satisfied that I’d crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s and then handed the packet to Evan.
“Mr. Jones, if you will please double-check the document and make sure you’ve signed and initialed where indicated?”
Evan’s gaze blazed into me as he took the packet. I had to look away. He signed a couple of places he’d evidently missed, then slid the document back to Rhett. Everyone was being so civil, but also so stiffly formal it was almost like a practical joke.
Jenna arched her brows and addressed me directly.
“Signing these documents frees you from all of your contractual obligations, save for one. Your NDA about the nature of your contract with Mr. Jones will remain off limits in discussions with the press. If asked, you will only say two words. No comment.”
I nodded, remembering that little caveat when I’d signed up for the deal.
“I suppose we’re done here?” I asked stiffly.
“Yes, we are,” Rhett said.
“Then I’m out of here.”
“Wait.” Evan stood up. “Can I get five more minutes of your time?”
I scowled at him.
“Please?”
I rolled my eyes and sighed.
“Five minutes and not one second longer than that.” I held my fingers apart a short span. “Not one little bit, you understand me?”
Evan turned to his employees. “Would the two of you please give me a few minutes in private with the former Mrs. Jones?”
I blinked in confusion. His politeness took me aback. I was not used to seeing Evan treat his employees like that .
On their way out the door, Jenna winked at me, exactly the way she had on my wedding night.
I was too sad to care what she meant by her wink.
Evan waited for them to leave and then caught me with his gaze.
“What I want to know right now, more than anything else in the world, is why you left like that.”
I tried to formulate a response, but he was not done.
“But I’m not going to ask you that. Do you know why?”
I shook my head.
“Because you’ve taught me something very important.”
“And what’s that?” I asked, rather stiffly.
“If you want to truly have something, truly have it, then you need to let it go.”
He gestured at the divorce papers sitting on the desk.
“I knew that so long as we had this contract, it would be a barrier between us. We could never be together as long as we were bound by a fake contract. I didn’t want our marriage to be fake anymore.”
My mind was reeling. I couldn’t believe my ears. What was he saying? It didn’t make any sense. He wanted to divorce me so he could be with me.
“I have just one thing to ask you,” he continued. “One simple thing. And I pledge to accept your answer, no matter what answer you decide to give.”
His eyes shone with intense light. My heart skipped a beat at the thought that I was the focus of the near totality of his being in that moment.
“What?” I asked, my throat suddenly dry. “What did you want to ask me?”
“Will you go out on a date with me? ”
I flinched, my mouth falling open wide.
“No contracts. No fake weddings. No silly pretense or pretending to be anything other than what we are. Just you and me, being together the way we should have from the start. What do you say? Isn’t that the fresh start we both need?”
I sat back in the chair, feeling the gravity of the situation smack into me like a ton of bricks. He was asking me out. Evan Jones, the most eligible bachelor on the planet, as of five minutes ago when I signed those papers, was asking me out.
He really was interested in me. Plain old me.
As I pondered this fact, I also considered how I was going to answer him. I came to a decision and looked up at him sharply. My mouth formed the word before it had fully taken shape in my mind.
“No.”