Aubrey
The pen weighs more than it should. It's just a pen. A regular, blue, ballpoint pen.
I set it down and stare at the signature line that will make Linden Dunleavy my legal husband.
I'm on my third serving of dry Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Eaten straight from the box. Because if there's ever a time for comfort food, it's now. And the box doesn't judge me the way the contract does.
A cinnamon-sugar shard falls onto the signature page. I brush it off. It leaves a tiny grease stain behind, right next to the clause about spousal cohabitation. Great. Now my future fake-marriage has a literal stain on it. Fitting.
"500k." I say it out loud, because saying it out loud is supposed to make it feel real.
It doesn't. It feels like Monopoly money. Like one of those cardboard checks people get handed at golf tournaments. Five hundred thousand dollars, and all I have to do is—
Marry the man I slept with exactly one time.
The man whose hands I still think about when I'm trying to fall asleep. Whose mouth did things that I have, on multiple occasions, revisited in great and shameless detail while alone under my covers.
Linden Dunleavy.
Who, if I sign, I will be contractually obligated to live with. Share an address with. Sleep down the hall from—
—and not touch.
Perfectly fine.
I am a grown woman with self-control and dignity. I don't need to touch Linden Dunleavy. I have, in fact, spent the entirety of my life not touching Linden Dunleavy, and I was perfectly fine.
Except I was not perfectly fine after the touching.
And that's the issue.
I pick up the pen. Set it down. Pick it up again. Tap it against my knee. Set it down.
Why did he pick me?
That's the part my brain keeps snagging on, like a hangnail it won't stop chewing.
At the meeting, he seemed entirely disinterested in me. Was it an act? Or...
He just wants to save his inheritance or whatever it is. His mother wants him to have a wife.
Still, he could've picked anyone. He probably knows actual actresses. You know, women with cheekbones. Women whose pantries don't contain three half-finished boxes of cereal as their primary food group.
There's a reason he chose me, and I'm not na?ve enough to believe it's because he was as blown away by the sex as I was.
So why?
I shovel another handful of cereal into my mouth. Chew aggressively. The crunching is almost loud enough to drown out the part of my brain whispering you know exactly why, and it's because he thinks you'll be easy to manage.
500k, the other part of my brain shoots back. 500k, 500k, 500k.
I flip back to page one. Then page four.
Then the signature page. Then page one again, like maybe this time I'll see something different.
I don't. It still says I'll smile in photos with him.
Wear a ring. Testify, if asked, that the marriage is real.
And walk out of this on the other side with enough money to stop flinching every time my phone buzzes with a new bill.
My hand is shaking. A little. Embarrassingly little, considering the magnitude.
I take a breath. Hold it. Pick up the pen one more time. Don't think don't think don't think—
I sign.
My name looks smaller than usual on the page. Cramped, almost. Like even my signature is trying to take up less space than this decision deserves.
I stare at it for a long second. Long enough that the ink starts to look like someone else's name.
Then I close the box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, because some things you only get to do once, and demolishing a whole box of cereal in a single sitting probably shouldn't be one of them.
Not on the day you signed yourself away.
The Centre Civic Complex doesn't care that I'm getting married. It cares that everyone has the right form, the right ID, and the right number from the ticket machine.
Hollis Cates, Linden's security lead, gets us through the public security line with the grim patience of a man who's already mentally tackled six people.
Linden's driver, I forget his name, waits outside with the SUV.
Then there's the follow-car driver, and another security agent, who disappear and reappear at hallway corners.
The ceremony room is small. Fluorescent lights. Scuffed baseboards. Two plastic chairs against one wall. A city clerk stands behind a lectern.
There are no flowers. No music. No aisle.
Excellent. Exactly how I imagined my wedding.
Paperwork with witnesses.
Then Linden steps beside me, close enough that his sleeve brushes my blazer, and my nether region decides to remember the Mercer suite.
I slam aside the memory.
Absolutely not.
The officiant looks between us. "Do you have rings?"
Hester passes me a box, and gives Linden another.
I open it, take out the ring. The band in my palm is plain and cool. No stone. Nothing to hide behind.
The officiant begins. "Linden Dunleavy, do you take Aubrey Bell to be your lawful wife?"
Linden looks at me, not at the clerk. "I do."
He doesn't look away.
My hand tightens around his ring.
The officiant continues. "Aubrey Bell, do you take Linden Dunleavy to be your lawful husband?"
This is where my mouth could save me. It's saved me from donors, creeps, bad landlords, drunk men in ER waiting rooms, and one foster volunteer who thought "alpha energy" was a personality.
"I do," I say, and reach toward his palm.
The ring slides onto Linden's finger first. His hand is warm, heavy, still marked where the orange cat scratched him days ago. My thumb grazes one pink line.
His hand goes tense for half a second.
Then he takes my hand.
The band moves over my knuckle with little resistance until it settles at the base of my finger.
The clerk says, "By the authority vested in me by the State of New York, I now pronounce you husband and wife."
Oh.
That's it?
"You may kiss," the clerk says.
This kiss is supposed to be nothing. A public compliance item.
Linden's hand comes up, stops before touching my waist, and lands instead at my elbow. He waits.
I step in.
His mouth touches mine, careful at first. Too careful. Then my hand, betraying little idiot it is, curls against the front of his shirt.
The kiss lasts half a second longer than it should.
Maybe a whole second.
Hester clears his throat.
I pull back and stare at Linden's collar because, well... eye contact is not something I can handle right now.
The courthouse steps are a mistake with architecture.
The second the doors open, noise rushes up at us. Questions overlap until none of them are words. Cameras lift. The ring on my left hand catches attention before my face does, and lenses tilt down in one ugly little wave.
"Aubrey, did he buy your testimony?"
"Linden, when did you meet her?"
"Was Lantern House part of the deal?"
I keep walking because stopping would give the crowd time to close around me.
A photographer lunges sideways for a shot. His shoulder clips someone. That someone bumps me. My boot lands wrong on the edge of a step, and pain snaps up my ankle.
"Shit." My hand grabs for the rail and misses.
Linden moves so fast I don't see the decision. One second he's beside me. The next, he's between me and the cameras, one arm shoving me behind him.
"Back up," he growls at the photographer.
But he keeps coming.
Linden's voice drops. "Try for another shot and see how much of your goddamn week disappears into court."
Hollis is already there. Security cuts in from the right. Another man clears the curb lane. The SUV waits with the rear door open and the driver behind the wheel.
Suddenly Linden lifts me.
My whole body goes hot with embarrassment. "Oh my god. Put me down."
"No," he says between gritted teeth. "Your ankle rolled."
"It's attached," I exclaim, feeling my face growing hotter by the second.
"For now." He carries me the last few steps while cameras fire so hard the flashes turn the sidewalk white in patches. I duck my face toward his shoulder, furious at my ankle, furious at the crowd, furious that his arm under my knees feels secure enough to make my throat close.
He sets me in the back seat of the SUV and climbs in after me. The door shuts.
Nobody speaks.
Then Linden looks at my ankle. "Shoe off."
I cross my arms. "No."
His eyes lift to mine. "Aubrey."
Damn it.
I take the shoe off.
He turns my foot in his hands with the clinical detachment of a man inspecting a used car. Rotates the ankle. Presses his thumb gently along the side. I hold my breath for reasons that are absolutely about pain and not at all about the fact that his hands are on me again.
"Not sprained," he says. "You'll live."
"Glad to hear it."
He sets my foot down. I put my shoe back on with as much dignity as a person can muster while sitting in the back of an SUV in a courthouse dress, which is to say not a lot.
"Where to?" the driver asks.
"Her apartment," Linden says, before I can. "It's time to get her things."
Twelve minutes later I'm standing in the middle of my living room, trying to remember how packing works.
The apartment feels somehow wrong without the orange cat.
His carrier is gone from beside the door, the water bowl drying upside-down on the rack, the corner of my couch suspiciously un-shed-on.
The rescue moved him to a foster yesterday...
the instagram clip pulled in three applications before noon, and my boss wanted him out of what she diplomatically called "a media situation. "
He'll be in his forever home by the weekend, probably wearing some kind of tiny bandana, blissfully unaware that he was briefly the most famous cat on the internet. Well as much of him as could be seen through the carrier having a hissy fit, anyway.
I start throwing things into my duffel with the grace of someone tossing their belongings into a fire pit.
Which I probably am. A sweatshirt, underwear, the good moisturizer, my laptop.
A framed photo of my mom that I grab on instinct and then stare at, suddenly close to crying for reasons I refuse to contemplate.
When I'm done, I lock the door behind me. The click sounds louder than it should.
By early afternoon, the announcement is everywhere.
The approved statement says we met weeks ago at a conference, and started seeing each other quietly. It calls the whole mess an accelerated courtship under unusual scrutiny.
My phone lights up until I turn it facedown.
Congratulatory flowers are already being routed to Halcyon House and Dunleavy Media. Hostile speculation runs under every post.
Marnie Kells, Lantern House's executive director, sends one text that reads, Call when you can. Staff are scared and confused. Some are relieved. Some are furious. I'm holding the line.
Blythe texts: Are you okay? Real answer later.
I type Handled and hate myself a little.
The elevator climbs in silence so complete I can hear my own pulse.
Linden stands beside me staring at his phone, thumb scrolling with the calm of a man who has been a headline before and will be one again.
I stand beside him pretending I am also a person who has been a headline before, when in fact the most public thing I've ever done is get tagged in a Lantern House fundraiser photo with spinach in my teeth.
The doors open into a private vestibule. Ahead awaits his door. Our door, technically, which is a phrase I am not going to be saying out loud anytime in the foreseeable future.
He keys us in.
The penthouse door closes behind us.
No cameras. No clerk. No lawyers.
Just the apartment, too clean, and Linden standing a few steps away with a wedding band on his hand.
Husband.
Nope.
Yes. Unfortunately.
Someone's put flowers and cards on the entry table.
My ankle's still sore but not dramatically so. It's my pride that needs a splint.
Linden looks toward the stairs. "Your suite is ready. Staff won't enter unless you ask. Door access is yours. Chet can walk you through the controls tomorrow." Chet runs the penthouse, or close enough.
"Tonight," I say.
He looks back at me.
"I'm taking the guest suite tonight," I clarify. "Separate bedrooms. That was the deal."
His face barely changes.
"Sorry, yes," he agrees.
We climb the stairs slowly. He stays one step below me, close enough to catch me if my ankle gives out, far enough not to touch.
The upper hall is quiet. Two doors face each other. His room. Mine.
A borrowed robe hangs on the bathroom door, someone else's idea of a wedding night. Twenty minutes later, my hair is down, my face is scrubbed, and I'm in my own T-shirt.
Across the hall, a door opens.
I step to my threshold. Linden stands at his, shirt sleeves rolled, wedding band visible on his left hand.
The hallway between us is maybe eight feet.
Eight feet is a perfectly reasonable distance. Very contract-compliant.
"Good night," I say.
"Aubrey," he begins.
My fingers close around the edge of my door. "Good night, Linden," I say more forcefully.
His mouth tightens. "Good night."
I go inside and close the door.
I lock it.
Then I stand there and stare at the deadbolt like it solved everything.
It hasn't.