8. Adrian
CHAPTER 8
ADRIAN
It’s official. Emotions on Jane’s face are harder to discern than those on the Mona Lisa’s.
Suddenly feeling stupid about the knee, I get back into my chair and do my best to enjoy a piece of bluefin tuna as Jane gathers her thoughts.
“Look,” she says, her chopsticks hovering just above an ahi piece. “I think it’s admirable that you want to be in your daughter’s life?—”
“But?” I say with a sigh.
“But why would you want to marry me ?” She closes the chopsticks over the piece of sushi and sets it on her plate. “Wouldn’t some famous model be more realistic in such a role? Don’t your kind of people have something like a marriage mart?”
Marriage mart? Sounds like Walmart’s nuptial-obsessed brother.
“When I saw you wearing that suit at the boutique, I pictured you in the courtroom and thought you’d be perfect,” I say earnestly. “There’s something respectable about you. Something proper. Something that wouldn’t scream ‘she’s just with him for his money.’”
“Thank you?” she says. “I think.”
Did I put my foot in my mouth again? “It was totally a compliment,” I reassure her. “You’re the kind of woman I’ve never been with before, so selling people on the idea that I settled down with you should be easier than in the case of a model or an actress.”
“Again, that doesn’t fully sound like a compliment.” She mindlessly separates the fish on her sushi from the rice, and I hope the chef doesn’t see the sacrilege, or else he might just ban me.
“Again, I assure you,” I say. “I mean it all as a compliment. I swear.”
“Fine.” She chews on her lip. “I don’t mean to sound indelicate, given that your daughter’s custody is on the line, to which I’m sympathetic and all, but… why would I fake-marry you?” she asks and finally sticks the ahi she’s tortured into her mouth.
All right. Now we’re on my turf. “You’ll marry me because I’ll pay you ten million dollars.”
I thought people only did spit takes in movies, but she does a major one, the chewed-up fish dropping back onto her plate.
If the chef saw that, he might actually commit seppuku with his sharpest yanagiba.
“Sorry about that,” she mumbles. She sticks the food back into her mouth and swallows it without chewing further. “You caught me off guard with that obscene number.”
I shrug. “I know I’m asking you to do something crazy, something that would also take three years to resolve.”
“Oh,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say. “Three years where you can’t date.”
“Oh.” She grabs her water and takes a sip.
“Which is why, if you want to name a higher number, I’m okay with that.”
I can see she almost does another spit take but stops herself in time. “That number will be sufficient,” she says. “Assuming we agree on what you mean by ‘pretending’ in the context of this marriage.”
Dare I hope she’s considering this? “As I tried to say earlier, no intimacy would be involved,” I say quickly. “Apart from, perhaps, some occasional PDA to create a digital trail.”
Shit. She’s blushing again. I probably should’ve left that PDA bit for later, after she says yes.
“We’d have to agree ahead of time on what we do or don’t do,” she says.
Whew. “Of course. I’m thinking we will have two contracts between us. A secret one, which will outline things like the PDA, and a standard prenup the world can know about, which will state that if we were to get divorced after three years of marriage, you’d walk away with ten million dollars. The reason for our divorce will be in our secret contract—something that would sound plausible, like, say, different values when it comes to parenting or something like that.”
“And your custody will not change if we get divorced?” she asks.
I shake my head. “Once the child is used to being around me, the courts will not rock that boat. Bob—my lawyer—thought a couple of years should do the trick, but I decided to make it three just to be safe.”
She blushes again. “And just to clarify… we can’t date anyone in that time?”
Shit. “I’m so sorry. I totally forgot to ask if you’re currently single. If you aren’t and want to see a boyfriend on the side, that would actually be a problem, so if that’s?—”
“It’s not that,” she says. “The opposite, sort of.”
I watch her face in confusion.
The color we call red is really electromagnetic radiation at a wavelength between 625 and 740 nanometers, and Jane’s cheeks seem to traverse that whole spectrum before she says in a choked voice, “I’m twenty-three, and I’ve never gone all the way.”
Wow. I’m speechless—apart from the extremely inappropriate solutions that are coming from Yoda, such as, “Fix the problem, I can.”
“Fifteen million?” is the best I can come up with.
She doesn’t seem to hear me. Cheeks going into infrared territory, she adds, “In three years, I’ll be twenty-six—and I hope to have had my GD by then.”
“I take it you’re not talking about Gadolinium, the rare-earth element with the atomic number of sixty-four?” What? Why even bother talking when you say nonsense like that?
Jane blushes some more—which is an odd reaction to my chemistry trivia geekout. “GD stands for Grand Deflowering,” she whispers. “Not letters in the periodic table.”
Fuck me. Yoda is turning into the Hulk. “Twenty million?” I venture.
“I can’t believe I just told you about my GD,” Jane says. “I never talk about it with anyone. Ever.”
“Look on the bright side,” I say. “Talking about it just netted you ten extra million.”
She shakes her head. “I can’t accept that much money. Not when you’re just being a good dad.”
“I will not accept your help without properly compensating you,” I say firmly. “Twenty million to me is like three months’ salary for an average person.”
“But it’s a fortune to me,” she says stubbornly.
“Which will make me feel better about depriving you of your GD for three more years, as well as the other unforeseen headaches this arrangement will bring.”
She sits there, deep in thought, and mindlessly grabs a piece of sushi that has a piece of chinook salmon on top—which coincidentally matches the current shade of her ever-changing cheeks.
“Okay,” she says when she’s done swallowing.
“Okay… as in, yes to my proposal?”
She smiles weakly. “You’re not going to take a knee again, are you?”
“I will if it helps.” I stand up, ready to get into position.
“No need,” she says.
I sit back down. Then, on a whim, I reach out, grab her slender hand, and hold it in the air in front of me as I solemnly say, “Jane Miller, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?” This time, I remember to pull out the ring box from my left pocket, the one that contains the engagement ring my dad gave my mom twenty-eight years ago.
At the sight of the ring, Jane’s eyes get misty, which sends a pang of guilt down my chest for putting an innocent woman through this. “Yes,” she says in one gasp.
I slip the ring onto her finger—and in a sign from the universe, it fits perfectly, like it was custom made for Jane.