Chapter Three
Dec
“How was your flight back from New York?” Ellen peered at me, then went on before I could answer. “Never mind. You look like shit, so I assume it didn’t go well. Anyway, are you ready?”
Ellen Esposito was a lovely person, as you could probably tell from that exchange.
Just kidding. She was a domineering, formidable woman. Tall with angular features and not an ounce of fat on her body. Brown hair artfully dyed a shade of caramel blonde to accentuate her startlingly-green eyes. Pale skin with a dusting of freckles. She wasn’t my type at all. In fact, she was the exact sort of woman I’d usually avoid.
She was also about to become my wife.
“Almost,” I said, taking in the interior of her gorgeous Monterey home. It was on a winding road out of town, set back on an estate which had a breathtaking cliff view of the ocean toward the right of it. Ellen was rich as fuck, although if you asked her, it wasn’t enough. Nothing was ever enough for a woman like her.
She sniffed and rubbed her forehead, which I could tell was freshly-Botoxed. “Well, don’t take all the damn day. I have to start getting ready to fly out to the set in a few days.”
“What’s your show called again?” I asked curiously.
“Wed At First Sight.”
“Sounds awful.”
She snorted. “It is. But it’s ratings gold. The viewers genuinely think people go on there looking for a real marriage and real love. But fuck ‘true love’. Fuck marriage. It’s all bullshit. I sucked my ex-husband’s dick and took it in the ass whenever he asked, and I still never got close to true love with him. And we were married for nearly fifteen years!”
I winced. Did I really need that much detail about her old sex life with her now-deceased ex-husband? “Ellen, please.”
She scoffed. “Don’t get all defensive of Joe just because he’s dead. You of all people know what he was like. He was an asshole. I carried and raised his kids, and what does he do in the divorce? Screws me out of most of his fortune. But I still got somewhat of a pretty penny, and I still have the estate here in Monterey. So I didn’t do too badly in the end.” She shrugged, then jabbed a finger at my chest. “But you…you and your family really got shafted by Joe before he died, didn’t you?”
I gritted my teeth. “I’d rather not talk about that right now. Let’s just get on with it. Where’s the paperwork?”
Ellen nodded toward a table on the far side of the room, across from the luxury bird enclosure she had for her pet parrot, William. I’d been here a couple of times in the past to hash out the details of our plan, so I’d had a few ‘conversations’ with the bird. Damn smart creature. He was an African Grey parrot. I Googled them the first time I encountered William. Apparently they could learn over a hundred words and differentiate between faces and colors.
He let out a loud ‘squaaaaaawwk!’ as we headed over to the table, stepping past his cage.
“Hush, William.” Ellen picked up a pen from the desk. “I already signed my parts. Just initial on the parts where the little blue Post-Its are stuck to the page. Then sign where the pink Post-Its are stuck.”
I picked up the pen, hesitating. Did I really want to throw away the next three fucking years of my life on a sham marriage? No, of course not. But with the way things had panned out over the last few years, I didn’t exactly have a choice.
It was a mutually beneficial situation for the both of us. Ellen, an executive producer for a few popular reality TV shows, was in her late forties and apparently needed to be seen as having the ability to score a hot younger husband to prove to the world that she was still ‘fuckable’. According to her, the second people started to view a woman as past the point of fuckable, the show offers from network head honchos would begin to dry up, even for those who worked behind the cameras. Sad fact of life, but there it was.
As for me…well, my reasons for agreeing to this shit-show of a fake marriage were far more desperate, but I guess that’s just how the cookie crumbled. This had to be done.
I was about to sign when William flapped his wings, let out another almighty squawk and began to speak. “Hello! Squaawwk. Freckle! Freckle!”
Ellen frowned—as much as she could with all the injectables she had in her forehead—and squinted at a wall mirror which hung above the desk. “Goddammit,” she muttered, fumbling in her pocket. “This fucking weather. It’s not even hot, but it gets so humid in here this time of year. Makes my foundation melt right off. Doesn’t help that the damn bird reminds me of it every five seconds.”
She began to dab at her face with a makeup sponge, trying to cover the dusting of freckles on her nose. I had no idea why she bothered. She was seemingly always trying to look younger, and to be honest, the freckles made her look younger. Yet she was always trying to cover them up.
As I watched her fret over her face, I was reminded with a jolt of a night three weeks ago. The fiery brunette girl I was with that evening had a few freckles too, though none were on her face. She had a big one on her left shoulder, one on her right breast, another on the right side of her abdomen, and a couple on both legs and arms. I knew because I’d spent the better part of a minute staring at every single inch of her gorgeous body while she stripped, wishing I could devour her all night.
Too bad it all got fucked up.
I was planning on that night being a last hurrah as a single man before I had to pack up and return to California to start sorting shit out—this marriage being one of those ‘shit’ things. The second I saw young Liv in that club line, I knew she was the perfect girl for an experience like that. A night worth remembering. She was fucking stunning. Special. All the other women around her paled in comparison, and I knew I was going to have her, no matter what it took. And I nearly did.
But then she told me she was a virgin. I had no issue with that (I should’ve seen it coming, really) but I had an issue with the way it was going. A girl like her didn’t deserve to lose her virginity to a stranger in a hotel room after a drunken night out. No, she deserved better. She deserved a guy who could really take his time with her, make love to her, show her how good it could be. Not a guy who demanded she sit on his dick and use it to fuck herself like she was some sort of goddamned sex doll.
I was going to do all that. I still had a few more days in New York, so I was going to ask her if she’d put the brakes on, let me take her out on a real date. Show her a real good time. Maybe it wouldn’t have lasted longer than those few days, seeing as I had to head back to California, but she would’ve had a great first-time experience. Something to remember; something more than a hard and fast fuck in a hotel.
Of course, that never happened. She misinterpreted my smile as amusement at her situation (it wasn’t—I was just smiling because it was cute how damn nervous she was) and then she blew up on me before I could explain a single thing. The moment was lost after that. It was over. She stormed out (forgetting my name in the process, apparently—she called me Mac for some reason before she left) and that was fair enough. Maybe I could’ve done more to make her stay, make her listen to me, instead of coming across as an asshole. But I wasn’t that kind of guy. I wasn’t going to force her to stay or stalk her down the street begging for another chance.
She was only nineteen, anyway. She had a lot of years ahead of her, and she was bound to find the right guy for her eventually. Not me, though. Never me. I couldn’t be ‘that guy’ for any woman right now, not with my current state of affairs, and besides, I was thousands of miles away now anyway.
The image of her pretty face and body were still fresh in my mind after all these weeks, and it was a nice memory to cling to for a while, I suppose. But in the end, I had to forget her.
“Declan? Are you going to sign today?” Ellen’s voice sounded even more annoyed now. “I need this out of the way now. You have no idea how much other shit I’m dealing with at the moment. One of my show contestants just dropped out, and filming starts in two weeks, for Christ’s sake.”
“Right. Yeah. Sorry to hear that.”
She sniffed. “You don’t need to pretend to care.”
Lord, give me strength…
I scrawled my signature on the papers and initialed where I was told to. Once I was finished, I handed the papers back to her. She inspected them, then gave me a curt nod and stalked over to edge of the room, where she handed them to the officiant she must’ve hired for the joyous occasion. I honestly hadn’t even noticed the dude was in the room this entire time, but it made sense—we couldn’t get married just by ourselves. There was a whole legal process.
“Congratu—” The officiant began to speak, but Ellen cut him off with a simple raised hand.
“There’s no need for that,” she snapped.
I rolled my eyes. Christ, she was a nasty piece of work when she wanted to be. Sure, she had a good side too, but in the short time I’d known her, it hadn’t exactly come out much.
“Freckle!” William screeched again, swooping around his enormous cage and giving my new wife a beady-eyed stare. I stifled a laugh. I didn’t like Ellen much, but I sure as shit loved her bird.
“So is that it?” I asked, absentmindedly cracking a knuckle. “Now I’m officially your husband, and I just have to go out with you in public on occasion like a little lapdog so everyone knows you’re still hot?”
Ellen narrowed her eyes in thought as she looked at me, and then she cocked her head to the side. A slow smile spread across her face. “Actually, I have an idea. There’s something else you can do for me, too…”