Chapter Six

 

 

 

 

Nick

 

 

 

 

 

I heaved myself up into the rig and immediately pulled my helmet off my head as I fell into my seat. There was no use in putting on my headset because we were going off duty since our shift had technically ended almost five hours before. I felt disgusting and I was sure I looked even worse. We’d spent the last six hours knocking out a brush fire along the interstate and I was beat. Before the call for the fire had come, we had already been out several times overnight for medical emergencies and vehicle accidents.

Owens got into the front seat and dropped his helmet to the floor as he sucked down some water. He didn’t bother putting on his headset either when he glanced back at me.

“I’m fucking beat.”

I nodded my head in agreement as I let my head fall back against the seat. “I’m going to shower and go home to crash. I think I’m hungry but I can’t tell because I’m so damn tired.”

Hughes and Jones all got in next and Barthe, our engine operator, sat in front next to Owens.

No one said much as we drove back through the city. I blinked several times to keep myself from falling asleep and let my thoughts drift to Kelly. I knew she was confused and probably hurt by my response to our Vegas wedding but I couldn’t tell her the real reason why I couldn’t be married to her. It was archaic and embarrassing and just pissed me off.

It was amazing how much I missed her already, though. Kelly and I usually text or talked at least once a day and I’d gone almost three without her. I just didn’t know what to say to her. I’d been trying so hard to boost her self-esteem and I felt like I’d undone everything just by my reaction to our marriage.

When I’d made it home Saturday, I had looked through my phone and found so many photos and videos of us from that night. The videos made me smile. Kelly was so carefree and happy in every single one of them. We’d taken a video right after getting married and she’d cuddled to my chest as we rode in the limo. She held up my left hand to show the camera my ring before displaying her own.

“I’m Kelly Christos now or maybe he’s Nick Gold.” She tilted her head so she was looking up at me. “Do you wanna be Mr. Gold?”

I’d told her I didn’t care as long as she was my wife and then kissed her to the point that the phone had been dropped on the floor of the limo.

That video was my favorite.

I couldn’t find my ring, either. I hadn’t seen it since we’d left the hotel room and when I called Saturday afternoon, they said the housekeeper hadn’t found it and no one had turned it in. I felt sick to my stomach knowing that I’d lost my ring within twelve hours of us being married. Even if we weren’t planning on staying husband and wife, I still wanted my ring.

I shook myself out of my daydream as we pulled into the garage behind the ladder truck and we all immediately hung up our turnout gear. The only people who spoke were Cap and Owens as they quietly praised everyone and checked our gear and apparatuses. I climbed the stairs and instantly went to the end of the hall where the men’s bathroom was to start one of the showers. The men’s room had six shower stalls and by the time I was done washing, five of them were occupied.

I dried off, pulled on my civvies, and went to the bunkroom I shared with Hughes to grab my bag. I mumbled a goodbye to everyone I saw and eventually made it out to the Camaro. The house I shared with my roommates was only five minutes from the station and I almost sighed in relief when I pulled up out front.

Neither of my roommate’s cars was there but I wasn’t surprised. Hughes was obviously still at the station and our other roommate, Erik, was a mortgage broker who worked banker’s hours. I unlocked the front door and didn’t stop as I walked up the stairs to my bedroom. I dropped my bag on the floor, toed off my sneakers, and fell onto my bed.

I was almost asleep when my phone vibrated from the pocket of my shorts and I pulled it out to look at it. When I saw that I had a text from Kelly, I immediately smiled. The smile fell when I read the message, though.

 

Kelly:      I called some lawyers and it’s going to be around $1500 for an annulment but it will be like it never happened. One did say that it might be a fight because we’re claiming intoxication and neither the public office nor the chapel should have issued documents or married us if we were intoxicated but we’ll figure it out.

Me:      I’ll pay for it, Kel. I’m sorry to drag you through all of this.

Kelly:      I’ll pay my half.

 

Her short response made my stomach hurt. I needed to figure out a way to smooth things out between us and soon. No way was I losing my best friend.

I dropped my phone to the nightstand and let out a long sigh as I closed my eyes. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes before I fell asleep.

I don’t know how long I’d been out but my phone constantly vibrating pulled me out of my wonderful dream. A dream that involved my hot best friend completely naked. I blindly felt for it on the nightstand and groaned when I saw my father’s name. I swiped the screen and brought it to my ear.

“Hey, Pop.”

“Nickolas. I’ve been calling you for twenty minutes.” His voice, which held a heavy Greek accent, was angry and severe and I wished I hadn’t answered.

“I worked thirty hours with very little rest, Pop. I was sleeping.”

I could almost hear his eyes roll. “Well, how about I read you a little bedtime story then, hmm? ‘Nickolas Argus Christos, 27, of New Hope and Kelly Renee Gold, 26, of Canyon City.’”

I sat up quickly as he read and it felt like ice was in my veins. “What are you reading?”

“This is in today’s paper under the marriage license section for Clark County. One of your mother’s friends saw it this morning and called to offer the family congratulations.” My father’s voice had gone intentionally light and I didn’t reply as I waited. I didn’t have to wait too long, though. “How stupid can you be? Did you already marry this girl?”

My first instinct was to lie. If we were getting it annulled, why did it matter if he knew the truth? But I knew my father would somehow figure it out in the end and lying would only make it worse.

“Yes.” I cleared my throat. “I did.”

My father muttered in Greek but I didn’t understand any of it. “What about Apolla? What’s your next move? You just abandon everything that we had planned for this… Kelly?”

“We didn’t have this planned, Pop. I wasn’t involved in this decision whatsoever. I never wanted to marry Apolla.”

“Oh, here we go,” my father said with a sigh. “Marriages are not about love and passion, Nickolas. They are about partnership. Your marriage to Apolla will ensure a great partnership between the families.”

I didn’t reply. I’d heard all of this before. In fact, it was all I’d heard for more than ten years, since the first time I was told that I was going to marry Apolla. I was sixteen while she was only ten and our whole futures had been mapped out for us. Hell, I’d only even met her three times, too, and I was expected to spend the rest of my life with her.

“Well? What is your plan? You would betray your family for this Kelly? Give up the relationships with your mother and siblings to play house with a woman?”

I sighed tiredly and ran a hand through my hair before opening my mouth to tell him about the annulment. If he knew it was something we’d done while completely drunk, maybe he wouldn’t be so pissed. Before I could, however, my father spoke again.

“The sooner you realize that life is not some sort of fairytale, the sooner you can be happy.”

Anger bubbled in my chest. “Happy? Is that what you think you are? I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t know happiness if it kicked you in the ass.”

“You do not talk to me that way,” he growled but I barely heard him as I kept speaking.

“Do you know how lucky you have to be to find someone like Kelly? Being with her, even just watching TV on the couch, is the epitome of happiness. The fact that you decided more than ten years ago how exactly I was going to be happy just pisses me off. Maybe I want the fairytale, Pop.”

“I didn’t raise you to be an idiot.”

I didn’t get a chance to respond because a female voice murmured to him in Greek. My father responded to my mother and I listened as the two of them began to argue back and forth with me on speakerphone. They kept switching from English to Greek and made the conversation really hard to follow. I sat with my chin in my hand as I listened for more than ten minutes. Some parents had a relationship where they leaned on each other, calmed one another down. Not my parents. They barely tolerated each other most days.

I should have just told him I was going to get it annulled but he pissed me off. The first time the gravity of the situation hit me was when I was almost twenty-one. I’d been with the department for a little more than a year and our old Lieutenant’s daughter had brought her father in some lunch. Emma and I had flirted a bit before she left and I was excited when she came back to visit the following week.

Four weeks later, Emma told me she loved me. I drove to Henderson that night and begged my father to let me out of the agreement with Apolla. I told him I wanted to try and be with Emma, to have my first relationship.

He laughed in my face. Called me weak and told me that I could have Emma but I’d lose everything else. Not only would I be disowned and not allowed to ever see my family again, but he’d force my little sister, Delia, to go through with an arranged marriage instead. Delia was only eighteen at the time and he showed me a picture of a forty-nine-year-old man that he’d make her marry within the year.

I couldn’t let that happen to Delia and losing my family wasn’t an option. I also couldn’t tell Emma the truth, I was so ashamed. I broke her heart instead and gave some vague response about not loving her. The devastated look on her face was ingrained in my brain forever. It also made work hell because our Lieutenant hated me. It wasn’t until Emma married two years later that he finally stopped treating me like complete shit.

“Nickolas.” My mom’s voice came over the line clearly and I jerked out of my fog. My dad was a huge asshole but my mom was amazing. Her biggest flaw was the fact that she let her husband control her. She tried not to let it interfere with how she raised us, though.

“Hey, Ma.”

“My beautiful boy. You should have talked to us first, told us how you felt. Going behind our backs is not acceptable.”

“Ma, it wasn’t planned. Besides, I told Pop how I felt years ago and it didn’t matter.” I fell back on my pillow and heard my mom let out a long sigh.

“Is this marriage something you did just to get out of your partnership with Apolla?”

“Of course not,” I said immediately with a frown. The thought had crossed my mind on the drive home from Vegas. Had I been drunk and decided to do something to get revenge on my father? As quick as the thought came, it was gone, though. I knew that wasn’t it. Even drunk, I wouldn’t use Kelly like that.

My mother muttered something to my father before clearing her throat. “Your father wants you to get a divorce immediately.”

“And if I don’t?” I challenged, anger take over every other emotion. “If I don’t get a divorce but try to find my happily ever after with Kelly instead?”

More mumbling in Greek followed by something that sounded like, “Damn fool.”

My mother quickly shushed him and added her own Greek to the mix for a moment before speaking to me again. “We will give you five months.”

“Five months?” I shook my head. “I don’t understand. Five months to get a divorce?”

“We will want to meet this Kelly immediately, of course,” she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “If you can prove to us that you are truly in love and that you didn’t do this just to get out of your responsibilities, you will be relieved of your obligation with Apolla.”

I sat up so quickly that I almost gave myself whiplash. “Really?”

“Really. But you will need to hold up to your end of the bargain. If you are not truly in love with this woman at the end of the five months, you will need to end the marriage and prepare to marry Apolla early next year.”

“Okay. Okay. I agree.” I moved to my feet and could hardly believe what I was hearing. Never once had I been offered any other alternative to Apolla. And now… I was being presented with a chance to get out. A chance of life with love rather than duty. “I definitely agree to those terms. Will this have any impact on my siblings?”

“No, Nickolas. It will not.” I could hear the pride in my mother’s voice. She knew how protective I was of my brothers and sisters. “This does not have anything to do with them at all. You have our word.”

I released a relieved breath. “Okay.”

“I have further conditions,” my father said, his voice eerily low. “After the end of the five months, you will not only marry Apolla but you will move to Greece to take over the company.”

My breathing stopped as I absorbed his words. My father hadn’t been happy when I decided to become a firefighter because he’d expected me to take over his position in the company he and his brother ran one day, whether in the United States or Greece. I’d refused, though. If I was giving up my choice of who to marry, I was going to at least have a career I loved. So it had been agreed that my uncle’s son would take over the company on his own unless one of my younger brothers decided they wanted to later on.

My parents were the first generation to settle in the US and the company operations were handled beautiful with my father here and my uncle there. Sending me back to Greece would be purely for punishment.

“I’m not giving up my career.”

“If you truly love this woman and married her for the right reasons, you have nothing to worry about, do you?” My father’s voice was almost a sneer and filled me with irritation.

“Right. Fine. Deal.”

“Okay. We will see you and Kelly on Sunday for dinner.” My mother left no room for argument. “We love you, kalo mou.”

“Love you, too.”

My father didn’t say anything else as the call disconnected. I stared at my phone for a minute as I tried to absorb everything that had just happened. I glanced at the clock on my nightstand and immediately shoved my feet into my sneakers. It was barely four and Kelly probably wouldn’t be home from work yet but I’d wait.

I made the thirty minute drive to her apartment and both Kelly and Megan’s parking spots were empty. I didn’t see Owens’ truck, either. I parked in a visitor spot and sat down on the porch next to the door so I was in the shade. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and thought about texting her but brought up a video of our night in Vegas instead.

The video image was of Kelly and she was staring at the roof of the limo from one of the side seats. I was obviously sitting in the back row and holding the phone.

“Okay. I’m going to stand up in the sunroof and you’re going to post it on Instagram,” Kelly said. “They do it in the movies.”

I chuckled in the background. “The driver said we can’t do that.”

“I could take him,” Kelly replied as she began to giggle. I laughed, too, causing the video to shake. One of my arms appeared in the frame as I held it out to her. She immediately moved to my lap and the video shifted so it was recording us from over Kelly’s shoulder where my hand was. We kissed passionately and she moaned when I dropped my lips to her neck.

“Marry me, Kel,” I murmured on the video. “You should marry me and be my wife.”

She pulled back and, from the side, I could tell she was smiling as she looked at me. “Marry you?”

“Yes. We’re perfect together.” I nodded with a drunk, lazy smile on my face. “Now. Let’s go. If you don’t do it tonight, we won’t ever get the chance again.”

“Okay. Let’s go.”

We kissed again for a moment before Kelly yelled to the driver to take us to get married. The video ended there and I let out a long sigh as my head fell back to the cement wall behind me. I had no idea what possessed me to ask her to marry me that night and I wished I could remember my thought process. I closed my eyes as I searched my mind and I had no idea how much time had passed when footsteps approached.

“Nick?”

I opened my eyes as I turned my head and Kelly was standing in front of her door with her brows furrowed. She had obviously just come from work since she was in a pair of black shorts and a blue and white polo that had Southern Nevada Physical Therapy and Rehab embroidered on it.

I pushed myself to my feet and offered her a smile. “Hey.”

She nodded at me and stuck her key in the door. “Hi. What’s up?”

I didn’t get to answer before she walked through the doorway. I followed immediately and shut the door behind us. The tension between us was thick and I hated that I’d put it there.

“Can we talk?”

“Yeah.” Kelly gestured for me to follow her into her room and she dropped her purse and bag on the dresser before turning to look at me. “What’s wrong?”

Her body language was very defensive as she folded her arms across her chest and I couldn’t handle it. I kicked my shoes off and sat on her bed against the headboard before holding my arms out expectantly. Kelly stared at them for a moment before shaking her head.

“You’ve been freezing me out.”

I nodded with my arms still outstretched. “Come here and I’ll tell you why.”

She stared at me for another beat before kicking off her socks and sneakers and crawling up the end of the bed. When she settled next to me, I dropped my arm around her shoulders and pulled her to my side. Everything felt better when I was touching Kelly.

“So, you know my parents are Greek, right?”

She nodded and shifted so her hand was resting on my chest.

“My great-grandparent’s marriage was arranged and it brought the two families together, making them a power family. So when it was time for my grandma to get married, they arranged her marriage with a man who could keep the tradition going. My grandparents met when they were in their teens, grew up knowing their future, and they were married in their early twenties.”

I sighed and ran my fingers up and down her arm slowly. “At that point, arranged marriages weren’t really a thing anymore but my grandparents figured that it worked well for them, so they would find a suitable partner for their son, my father. My grandparents owned a very successful fishing business that thrived due to the partnerships and collaborations from marriage. My mother’s family owned an import/export business and it was a match made in heaven. My parents met once as teenagers before my father came to the United States to go to college. The second time they met was after he’d graduated and they were immediately married.”

“They only met twice and then had to get married?” Kelly looked up at me with a horrified look on her face.

I nodded and used my free hand to brush some hair off of her forehead. “Yeah. My parents love one another in their own way but they’ve never been in love with each other, if that makes sense. Their relationship is a partnership.”

“Wow,” she whispered as she shook her head. “That sucks.”

“It really does.” I sucked in a deep breath and tightened my grip on her, expecting her to pull away when I told her the truth. “I’ve met Apolla three times. Once when she was ten and I was sixteen, once when she was thirteen and I was nineteen, and I saw her a couple of years ago when I was twenty-four and she was eighteen. I was supposed to marry her this month but it was pushed back to early next year because she needed one more semester of college.”

Kelly’s body stiffened in my arms and I watched as her eyebrows slowly pulled together. After a moment, she shook her head. “Wait. What? You have…”

“An arranged marriage,” I finished for her with a nod. “Yeah. My parents run the business from here and Apolla’s family owns quite a few mines and quarries over there. Something that would pair perfectly with exportation.”

“I don’t understand.” Kelly pulled herself out of my hold and moved so she was sitting facing me and the headboard. “You have four siblings?”

“Five.”

“Five siblings. Are all of you set up for arranged marriages?”

I shook my head and gripped one of her hands in my own. “Just me since I’m the oldest. I didn’t really care at first, you know? Marrying Apolla was all I knew growing up. But it started to bother me more and more as I got older and I told my dad six years ago that I was out. That I didn’t want to do it and I wanted a chance to love someone.”

“What did he say?” Kelly’s voice was quiet and her blue eyes stayed on mine.

I let out a small laugh. “That turning my back on Apolla meant turning my back on my whole family. That I couldn’t have one without the other. He also threatened to force my sister to marry someone who was thirty years older than her. Even if Delia had the strength to go against my father, what’s to say Angela wouldn’t be next? If I didn’t do it, he’d eventually get one of my siblings to cave.”

“And that’s why you don’t do relationships.”

“Right,” I replied quietly. “Why bother when it all has an ‘end by’ date? All that would happen is people would get hurt.”

Kelly nodded slowly. “And that’s why you freaked out when we got married. You need the annulment so you can be free to marry her next year.”

Even though she was trying to hide it, disgust and sadness were evident on her face. I reached out and gripped her waist so I could pull her into my lap. “I was hoping to do it quickly and quietly without my parents getting wind of our nuptials. Apparently when you get a marriage license, however, it’s printed in the fucking newspaper. My father called today and he was pretty pissed off.”

“Oh, shit.” Kelly’s eyes went wide. “So, we need to do it quickly.”

I shook my head and hugged her to my chest. “I’ve been given a five month stay of execution. If I can show them that our marriage wasn’t my attempt to purposefully sabotage the arrangement but was actually done for love, they won’t expect me to marry Apolla. They’ll call it off and I won’t be exiled from my family.”