KristoI lay next to her in bed and turned to look at the sleeping woman next to me.Just a few hours before, I would have described her as my wife in my head, and I would have liked that. It might have seemed silly now, but just knowing she was my other half, that the two of us were bound in a sacrament that was deep and old and important, made me feel better. I had done a lot of things wrong in my life, that was for sure, but marrying Amaya was something I’d managed to do right. Even if I had only achieved that by stumbling ass-backward into a wedding while the two of us were too drunk to stand.But since my lawyer had come by, I knew that wasn’t true. We had never gotten married. Well, we had gone through the motions and made like we had, but in fact, that marriage wasn’t valid thanks to the place we had gotten it from. They had been conducting illegal ceremonies for months and had long-since had their license stripped by the time we got to them, but they had gone through with our
KristoI wasn’t sure she would want me to lay so much as a finger on her now that we weren’t married. Perhaps she would cut that all off and leave. But we were so entangled in one another now, emotionally, physically, financially, and familially. Both our families had met and promptly formed bonds with each other, and to cut them off from that now seemed unnecessarily cruel. Or maybe I was just looking for reasons to keep her around. I glanced down at the ring on her finger, the glowing gem I’d purchased for her just a week before reminding me of how sure I’d felt of her and of us, and my stomach churned. I tossed the covers back and climbed out of bed. I was doing no good sitting around here and brooding. I needed to get myself a coffee, and then perhaps I could work out what it was I needed to say to her.Because I wanted her to stay. That was what all of this had been about, really. The ring, the contract, the money—whether or not I would have admitted it to myself, I wanted nothin
AmayaI drove to work and tried to remember the last time I had been so relieved to be getting to my job.Since the lawyer had dropped the news, Kristo and I had been going through the motions. Polite, sure, but that was it. Neither of us seemed to be able to muster up the energy to talk about what had happened, and frankly, I was more than all right with that. The thought of admitting this was real, that this was happening after everything we’d been through together … no. I couldn’t handle it.The only time either of us seemed to be honest with one another was when he hugged me in the kitchen the morning after. But as I held him, I couldn’t tell whether he was holding me to let me know he needed me here, that he wanted me to stay, or if it was, in fact, just a hug goodbye. The thought of that made me choke up all over again, and I pushed it through the back of my head. No. I couldn’t let myself get stuck on that, not today. I had so much to do, so much to distract me, and I didn’t wa
AmayaI watched as Darla made her way out of my office, and I leaned back in my seat and let out a long sigh. I knew I shouldn’t have let it bother me, but I couldn’t stop looking at the clock, wondering if Kristo was finished with that meeting yet. I had been checking my phone constantly since I’d arrived at work, on the off-chance he might somehow have decided what was going to happen to the two of us without my knowing. This state of uncertainty was driving me crazy, and I needed to lock something down before I lost my mind entirely.I went back to the papers I had been filing and tried to focus my attention on them, but my head was restless and wouldn’t let me. What was going to happen with Kristo and me? Would we get married now? Would we just keep up with the charade? Either of us could walk away at any moment, and that made the ground feel like it was slipping out from beneath me. I hated this feeling, hated how uncertain I was, hated how my brain seemed to be sloshing full of
Kristo“So none of it’s real?”“None of it’s real.” Michael Masser, one of my lawyers, shook his head at me. We were sitting at either end of a table strewn with papers, each of them detailing exactly how Amaya and I had been screwed over by the shady chapel that had allegedly married us.“Fucking hell,” I snarled, and I got to my feet and turned on him, but it wasn’t his fault. I stopped myself before I launched into a tirade, knowing he wasn’t the focus of my anger or that he shouldn’t be.“What do we do now?” I asked. He stared back up at me for a long moment, a seriously? expression on his face. I ignored it. I just needed someone, anyone, to give me some guidance here.“If you want to stay married to her, you have to get a license in this state.” He shrugged. “Make sure it’s all above-board and legal. Then, you can start with the contract from scratch and take it from there.”“Right.” I got to my feet. I felt as though my body had been crumpled up the last few hours, and practica
KristoAs soon as I heard that voice, my stomach dropped, a learned reaction from all those times that very same voice had cursed me out for having my hand in the cookie jar when I was a kid. I spun around and found myself face-to-face with my nonna.“What the hell are you doing here?” I demanded, and I shifted so that I was standing in front of Amaya. It wasn’t that I thought my grandmother would actually try to physically hurt her, but the brunt of whatever she was dealing with was going to hit me and not her. Nonna stormed toward me and jabbed her finger into my chest, a motion that would have been funny if it hadn’t been so deadly serious.“A contract?” she yelled, her voice cracking. “You married this woman, and she took money from you for it?”Fucking Cleo and her big mouth. My stomach dropped. Well, the secret was out now.“It’s not like that.” I brushed her away from me, not liking the way she was coming at me like I owed her something. Hadn’t enough happened in the last few d
AmayaI lay in bed, the flat champagne in my hands, straining my ears so hard, I thought they might burst as I tried to make out the conversation happening in the courtyard below me. I knew it was useless, that I couldn’t hear a thing, but I wanted to know what his nonna was saying to him. It would have been comical that the tiny little woman was coming to tell off her fully-grown grandson if it hadn’t meant that everyone in that family would know about our fake wedding. The thought of them knowing the truth at last made my stomach hurt. But maybe it was for the best? The truth had come out in all sorts of ways these last few days, and perhaps peeling it open like this was the only way any of us could move forward.I placed the champagne on the bedside table and stared at the ceiling. The last thing I had expected when I came home from work was to find Kristo with flowers and champagne, suggesting we spend the evening together on the balcony. He could be romantic, sure, but he usuall
AmayaIt felt as though he had punched the breath out of my body. There was no other way to describe the feeling as I waited for him to throw his hands in the air and announce the whole thing a joke and me a gullible idiot for falling for it. But he didn’t blink. He didn’t look away. Somehow, this was real.“You mean it?” I asked, my voice comically tiny as I looked at him. He nodded.“I want to marry you,” he told me bluntly, and all the feelings I had been doing my best to clamp down on these last few months came flooding up and over me in an instant. It was ridiculous, but I couldn’t keep them in any longer. Maybe it was the intensity of the last few days or maybe it was something else, but I needed to blow off some steam. And, the champagne mellowing my inhibitions, I knew exactly how to do that.“Kiss me.” I moved into him and breathed the words into his ear, and he didn’t need telling twice. He guided me on top of him, spreading my legs as though it came easy to him, and kissed