Page 37 of That Kind of Guy

“I get up at six every day. We should get married.”

I narrowed my eyes, replaying the words I must have mistakenly heard. “No, thank you.”

“It’s working, Adams. My polling numbers shot up the second you and I stepped out together. Also, Miri sent herself that picture from last night and posted it on social media.”

“The second one?” I remembered the way his mouth brushed my cheek right before he got a bunch of my hair in his mouth. His stubble had scraped my skin so gently. Why did I keep replaying that?

“No, thank god, the first one. My phone has been ringing all morning with people around town wanting to congratulate us.”

I pulled my phone away from my ear and saw a few phone calls and missed texts. I didn’t really care what most people thought, but there were select few in town that I didn’t like lying to, including Hannah, Keiko, Max, and Elizabeth. I winced. I didn’t think about Elizabeth when we made this deal, I just thought about myself. But now, I’d have to lie to Elizabeth about dating her son, and I actually liked and respected her. I chewed my lip and stared at the trees outside my bedroom window, thinking.

“We wouldn’t have to actually get married, we could just get engaged,” Emmett was saying. “People love weddings. This would create so much buzz. You saw how Miri reacted and that was just us dating. Imagine if we got engaged, she’d lose her mind.”

Married. Blegh. My stomach churned. My initial reaction to Miri’s mention of a wedding last night was accurate—I had no desire to get married, especially after what I saw my parents go through. What they made me go through.

I had worked my way up from the bottom. I would never allow myself to give away half, especially when things inevitably went south. I would never allow someone to do what my father did to my mom.

“Emmett, you already said it was working, why do we need to get engaged?”

“I don’t have this in the bag yet. Isaac is still ahead.”

“I’m not doing it.”

I hung up on him, and my head dropped back on the pillow. My phone began to buzz a second later.

“No,” I answered.

“Double-paned windows.”

“What?”

“The Arbutus still uses single-paned windows. Do you know how energy inefficient those are? I could cut thirty percent off your utility bills in the summer and winter by switching them out.”

“You’re going to give me free double-paned windows if I pretend to get engaged to you?” I rubbed my eyes again and stared at the ceiling. It was way too early to be agreeing to a fake engagement. “How romantic.”

“Mhm.”

While Emmett talked about how it would work, I slipped out of bed and padded over to the kitchen to make coffee. It really wasn’t that different from what I was already doing—try to smile at him, don’t jerk my hand away when he reaches for it, pretend to like him. The wedding would never happen. We’d quietly break up sometime after the election, and everyone would go back to their business.

I watched the coffeemaker drip caffeine into the pot. “Fine.”

Emmett made a satisfied noise on the other end. “Excellent. I’ll drop by the restaurant to say hi later.”

“No, don’t—”

But he had already hung up.

* * *

“I’ll take that,”I told Max that evening during dinner service, handing him a full pitcher of water and taking the empty one from him.

He accepted it with a look of relief before heading back out into the restaurant, and I went back to watching Chuck in front of me, seated at the bar. He was glancing around the restaurant and making notes in a notebook in between mouthfuls of the linguine pasta I had reverse-engineered to the best of my ability with the chef yesterday.

“How’s your food, Chuck?” I asked. He had a big grease stain on the front of his shirt.

He stared at me for a second before making a note in his notebook. “Too salty.” He shoveled another bite into his face.

My eyebrows raised, but I kept my customer service smile pasted on my face, reserved purely for people like Chuck. If only I could see what he was writing in that book.

---