Page 41 of Play Fake
“Yes, but I didn’t think it would really happen, and it didn’t, but now you’re married anyway, and I didn’t get to be there?” She’s wailing, and my dad is shushing her, and I knew I shouldn’t have done this over the phone, but I didn’t have much choice.
“I know what I’m doing. It’ll be fine. Someday I’ll give you the big dream wedding, okay?” I don’t know how, and I don’t know who the groom will be. Maybe a part of why I left home to get married on a reality show was so that my parents wouldn’t have the stress of having to pay for a wedding.
Dex knocks on my doorframe. “Dinner’s here,” he mouths to me, and I nod.
“I need to go. I’m so sorry. I know you don’t love this for me, but thank you for being the kind of parents I can trust with this. I’ll send over those NDAs in a bit.”
“We love you, Ains,” my dad says.
“Love you, too.”
My mom is crying and clearly trying to muffle it, and I feel bad that I’ve upset her. But this is my life to live, my mistake to make.
And when I walk out into the kitchen, to be honest, it doesn’t really feel like a mistake at all.
CHAPTER 16: Dex Bradley
Never Been Drunk
I didn’t do any of it, but she looks impressed when she walks into the kitchen and sees our spread set up on the table.
“I told Milton we needed a post-wedding dinner, and this is what he sent,” I say.
“You could’ve taken credit. I would’ve believed you.”
I chuckle as she looks at the candlesticks glowing with a flame, the fancy plates with steak and lobster on them, and the champagne flutes filled to the brim.
I hold out a hand as I pull her chair out to help her sit, and she smiles at me as she takes her seat.
It feels like a date.
It’s not. I mean, not technically. It’s just dinner, but it’s dinner after we eloped earlier today.
Fake or not, we’re spending the next two years together, and there’s something far more comforting in that than I’m ready to admit.
She holds up her glass in a toast after I sit beside her, and I touch my glass to hers.
“To the next two and a half years,” I say.
She repeats me, and we each take a sip.
“Whoa,” she says, and she takes another sip.
I chuckle, something I seem to be doing a lot around her. She’s just so…naïve. Young. Pure. She’s so unlike all the others. So unlike Tawny, who had my baby in secret and didn’t bother to tell me until she needed something. So unlike the nameless host of others who came before Tawny and even after.
But Ainsley…she has the sheltered innocence thing down pat, and the more time I spend around her, the more I’m starting to like it.
She’s still wearing her dress. Her hair is still in that braid thing she did for our wedding. She looks sweet and innocent because she is.
She doesn’t know what good champagne—or good whiskey, for that matter—tastes like. She’s never had it. She doesn’t expect a single goddamn thing out of me other than to step up and accept the responsibilities and consequences that I’ve created, willingly and knowingly or not.
And as I glance up and our eyes connect after we each swallow that first sip of champagne, I can’t help the words that plow into my brain.
That’s my wife.
My wife.
It’s for show. It’s for the media. It’s for her protection. It’s for my sponsors.
