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“Gah, you found that at a thrift store? You lucky bish,” Kitty gushes.
“I apologize for my sister and her use of the word bish,” I tell Darby. My head is really pounding now. I’m going to be lucky if I get through this damn ceremony.
“That’s okay. Bish is a good thing.” Darby grins at Kitty. She likes her, I can tell, but then there aren’t many people who don’t like my sister. She might be tiny, but holy god, is she mighty. Growing up the way we did, she didn’t have much of a choice in turning out that way. Then again, she could have turned out like me, but thankfully, she’s about as far away from me as you could get. I guess that was what growing up with our mother and not with our father did for her. He was the key to the whole sordid picture.
My left hand, which usually never hurts, actually throbs. It’s phantom pain. I know it’s not really there. I’m just thinking of the bastard who sired me, and underneath the prosthetic that I paid a fortune for, I can feel myself wrapping my fingers around that hot poker and seeing the smug bastard’s face above me as tears of pain streamed down my cheeks.
You’ll think of me whenever you look at this, boy. Think of me and all the valuable lessons I taught you.Spoiler alert: my father wasn’t very fatherly. Actually, he was a right bastard and about every other curse word in the book, but I don’t have time to get into a stream that long and filthy when we’re already running late.
“I—uh—I guess let’s go get married then,” Darby whispers. She sounds so uncertain. She looks so uncertain. But I’ll take uncertainty over anything else. Unfortunately for me, when she raises her eyes back to mine to give me a shy, sweet smile, I see the one thing I hoped like hell I wouldn’t see.Hope. It’s all shiny and vapid there, and I can’t take it. I can’t stomach it.
And,oddly enough, my dick likes it. Even with the nasty memories, banging headache, churning gut, and stressed out shite I have going on. This is an agreement, nothing more. I can’t have her walking around with stars in her eyes or whatever people call it, even if she does look extraordinarily beautiful right now, with her eyes being her best feature.
“Fake married,” I clarify.
“Very real married,” she shoots back.
“Very real, very fake married,” Kitty croons. “Sounds like a good song title.” She walks over and punches me on the shoulder, but she’s looking at Darby. “Enjoy your last few minutes of freedom, sissy-in-law. You’re about to be married to my beastly big bro. God have mercy on your soul.”
“Where are we doing this?” Darby mumbles instead of rising to my sister’s baiting. That’s a good sign. I think. “The house is really nice, by the way. Homey. I expected something modern like the office, but I like that it’s comfortable and lived in.”
“My brother always wanted—”
I cut Kitty off by tousling her dark hair, messing it all over the place. Kitty screeches then shuts her mouth abruptly and looks at me like she might have set off the hounds of hell on everyone. She gives me a foul look and stalks out of the hallway, ducking into the bathroom to deal with her hair. She had it swept back in a braid, and today, she’s wearing a black dress. Not the kind of thing you’d go clubbing in, but something classy. And not work attire either. More like what you’d wear to a funeral. I guess maybe she does have the right idea about this, no matter how much romantic crap she spouts off about fairy tales and blah, blah, blah.
“The living room.” I didn’t shut the blinds in there because I thought it would be too weird to plunge the room into darkness in the middle of the morning. Before we head in, I take a pair of aviator-style sunglasses out of my suit jacket pocket and slide them on. They are tinted very darkly, and my head feels about two grains of sand in a whole dessert of blistering pain better.
“Geez,” Darby mutters as I walk past her. “If I had known we were going for the stone-cold poker face look, I would have brought my shades too.”
We’re almost reaching the living room when Kitty catches up to us. “Poo pants,” she hisses at me.
She wraps an arm around both our shoulders, and since we’re almost side by side, she’s the link that holds us together. I can smell bubble gum, which is all Kitty, and gardenias, which is Darby. Flowers and something sweet. I like it. I don’t wear anything myself because it sets off my head, but I like it on her. It’s delicate and not too much. Not triggering anything.
“I can’t wait to hear you guys promise your lives and your bodies to each other—”
This time I don’t mess with Kitty’s hair again to silence her. I go straight for her mouth, clamping my hand over her much bigger yap. Gently. But she gets the message. Because I have something much better, which I’d like to say.
“If we were having a wedding supper, which we’re sure as hell not, but if we were, I think a feast of blood and puppies would be most fitting. What do you think, Darby?”
When I turn to look at her, I know it’s not just the dark sunglasses that have drained her face of all its color.
“Sick,” Kitty grunts. “What the heck is wrong with you? I know that’s an inside joke. It has to be an inside joke. But gross.” Before I can say anything, she wipes away her disgusted look and gives me the most hopeful eyes I’ve ever seen. She’s excited, damn it, and her sing-songy voice rings through the house when she proclaims, “Now, let’s go get marrrriiiieeedddddd!”
4
DARBY
He freaking knows.
That’s the thought I kept having the whole time when I should have been on my game, concentrating on those serious vows that bound me to another person for the rest of my life—aka a year or whatever, but instead, I kept thinking that Leonknew. To the tune of,‘twas the minute before our wedding, and Lord Poo is in the house, and holy fuckle nutles, he knows.He knew about everything. Everything in those damn chats. That upset me, even though I knew they were being monitored. I never said anything bad about anyone as a rule because I just don’t do those things since it’s simply not nice, but he knew all along, and he said nothing, which is kind of creepy. He allowed it to go on and on and on for who knows how long. He was rubbing it in when he told me right before we went to get married—the smug bastard—but I didn’t miss the little tiny inflection of hurt in his tone.
Yeah. I’d be freaking wounded if people were saying half that crap about me too.
If he was trying to distract me from my wedding jitters, I guess he did the job. I barely got through the ceremony. He didn’t kiss me, which was something I was freaking out about the whole time. And not in a bad way either, which makes me totally pathetic. He grasped my hand and said I was shy and we could skip that part. The JP just seemed like he wanted to get the heck out of there because we were running so late, so it didn’t matter to him either way.
After signing everything to make it all legal, Leon and I had our first fight as a married couple.
I wanted to go to the cabin in the morning. Sunday to Sunday. And I wanted to drive. However, Leon made it known that he was calling the shots, and we’d be going tonight. In no uncertain terms. His sister gave him a hard time for being an arse again and making me upset when I was sacrificing a lot for him to stay, but he just rubbed my promotion in my face—and frick, I’m insecure about that too because I don’t even know if I can do the job for sure—and then we had grilled cheese sandwiches that Kitty made as a sort of peace offering. I didn’t want to eat mine, but I humored Leon’s sister because she’s awesome, and then I left.
