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“Y’all know what was happening with her former boyfriend,” Bowie said to him. “Don’t you want Lissa to be safe?”
“Of course we do!” Rylah answered.
“Well, then?” Bowie prompted. “This will make sure that happens. He’s not going to look in her direction when she’s my wife.” He repeated that. “My wife.”
“What are we talking about here?” Mr. Coelho asked. “What’s about a boyfriend?”
Yes, that was such a good question, and I opened my mouth again to speak. My brain still hadn’t reformed, though, so I just sat there gaping.
“Bowie is delving into old family business,” Aubin said, recovering fast as always. She also didn’t know what the heck was going on, but nothing stopped my sister. “It’s not relevant here and it’s time to go. Bowie? Sissy? We’re leaving.”
I followed her, like I always had, and he came right behind me. When we were outside the room, Aubin held a finger to her lips. “Not a word,” she mouthed at me and silently, I followed her again. She knew her way around the stadium, too, and we went right to where I’d parked the Ocean Waves blue car and she’d left her red BMW.
Then she turned on me. “You better explain this, Sissy.”
Instead, Bowie piped up. “It was my idea. I thought about what to do and figured this was the best solution.”
“Really? Marriage to me is the best solution?” I asked.
“We all think they’re trading Ray Bishop at the end of the season and my contract is up, too,” he answered. “They’re not going to want to lose both of us and have two new guys on the line, so I had the advantage. I took it.”
Aubin looked at him admiringly. “I like the way your mind works, but what now? How long are you going to keep up the charade? As soon as you say it’s over and you’re not really her fiancé, they’ll come down on her and Sissy will get fired.”
“Why would I say that it’s over?” he asked her.
“Wait a minute.”
They both turned to look at me.
“Bowie, how could you have lied like that?” I asked him. Yes, I liked the outcome so far because I was still a Wonderwoman, but the manner of keeping me there? “I can’t believe you would have made this up.”
“Who says it’s made up?” he responded. “I’m totally serious.”
“You’re serious about pretending to be engaged,” Aubin translated. “But what—”
“I’m serious about getting married. We should,” he told me. “I meant what I said. No one’s going to mess with you when you’re my wife. My wife,” he repeated. “No one will, not anyone from the Woodsmen team, not your ex-boyfriend, no one.”
I put my hand on his forehead to test his temperature. It had only been last night that he’d started to feel bad, and only this morning that stupid Erin had seen us together. The wheels of Woodsmen justice moved fast. “You’re feverish,” I said, like that explained away what he was saying. He wasn’t hot enough for delirium, which was how his words sounded to me. “You need to sleep and have more soup. We need to go home.”
“So you are living with him!” Aubin said triumphantly. “I knew it. Then you really should get married, Sissy.”
I knew exactly what she was thinking, because it was another thing she said a lot: get it in writing. Living together in a rented apartment was nothing when compared to two names on a mortgage or a marriage certificate that was filed with the appropriate agency. “We’re not living together,” I told her.
“We should be,” Bowie said.
I held up my hands. “Right now, we’re going back toyourapartment because you’re sick and you need to rest. We’ll talk about this more there.”
“Sissy, when did this start up with him?” she persisted. “Were you still with Ward? You really cheated on him?”
“For the last time, no!” I told her. I opened my car and got in. “Goodbye, Aubin. Bowie, I’ll see you at home.”
“No, ma’am,” he told me. “Drive me around to my truck and we’ll go together.” And I could tell how bad he felt because as I did that, he leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes, which made it difficult to harangue him for what had just happened in that conference room.
So I harangued him later, after he’d eaten and taken a nap and had some color back in his face. “I understand that you were trying to help me, but lying about things won’t do that. Believe me, I know. I’ve spent the last few years lying about Ward and what was happening with him, and if I’d been honest a long time ago, maybe it wouldn’t have gotten this bad.”
I was sitting on the bed next to him again, his big bed that I found very comforting and at the same time, kind of off-putting. No, kind of exciting. No, kind of—I wasn’t sure what it was, but I was focusing on the issue, and the issue was that now, on top of having to deal with everyone thinking that we were a secret couple, he’d made the problem worse by proclaiming all that crud about marriage.
“I’m telling you, I wasn’t lying,” he answered.
