Page 17 of Just (Fake) Married (Calloways vs. McGraws #1)

ELEVEN

ETHAN

Seth: What is this?

Ethan: Wow? I didn’t expect you to be the first one to respond. What are you doing up?

Seth: I haven’t gone to bed yet. I repeat…what is this?

Ethan: Group chat…you’ve heard of a group chat, yes?

Carter: We’ve never had one of these before. Good thinking, Ethan.

Mac: Jesus. Do you know what time it is? Why are you blowing up my phone?

Seth: Ethan’s fault

Eli left the group chat

Ethan added Eli to the group chat

Carter: Eli? Where are you?

Ethan: I don’t think he can tell us.

Seth: Or he’d have to kill us. You know, when brothers kill each other it’s called fratricide.

Mac: If you all don’t shut up I’m going to fratricide the fuck out of you. Ethan why did you start this group chat?

Ethan: Big day today. Harmony and I are headed to Big Horn to get the license.

Eli: License for what? Never mind.

Eli has left the group chat

“Hi,” I said, approaching a glass window we’d been directed to by the security guard at the front of the building. The clerk’s office wasn’t so much an office as it was a bank teller’s window. Harmony and I, fortunately, were the only ones standing in the long hallway with the parquet wood floors.

The woman behind the glass looked like she might have been manning the license desk since the turn of the last century. She had on her head what could only be described as a steel gray beehive.

“We’re here to see about getting a marriage license.”

“Names,” she said, clearly bored by her job.

“Ethan McGraw and Harmony Calloway,” I said.

Instantly, the woman’s eyes lifted to mine and her eyebrows crawled up three inches on her forehead.

“Did you say McGraw and Calloway?” she asked.

I looked over at Harmony. “Our feud made it all the way to Big Horn.”

“I grew up in the Gulch,” the woman said. “Forty years ago.”

“Always nice to reconnect with someone from the Gulch,” Harmony said over my shoulder. “Do you still have family there?”

“Got cousins there,” she said. “Name’s Mabel. So you two want to get hitched, huh?”

“Actually, we’re just here for the license,” I said, this weird tightness in my chest. Was it embarrassment because Harmony knew about my suspension?

Not that I should care about her opinion of me.

But I think, strangely I did. I felt like a schoolboy getting slapped on the hands, while Harmony watched.

Or maybe it was nerves that we were actually going through with this ridiculous charade of a marriage.

“So, what’s the waiting period before we can actually get married?” I asked her, as we handed her our driver’s licenses.

Mabel looked me up and down and then turned her gaze to Harmony. “You knocked up?”

Harmony gasped.

“No, she’s not knocked up,” I snapped. “We just need to get married. Want. We want to get married.” I even smiled to make it believable.

“Judge is free today,” Mabel said. She turned toward her computer screen and started typing.

“What does that mean?” Harmony asked, still bouncing behind me to see over my shoulder.

“Means, I can finish this paper work and the judge can marry you today if you need to get married. Or, you can wait for the next available day, which is…” she lifted the page of a calendar on the wall. “March 5.”

Harmony frantically started shaking her hands and bouncing back and forth on her feet. “Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.”

“You’re doing that too fast if you’re trying to prevent a panic attack,” I warned her.

“You two sure you want to get married?” Mabel asked me, and I sensed some sarcasm in her voice.

“Give us a second,” I told her. I grabbed Harmony’s arm and pulled her away from the clerk’s window and deeper into the hallway. “Calm down.”

“Calm down? Calm down?” Harmony hissed at me. “We’re getting married today, aren’t we? Like today, today.”

“Yes, but isn’t that the point of all of this?”

“I just didn’t think it was going to be today! Did you?”

“No.” But oddly enough, I had come prepared with a ring. I’d just planned to give it to her later. An engagement ring, not a wedding ring.

“Mabel doesn’t think we’re serious about wanting to get married,” I said softly.

“That would make Mabel an astute judge of character,” Harmony fired back.

I closed my eyes, pinched the bridge of my nose, and tried again.

“Mabel,” I said slowly, “knows about the feud and has cousins who live in the Gulch. Maybe Mabel talks to these cousins, or maybe she doesn’t, but we’re supposed to be an epic love story.

Not two people who just found out they can get married today and are having seizures about it. So, are we doing this, or what?”

I looked Harmony dead in the eye. This was it. It was deep breath and steady hands on the scalpel, or we gave the surgery to someone else.

She let out a long, slow breath and then nodded once. “I’m ready.”

“Good. Now pretend you love me,” I instructed her.

“You pretend you love me, first.”

This time when we approached the clerk’s window, we had our arms wrapped around each other’s waists and I had a hopefully convincing smile plastered on my face.

“Mabel, we would love to see the judge today if that’s possible. We’re just in such a hurry to start spending the rest of our lives with each other.”

“You can wait over there on that bench.” Mabel said, typing away on her computer. “I’ll call you when the judge is ready.”

Harmony sat next to me on the bench, her body practically vibrating.

“You can still back out of this,” I told her, for like the tenth time.

“I told you, I’m good,” she insisted.

“I feel like now is maybe not the best time to point this out, but…”

“What?” she glared at me.

“Your sweater is on inside out,” I told her.

She glanced down at herself and started laughing.

“It’s not that funny,” I said, as the sound of her laughter, merry and bright but bordering on manic, echoed in the stone hallway.

Right in front of me, she pulled her sweater off, revealing a bright pink tank top with thin straps.

The tops of her breasts spilled out of the top, creamy and round.

They shimmied as she turned her sweater inside out and I was struck dumb for a second.

Unable to look away. When she pulled the sweater on over her head the static electricity sent her hair straight up.

I reached forward to pat it down and she dodged my hands, looking at me like I’d tried to feel her up.

“I was just…your hair,” I said.

She smacked it down. “I wasn’t one of those girls who thought a lot about her wedding day, you know? I didn’t buy Bride Magazine and cut out pictures of beautiful dresses. But this…” her voice caught and she shook her head. “This is pretty grim.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think for a Calloway and McGraw wedding, we’re doing all right. Neither of us is bleeding and I have no plans to kill you.”

“Yet,” she said ominously.

“I wonder what kind of statue they’ll create about this moment to put in the park.”

“Hungover with my sweater inside out?” She laughed. “Just the way I want to be remembered.”

The wooden doors at the far end of the hallway creaked open and a woman in glasses and a black robe stepped out.

“I understand you are here to get married!” The judge clapped her hands like a high school cheerleader. “Fun!”

I looked at Harmony and she looked at me. Fun, she mouthed and I smiled.

“Come on, come on. I’m Judge Lee. No time like right now to start the rest of your life. Am I right?”

Harmony and I got to our feet and marched into that office like we were meeting a firing squad.

“Now, let’s check your paperwork.” Judge Lee went back to her desk and moved aside a couple of coffee mugs to get to the papers on her desk. One said, Ask Me How My Baby is Sleeping.

“How is your baby sleeping?” Harmony asked, pointing to the mug.

“She’s not. But thank you for asking.” Judge Lee smiled at us and then grabbed a piece of paper and came around to the front of her desk. “Do you have a witness?”

“No,” I said, and left it at that.

“Okay,” Judge Lee said. “Let me just…” she walked back around her desk and hit a button on her phone. “Mabel, can you come witness the happy nuptials?”

“How old is your baby?” Harmony asked.

“Well, this mug is from my first born who is three. My new baby, the one keeping me up most nights, is three months old.”

“A three-year-old and a three-month-old,” Harmony said with a smile. “Your hands are full.”

“They are,” she said with a soft laugh.

I glanced over at Harmony, and all the wistfulness that was missing from her voice when she talked about her wedding day, was here for this conversation about babies.

She wants children.

I could add that to the list of things I knew about her.

Mabel shuffled into the room, an ancient boom box in hand.

“You ready?” Mabel asked, and Judge Lee came to stand in front of us.

“Sure am,” Judge Lee said, and Mabel pressed play on the old CD player. Seal’s smash hit, Kiss From A Rose, came out of the tinny speakers.

“Really?” I said. We were getting married to the theme from a Batman movie?

“Someone left the CD in Lost & Found,” Mabel said.

“In 1999?”

Harmony jabbed me with an elbow and I knew she was saying to just let this happen.

The song ended and Judge Lee asked the basic questions about marriage. There was no obeying. There was respect. There was sickness and health and we dutifully said yes to all of them.

“Do you have rings?” Judge Lee asked us.

“No,” Harmony answered.

“Actually, one,” I corrected her. “We have one ring. For Harmony. I don’t wear rings.”

I could feel Harmony’s gaze on the side of my face. She was stunned and touched and suspicious. Which seemed about right.

“Wonderful,” Judge Lee said, like none of this was strange. “Please present the ring.”

From the pocket of my coat, I pulled out the old, black, velvet box with worn corners I’d found in my mother’s jewelry box.

It wasn’t meant to be sentimental. We were supposed to be engaged. We wanted to make a show of it for the town. That meant a ring. But when I opened this box, Harmony would know that I’d been thinking about her when I picked it out.

I opened the box, revealing a ring that had been passed down by the women in my family for years. A two-carat emerald surrounded by pearls, all set in gold.

It was a little old-fashioned, but also timeless. The emeralds reminded me of her eyes. And the pearls gleamed like her skin. The ring, once I saw it, was so exactly like her it was a no-brainer.

“Ethan,” she gasped. “It’s beautiful. It’s…”

I pulled the ring out of the box, grabbed her hand, and slid it on her finger. “Too big,” I said.

I reached to take it back, thinking we’d get it sized, or even pick something different. Something not so…specific. But she curled her hand into a fist and pulled it away.

“I love it,” she whispered. Our eyes caught and I couldn’t believe how closely hers matched that emerald. It was eerie.

She was beautiful. Like a painting. I couldn’t give her a dress or babies or even the kind of day a bride deserved, but I could give her that ring.

I smiled at her, and it took her a second, but she smiled back.

There were other things we said, promises we wouldn’t keep. As a doctor, that hurt. I believed in the oaths I took when I became a doctor, but the McGraws and the Calloways had always been locked in a devil’s bargain.

This marriage was no different.

Judge Lee said. “You may kiss your bride.”

I leaned forward as Harmony leaned back. Then she glanced over her shoulder as if she realized Mabel was still…witnessing.

So I wrapped my arm around her waist and pulled her against my body. Her eyes went wide. Her hands landed against my chest and I felt the press of her fingers there.

Yeah, I thought. That’s right. I’m your husband now.

So I broke the rules and I kissed her on the mouth.

I pressed my lips to hers and felt the exquisite give.

She pulled in a surprised breath and I tasted the coffee she’d had earlier.

The sugar I’d mixed in it, thinking of her.

She sighed against me, her shoulders lowering for just a second.

A tiny moment of surrender that was somehow hotter than any kiss I’d ever had before. With any woman.

What, I wondered, would it be like if this woman really surrendered to me? Just let down all her defenses. For me.

Blood pulsed and my mind called up all kinds of things.

But then, like I knew was inevitable, she pushed against me ever so slightly, and I stepped back.

She pressed a hand to her lips and watched me with wide eyes, as if she didn’t like how that felt. Like she’d been expecting one thing and gotten something else.

“If you’ll sign here,” Judge Lee said, and I scrawled my signature where she pointed. Harmony signed too, with a little flourish on the y at the end of her name. Then Mabel’s turn.

“Are we done?” I asked, and Judge Lee grinned at us.

“By the power vested in me, by the state of Wyoming, I now pronounce you husband and wife.”