Page 80 of Married in Michigan

He shakes his head. Our fingers are still entwined. “Me either.”

Another silence.

“Is it why you won’t sleep with me?” he asks.

“Is what why?”

“The money thing. Your mom. The hospice care. Marrying me. You don’t want to sleep with me so it won’t feel like you are…”

“Selling myself,” I finish, and then shrug. “I mean, that’s part of it.”

“What’s the rest?”

“So I wouldn’t fall for you.”

“I didn’t realize that that was a possibility,” he says.

I laugh. “Me either. It wasn’t supposed to be.”

“Why couldn’t you fall for me?”

“Because this is an arrangement. It’s going to end. We get married, you get to where you need to be, and then we divorce. That was the agreement.” I sigh. “If I started liking you, falling for you, it would hurt. And I’ve got enough hurt to cope with.”

“How long?” he asks, his voice tender and quiet.

I shrug, knowing what he’s asking. “I don’t know. I think she’s waiting, somehow.”

“For what?”

We’re in his room, I realize. In his bed. He lies down beside me, cradles me in the nook of his arm and shoulder.

“For me to…” I shrug. “Not be alone, I guess.” A silence. “To know that I’m going to be okay without her.”

“Will you be?”

I shake my head, sniffle. “No.”

“You could…” He starts over. “You could let yourself care about me. Let me care about you.” I hear him swallow hard. “It doesn’t have to be an arrangement. There doesn’t have to be the expiration date.”

I feel my heart hammer like a kettledrum. “Paxton…” I catch my breath. “You don’t want that. You said so.”

“Before I understood who…who you are. What kind of person you are. How much I’d come to…to like having you around.” He hesitates. “I may have changed my mind, a little.”

I grin up at him. “A little, huh?”

He shrugs, endeavoring to look nonchalant, and not at all succeeding. “Yeah, a little.”

“What exactly did you change your mind about?”

He exhales, and it’s shaky—which is, oddly, reassuring. “You. Marriage.” He’s wearing his suit slacks still, and a plain white crewneck T-shirt, barefoot, casual, hair rumpled; he lies on the bed beside me, close but not presumptuously so. “Can I tell you something that may piss you off?”

I let out a small, sharp breath. “Yeah, I guess.”

“You weren’t supposed to be so fucking irresistible. You’re so completely different from the women I normally associate with, and that was on purpose. I couldn’t handle being married to those kinds of women, not even fake married, where I’d probably end up like my parents, having known but quiet affairs.”

“Your parents both do that?”

He laughs. “Oh yeah. Dad’s had the same mistress for twenty years—he’s been with her almost as long as he’s been with Mom, and I kind of feel like he’s actually closer to her than he is Mom.” He lifts a hand in a sort of shrug. “Mom is more complicated. Basically, she keeps a roster of like five or six guys she sleeps with. She’ll see the same guy for, like, six months, a year maybe, and then she switches to the next guy. Then, once that roster of guys has aged out, she finds new ones.”