Jared’s neighborhood is obscene.
Manicured hedges trimmed with what I can only assume are diamond-encrusted scissors, security cameras perched on every gate like mechanical vultures, and cars in driveways that have never once met a pothole.
I know this world, I grew up three zip codes from here, back when my father's name meant something. That was before the funeral, before the debt letters, before my mother's nice dress on the kitchen floor.
I smooth my hair, straighten my shirt and hitch my bag higher on my shoulder. The one bag I own that isn't falling apart, packed with everything worth keeping, which turns out to be not much.
The front door is enormous, dark wood, the kind that says ‘we don't need to try.’ I ring the bell and my reflection stares back at me from the polished brass knocker.
She looks like she's about to make the worst decision of her life.
The door swings open and Jared is standing there shirtless in gym shorts. Hair damp and pushed back from a shower, water still tracking down the side of his neck.
He looks like a cologne ad that got bored of the magazine and wandered into real life just to ruin someone's afternoon.
"Well, hello, fiancée." His mouth curves as his eyes drop to my bag.
He reaches down, takes it from my hand before I can react, walks past me to the curb, and drops it into the trash can. Lid shut. Done.
My jaw unhinges. "Hey! That's my stuff!"
"That's garbage." He's already walking back, hand closing around my elbow, pulling me inside. "Let's go."
"I have clothes in there. Personal things—"
"You have real clothes upstairs. Better ones. Move."
The house swallows us with its enormous and cold way expensive things always are. Vaulted ceilings, marble floors that echo every footstep like a courthouse, and air that smells like nothing because even the oxygen has been curated.
I follow him up a staircase wide enough to land a small aircraft and through a hallway lined with framed jerseys and trophies.
He doesn't slow down. He doesn't offer a tour. He walks like a man who assumes the world will arrange itself around his trajectory, and so far the world hasn't proven him wrong.
In the master bedroom, his king-size bed is covered in shopping bags, tissue paper spilling out like confetti at a party I didn't agree to attend.
I see dresses, stockings, lingerie in black and cream, jewelry boxes stacked in a neat row. All of it in my size, which means someone measured me without my knowledge…
I'm totally adding that to the list of things I'll be furious about later.
A red dress sits on top of the pile like a crown. I pick it up and hold it against my body. The silk is cool and impossibly soft and probably costs more than three months of my rent, but the neckline…
"I'm not wearing this."
Jared steps closer, enough that the heat from his shower-damp skin reaches mine across the space between us. "You will. And everything else I tell you to."
I drop the dress on the bed and turn to face him but he doesn't back up. Instead he moves behind me, his hands landing on my shoulders and turns me toward the full-length mirror in the corner.
My reflection appears between his arms, framed by him, and the image is so absurd I nearly laugh.
The cleaning girl bracketed by the six-foot-three of shirtless quarterback.
"Rule one." His eyes meet mine in the glass. "In public, you're my perfect fiancée. You smile, you touch me, and you look at me like I'm the only man in the room."
"Riveting. And rule two?"
"Your schedule revolves around mine. Events, appearances, dinners — when I go, you go."
"I'm a person, not a handbag."
"Rule three." His fingers shift on my shoulders, not tightening, just present. "No secrets. No meetings I don't know about. And I can check your phone anytime. I don’t need some nasty rumors of a cheating fiancee around me."
My spine goes rigid against his chest. "You're out of your mind…"
"And rule four." His voice drops as his reflection watches mine in the mirror. "You sleep in my bed."
The silence hums as his thumbs rest against the base of my neck, warm and steady, and my pulse is doing something under his fingers that I will take to my grave.
I hold his gaze in the mirror — green eyes, that half-smirk, the absolute certainty that he's in control here. "Sex isn't in the contract."
The smirk widens. "Just checking how convincing you can be."
I turn sharply and fast enough that his hands fall away as we're face to face with six inches of charged air between us. His chin dips to hold eye contact and the amusement flickers — just barely, but enough.
"Then you'd better understand something too." My voice is low and very steady and I have no idea where it's coming from. "You don't boss me around. We're in this together. You'll play your part as the perfect groom, or I walk out that front door and your sponsors can watch you burn on live television."
He stares at me as the smirk fades and something shifts behind his expression — not respect, not exactly. But the recalibration of a man who just discovered the furniture bites back.
His jaw works once before he steps away, grabs a shirt from the chair and pulls it over his head. "Dinner's at eight."
He walks out. I stand alone in the master bedroom surrounded by shopping bags and silk and the ghost-print of his fingers on my shoulders.
Just three weeks. You can survive anything for three weeks.
That night we stand on opposite sides of the king bed like generals surveying a battlefield neither wants to be the first to cross.
I grab every decorative pillow in reach — and there are many, because apparently rich people compensate for emotional emptiness with throw cushions — and build a wall down the center of the mattress.
Firm, tall, and structurally ambitious.
Jared watches from his side, arms crossed, one eyebrow raised. "You know those cost four hundred dollars each."
"Then they should be sturdy enough to keep you on your side, jerk."
I climb in, pull the duvet tight around myself like a cocoon, and turn my back to him. The mattress dips when he gets in. The lights go off. The silence is enormous and pressing against my ears.
I can feel the heat of him radiating across the pillow wall like a furnace I didn't ask for. His breathing slows within minutes, even and deep, the breathing of a man who has never once in his life questioned his right to take up space.
I stare at the ceiling of a stranger's bedroom. Shadows move across the crown molding when a car passes outside. The check is folded in the pocket of the jeans draped over the chair.
The reason I'm lying in a quarterback's bed instead of sitting beside my son's hospital crib counting the beeps on his monitor.
"I'll fix this, baby," I whisper into the dark. So quiet even I can barely hear it. "I promise."
But then, from the other side of the pillows, low and half-asleep, "You talk in your sleep too? Great."
My eyes squeeze shut and my teeth find each other and lock.
Three weeks. I can survive anything for three weeks.
The problem is I'm not sure that the anything is the contract. It's the heat still radiating from his side of the bed and the fact that some traitorous corner of my brain is already memorizing the rhythm of his breathing.
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