Cruel King, page 12
“We’re leaving tomorrow evening. And, no … I think we need to discuss it tonight.” She glanced at Dad, and he nodded.
Gavin beamed. “Absolutely. Why don’t you all come to my place instead? Whitley and I live in the same building.”
“That would be lovely,” my mom said gratefully.
Gavin bustled us all into the car and swept us back to our building on the Upper East Side. I couldn’t even express my displeasure at this new arrangement. Dinner hadn’t been as bad as my anxiety had expected it to be, which was normally the case, but you never knew with my parents.
Despite Gavin being in the same building, I’d never actually been to his place. We always met at mine or in the lobby or at the coffee shop. I marveled at how much nicer his apartment was than mine. It shouldn’t have surprised me since, even though I was making stupid money now, I hadn’t grown up with it. Gavin’s place was probably twice the size of mine and had clearly been put together by an interior designer. It exuded bachelor and wealth. It was absolutely Gavin King in every way.
I tried to act like I’d been here many times before, sinking into the plush leather sofa and kicking my heels off. Gavin offered my parents a seat and then poured more wine for everyone. I would have killed for the whiskey on his wet bar, but I wasn’t going to ask for harder liquor before anyone else did.
Gavin sank into the seat next to me, dropping his arm across my shoulders, as if it were perfectly natural. My parents glanced at each other. Neither touched their wine. They were being weird.
“You wanted to talk more about the wedding?” I prompted.
“Right,” Mom said, glancing to Dad and then back. “There’s been a new development. We tried to call, but you didn’t answer. We knew we’d have to see you in person.”
“Development?” I asked, sitting up.
“Your dad is sick,” Mom blurted out.
I blinked. That … wasn’t what I’d been expecting at all. My gaze shifted to my dad, who looked uncomfortable.
“I have cancer, sweetheart.”
The words registered, but they didn’t seem real. My ears were ringing. I could barely hear the rest of the things they were saying. Cancer. Moved to spine, hips, and bladder. A few months to live.
Those words were incomprehensible. I had my problems with my parents. They’d never been the people I wanted them to be. But I didn’t want them to die either. I didn’t want my daddy to die.
“That’s why we’re here,” he said. “I just … I want to walk you down the aisle.”
I choked. “What?”
“I know that would move the timeline up for you two,” Dad said hoarsely. “I understand it would have to happen before the end of the summer. But … it’s my last wish.”
17
Gavin
Whitley wasn’t breathing.
Her mouth was agape, eyes wide and tear-brimmed, and she just stopped. As if time had frozen.
I’d suggested we move to my apartment, thinking that we could have one glass of wine and then we could busy her parents out of the place. That it would be a lot easier to get rid of them if we were in my apartment. I hadn’t considered that they were going to drop a bomb in the middle of my living room.
“Whitley?” her mom said softly.
She said nothing. She stared at her father in abject horror.
“Whitley, honey,” her dad began.
“How … how long have you known?” she forced out.
“About a week.”
“We tried to call,” her mom interjected. “We bought the tickets to come see you when you didn’t answer. The engagement was just … a happy coincidence.” Her smile widened at the words, but Whitley’s didn’t.
They were asking her to process a lot right now. Even if our engagement hadn’t been fake, this would have been a whole lot to ask of anyone.
Finally, she got to her feet and stumbled toward her dad. “I’m so sorry, Daddy.”
“It’s okay, honey. It’s okay.”
“It’s not,” she said through her tears. “It’s not okay.”
“I know.” He patted her back. “I’ve had a good life.”
“But … but treatment,” she said, immediately going into doctor mode. “There’s so much cancer treatment. A few months is … that’s absurd.”
“He’s still going to do immune treatments,” her mom supplied. “But it’s at such an advanced stage that they don’t think chemo or radiation is going to help.”
Whitley had this look in her eye, like she thought she could solve this. I would have smiled at that look under other circumstances. But right now, there wasn’t a whole lot that she could do.
When that realization hit Whitley too, tears came to her eyes again. She closed her eyes and tried to fight them from falling down her cheeks. I hated this. I hated every minute of it. There was nothing I could do to make this easier for her … for any of them. And watching her in this much pain was terrible.
“I know it’s a lot to ask,” her dad said, looking at me now. “Moving the wedding up would mean so much to me, but if you can’t, we understand too.” He came to his feet and offered me his hand. I shook it immediately. “I don’t expect you to know if it’s possible right now.”
Whitley’s eyes finally met mine, wide with fear. Our engagement was fake. Her dad wanted us to get married in a matter of months. What the fuck could we even say?
“Daddy,” Whitley said with a hiccup in her voice, “I … we …”
She was about to tell them that it was fake. I saw it cross her expression, but she couldn’t do that. Not right now. Not with everything else.
“We’ll have to discuss it,” I told them quickly. “Can we talk about it more tomorrow? It’s been a long night.”
Her mom sighed with relief, as if she had just been waiting for a reason to leave and escape all of this. “Tomorrow would be lovely. We could always talk more on the phone once we’re home too. Nothing has to be decided yet.”
“Of course,” I said amicably as I bustled her parents out of the apartment.
It wasn’t until the door closed behind them that silence finally settled over the place. Whitley had her arms crossed over her stomach, as if trying to hold her intestines in from spilling out of the split that had just opened in her gut.
“What am I going to do?” she whispered.
“First, you should take a seat,” I told her. She did that promptly. I stalked to the liquor bar and poured her a hefty portion of whiskey. “Drink this.” She took it gratefully and took a long sip.
“I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe …” She trailed off as her eyes went glassy again.
I took the seat next to her, gently wrapping an arm across her shoulders again. She leaned her head onto my shoulder.
“We can figure this out.”
“How? My dad is dying. He wants to walk me down the aisle. But Gavin, we were going to tell them we had broken up in two days. We’re not really engaged.”
“I know,” I said slowly. I let the silence linger longer before adding, “But I’d still do it.”
“Do what?”
“Marry you.”
Her head tilted up to look into my emerald-green eyes. She blinked twice, as if she hadn’t heard me right. “What?”
“I’d do it. I’d let your father walk you down the aisle.”
“You would fake marry me?”
“Yes,” I said, brushing a stray pink strand out of her face. “And … it would be a real wedding, Whitley. You’d be my real wife.”
“But it wouldn’t be … real. It would be wrong. We’re not … we’re not together like that.”
“No,” I agreed easily. “It’s not like I planned to get married, but that doesn’t mean we have to say no to your father’s request.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “I don’t want to think about this.”
“I know.” I ran my fingers back through her cotton-candy hair. “I can’t imagine you’d want to discuss this. I can’t believe they dropped this in your lap. It’s not fair, and it’s awful, but, Whit … it doesn’t change the reality.”
“I know,” she croaked. Tears clustered in her long, dark lashes. She blinked them away, curling further into me. “What are we going to do?”
“I think … we should go through with it. If you’ll have me.”
Her eyes opened again, and she shook her head. “You don’t want this.” She pulled away from me, dropping her glass on the table and running her hands back through her hair. “I could never ask you to do that.”
“You didn’t ask,” I reminded her.
“No, but …”
“In fact, I offered.”
“Gavin …”
“Hey,” I said, tilting her chin back toward me, “look at me.” Her eyes lifted to mine, and she froze under my gaze. “I don’t think it’s a mystery that I like you, Whitley. I liked you three years ago when we were together and when you left for California. I respected your wishes, which was to leave, but we’re in a different place than we were then. The wedding doesn’t have to be real. None of this has to be real, if you don’t want it to be. But … it’s real to me. What we’re doing here is real to me.”
She swallowed down terror. “It can’t be real.”
“Why not?” I demanded. “Why can’t we at least try?”
She jerked to her feet and put her hands around her stomach. “Because I like you,” she admitted with such force that I thought it might shake the windows.
“So?”
The fact that she’d even admitted that much must have cost her. Whitley always kept her own counsel. She always had her own rules. Rules that protected her from the sort of heartbreak that could really be possible here if she let herself be more than just the bad girlfriend she’d written herself as.
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
I was taken aback by that. Never in all of this had I considered that Whitley would fear hurting me. I had thought all of her fears resided over the fact that she didn’t want to be hurt. That she ran to escape the possibility that she would give her heart to someone. She’d always held it so close, never quite making herself vulnerable enough.
I rose to my feet and took an easy step toward her. “And here I thought, you were worried about me hurting you.”
She scoffed. “No. I’m the one who leaves, Gavin.”
“In my relationships, Whitley, I’m the one who leaves.”
We stared at each other in the space of those confessions. We were the same. We’d been the same for so long. It was why we’d been the perfect wingman for one another and effortless friends. It was why soaring over that line had felt as easy as breathing. And why this wedding would be equally as simple, if she gave in to it.
“Why did you really leave?” I asked.
“Because I liked you … and I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“Did you ever think that leaving would hurt me?”
“No. I … I didn’t want to tear friends apart, and I … didn’t want to like you.”
“Why not?” I asked, dragging a finger down her jaw.
“I told you, I’m going to hurt you.”
“You don’t have to be scared.”
She laughed, slightly hysterical. “I’m not scared.” But I could see that was a lie. She was terrified. She was petrified to let her guard down and find that she actually enjoyed what we were doing here. “All liking someone has ever gotten me is heartbreak. I’m the bad girlfriend, remember?”
“Why don’t we put the labels aside? We’re good together. You’ve seen that for the last week. It was easy with my family because we’re easy, Whit.”
“We … we are.”
The admission felt like a balm. “I’m not asking you to marry me.” Yet. The word was left unsaid as I stared down into her wide, frightened eyes. “I’m asking you to see how this goes while we do the right thing by your dad.”
“You really mean it?”
“It’s your father’s dying wish, Whitley. It seems cruel to deny him that.”
She nodded once, folding herself against my chest. I wrapped her tight against me, and it was the most incredible feeling. I wanted to hold her like this for eternity. She sniffled against me, and I brushed a kiss on the top of her head.
“We’ll figure this out together, pixie.”
18
Whitley
The next morning, I woke in a big, comfy bed. Gavin’s bed. I rolled over and found the other side of the California king empty. The shower was running in the next room. The man showered more than anyone else I knew.
I sank back down into the plush mattress and tugged the comforter up to my chin. I was in one of Gavin’s oversize T-shirts. Nothing had happened. I’d fallen asleep in his bed, and nothing had happened. Well, I’d cried a lot, and he’d held me, stroking my hair, without complaint. I didn’t know what to make of that.
Or the conversation we’d had last night.
Or my dad’s diagnosis.
It was the first time that I’d ever been furious that I had chosen plastic surgery instead of something more helpful … like oncology. I could have been curing cancer this entire time. Not that I’d ever wanted to, but that seemed irrational at this present moment.
I had no more expertise in this than an oncologist had in a face lift. And still, I was mad that I’d put myself in this position.
I wanted to avoid the reality of my father’s cancer nearly as much as what had happened last night with Gavin.
Did this mean we were dating? A spike of fear shot through me. I’d told him the truth. I broke relationships, and if we had a real relationship, whether or not the marriage would be real, I was sure I’d hurt him. Of course, he thought the same thing. So, we were at an impasse there.
It was all too complicated to focus on. Last night felt like a fever dream. None of it could have possibly been real. Let alone all of it.
And yet here I was, in Gavin’s apartment, with two missed calls from my mom and a text message from my dad about meeting. It was real. I wasn’t going to wake up to a new world. This was my reality.
“Morning,” Gavin said, jolting me from my spiraling.
“Hey.”
I might have been depressed, but I wasn’t blind. Gavin was wearing nothing but a towel slung low around his waist, and he looked fucking fantastic. Water still clung to his red-brown hair. It dripped into his eyes, and he brushed his hand back through it, slicking it backward.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
I tilted my head to get a clearer view of the eight-pack abs. “Better now.”
He laughed softly. “At least you haven’t lost your sense of humor.”
“Please, humor is all I have left.”
Then, I snatched up his towel and ran across the room with it. Gavin’s jaw dropped, and without warning, he chased after me. There was nowhere to go anyway, but he caught me with ease, slinging me over his shoulder and plopping us both on the bed.
“You’re mischief incarnate.”
“Why, thank you,” I said with a teasing smile.
He shook his head and then dropped his lips onto mine. The moment they touched mine, the rest of the world fell away. It would have been nice to live here in this point of time. To not have to face what was coming after that. I could delude myself about a lot of things, but not that my dad was dying. No amount of freezing time was going to change that fact.
Gavin pulled away slowly, looking down at me with those mercurial eyes. “How are you really?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you still want to go through with this?”
“Do you?”
“Yes,” he said automatically.
I still couldn’t believe that Gavin was suggesting what he’d suggested. A fake engagement for a week to deal with his family was one thing. A real marriage to satisfy my father was something else entirely. We could annul it or whatever … divorce. But he’d taken it a step further. He wanted to try this. Actually try this. Might as well see if it worked while we were going through with it anyway.
Yet, as I looked up at him, I saw a future in those eyes. I saw all those promises we hadn’t quite made become reality. Would it be so terrible? It was certainly terrifying.
But there was something else there. Something … exciting too.
We were getting married one way or another.
Why not see if I could fall in love with him too?
“Then, let’s do it.”
His smile was brilliant as he bent down to kiss me again, sealing our promise.
It was nearly an hour before I got back to my apartment, took my own shower, and was ready for the day. We met my parents at H&H Bagels and broke the news to them. My mom cried. My dad pulled me into a tight hug. This was a big ask, and I had no idea how I was going to pull this off in two months, in New York City.
Back home, we could throw it together, but here?
I knew exactly who I needed to make this work. Now that the train was running down the track, there was no backing out. The engagement ring was on my finger. I was going to have to tell my boss, my friends, and the rest of the world too.
Which meant I needed help.
The SOS went out to my girlfriends that morning, and by the evening, we were all seated around a table at Katherine’s favorite sushi restaurant with sake for the four of us.
“Finally,” English grumbled. “I was wondering if you were going to avoid us forever.”
Lark arched an eyebrow. “So, are we going to get the whole story?”
“You know we do love a Whitley Bowen original,” Katherine purred. Her eyes were as clever as a cat. As if she’d already sussed out what this whole thing was about. Which felt impossible, but it was Katherine. I put nothing past her.
“I didn’t mean to avoid you. It’s been an interesting couple of days since I got home, which was why I wanted to get with you.”
Katherine tapped the diamond still on my left hand. “And explain why you’re still wearing this.”
