“I mean, we would really get engaged. I got a ring.”
“Jeremy, what I'm asking is, would you be getting engaged for appearances, or do you…? Are you…? Do you really intend to make her your wife?”
I snorted. “Do I have to think that far ahead? She probably wouldn't have me anyway, so no. I mean, you know. I just want to give her a ring. Let her wear it for a while.”
Martin sighed. “Are you sure she would understand a gesture like that? Because I'm not sure it makes sense to me. You have to tread very carefully with things like engagement rings and proposals. You have to honestly explain—”
“Explain what? She works for me. She plays my girlfriend. Now she can play my wife.”
“You mean your fiancée.”
“Right. My fiancée. Whatever.”
He sighed again. I wished I hadn't said anything to him at all.
“Listen, Jeremy, you need to think this through. Playing a girlfriend is one thing. Wearing someone's ring is something else altogether. Especially when…”
“When what?”
“When you're both so emotionally involved already as it is.”
“I'm not… We're not emotionally involved. I mean, we've been keeping things professional.”
“Have you?”
Fucker.
“Yes,” I said. “Actually we have. Anyway, I just thought it might get this crazy stalker lady off my back.”
“I don't know, Jeremy. I think it might inflame her more. We should talk to the case worker at the police department first, get his opinion. He would probably know better what might play out from a situation like this. You certainly don't want to endanger Nell even further—”
“No, of course I don't want to fucking endanger Nell!”
He fell silent. Now I was the one who sighed. Martin cleared his throat.
“Jeremy. Listen. I've known you for a long time. I've known a lot of your girls. I'm not exactly sure where you're taking this. I can't tell where your mind's at. Perhaps worse, I'm not sure
you
know where your mind's at. So until you know, I'm advising you not to do anything extreme. Don't do anything without thinking things through and without being brutally honest with yourself first. If you don't know why you're doing this, or what outcome you want, it would be better to just—”
“God, it was just an idea, Martin. Don't flip out and go all mental-health counselor on me.”
Fuck Martin anyway, and fuck the little fuck at the police department who called me a couple of days later to insist it was a
very bad idea.
If I wanted to propose to my fake girlfriend on Christmas morning in front of my whole family, then I fucking would. Hell, my parents would be beside themselves with happiness. Even now they were both beaming at her like she was the Madonna herself. I guess since she was the first girl I'd ever brought home who might remotely be considered wife material.
Wife material
. I really didn't want her for my wife. I just thought it might be a good idea for the stalker thing. And anyway, it would be fun to pretend to be engaged to her.
My parents were grilling her about her hometown, her parents, her career.
“I'm a personal assistant,” she said with a straight face over her plate of cookies. She didn't eat one of them. “I like to help people, I guess.”
“She's helped me on this trip, that's for sure,” I chimed in with a subtle wink that had her blushing and glaring at me.
“And were you raised with a religion, dear?” my mother asked with a hopeful note in her voice.
“Nell studies mythology,” I said. “She's too polite to tell you this, but she actually believes the Bible is just another book of myths.”
She shot me a glare and dropped her gaze into her lap. My mother looked depressed, like she always did when confronted by my godless ways.
“She knows hundreds of stories,” I continued. “Mythology from every continent and every era in time. Mythology about how the world began, what people used to believe—”
“The nice thing about being human,” Nell said softly, “is that you can determine the reality of the world for yourself. People have always done that throughout time, and mythology can reveal to us what those creative beliefs were. If you believe that God created the universe and everything in it, you're certainly not alone.”
Creative beliefs
. I had those sometimes. If I could write a mythology, the reality of the world for myself, it would involve me, Nell, a bedroom, and forever after.
“It's late, Mom. Nell's tired, if the inquisition is over.”
“Oh, of course you must be exhausted, dear,” she said. “She'll be staying in the smaller guest room, Jeremy. Everyone else will be arriving tomorrow, along with all the kids. Do you like kids, Nell?”
She nodded. “I do, but I haven't been around them much.”
“Will you want a big family someday? You know Jeremy is an uncle fourteen times over.”
“Mom!” I said. “It's late, do you mind?”
I led Nell down the hall to the guest room after the awkward leave-takings and good nights.
“Fourteen?” Nell whispered. “You have fourteen nieces and nephews?”
“My brothers and sisters are all breeders. Lots of kids.”
“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”
“Five. Two sisters, three brothers.”
“Wow.”
It seemed strange that she didn't know things about me like how many siblings I had. Why had I told her so little about myself? Why did I know so little about her? I thought on the flight back to Portugal I would ask her hundreds of questions. I wanted to know it all.
“Let me guess.” She smiled. “You're the baby of the family.”
I slapped her ass. “Why do you say that? Because I'm so immature and self-involved? Actually I was one of the ones in the middle. What about you?”
“I have a big family too,” she said. “But they're all fucked-up.”
“You'll find everyone in my family is perfect,” I said. “Except me.”
“Why did you say that about the Bible? You made me feel totally stupid.”
“Well, that's what you believe,” I said. “We talked about it a long time one night.”
“Still, if your parents believe in the Bible, why go out of your way to rub my opinions in their faces?”
“Why hide who you are, Nell? To keep some strangers happy?”
“They're not strangers. They're your parents. Anyway, follow your own advice. Why hide who you are?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why not just tell them what I am to you, if you're so against hiding the truth?”
“Because some truths they just couldn't handle.”
“Because you only reveal the truths that make
me
look bad, not
you
.”
I sighed and glared at her. “It's Christmas Eve tomorrow, why don't you try to summon up some small inkling of holiday spirit and stop acting like such a bitch?”
She rolled her eyes and started into the bedroom. I stopped her for one long, deep, passionate kiss to replace the sex I couldn't have that I so desperately wanted. I could have tried for a quickie, I suppose, but something about being in my parents' house ruined me for sex.
Later, in my own childhood room, I pulled the box out of my jacket and looked at the ring. She would love it. Girls loved rings, didn't they? This one was big but not too outrageous, a brilliant cut, a rare and exceptionally pure diamond. Just like her.
* * *
In the morning the parade of arrivals started. By noon the house was crawling with my annoying siblings and their hyperactive kids. Nell was a champ. No one played the innocent, adoring girlfriend better than her. I loved to watch her and picture her as only I knew her. Dressed in corsets or garters, bound, clamped, tortured, fucked, and in the throes of an orgasm. None of my vanilla siblings could ever understand. None of them would ever know what I knew. None of them would ever have what Nell gave me. I watched her mingle with the other women, all wives and mothers. Somehow she fit in.
Well, I suppose she was a woman after all. She had the genes to be a wife and mother. She hadn't been born a sex toy, and she certainly wouldn't die a sex toy. Someday she would become something more. A student, a mythology expert. A girlfriend, a real one. A wife. She would be somebody's wife someday, wouldn't she? She was almost thirty. She would want to settle down soon.
She held the children and interacted with them differently than I did. Instead of looking at them as nuisances or oddities, she treated them like little people. It was very entertaining to watch. And thought-provoking. When she quieted the colicky baby no one else could quiet, I caught myself wondering what a baby of ours might look like.
Anyway, it didn't matter. She wasn't cut out for the movie-star life, and I wasn't settling down into marriage and parenthood anytime soon.
“Jeremy, Nell is spectacular.” My squeaky-clean brother-in-law Ed sidled up to me. “She's great with the babies too,” he added, poking me in the side and nearly getting punched in the face for it.
She's great in a lot of ways you would never understand
. I was absolutely certain Ed fucked my sister missionary-style every time, if they even had sex anymore after three kids.
“She is great,” I agreed, moving out of poking range.
“How long have you been together?”
“Long enough,” I said. “In my line of work, even a month or two is a golden anniversary.”