Page 62 of Just (Fake) Married
Wanted: Information on the Ethan McGraw/Harmony Calloway wedding!
Mabel, I thought grimly. I should have asked who her cousins were that still lived here.
“Fine,” I confessed. “We did it. You knew it was going to happen.”
“Not yesterday!” Amity shouted. “Like…that was your wedding, and we weren’t even there. I might expect that from Sunshine or Boone, but not from you.”
“It wasn’t that kind of wedding,” I reminded them. “We did all the paperwork, the judge asked a few questions, we said yes, and now the first part of Leroy McGraws’ demands have been met. Now we need to turn our focus on the Feud Day Festival.”
“Hold on,” Bliss said. “We’re still on demand number one. You’re hitched now. Do you have a story?”
I blinked. “What do you mean?”
“A story,” she repeated. “Remember, you’re supposed to be convincing the town you’re an epic love story, and through the power of your love, you’re going to somehow restore the glory of the Gulch? When did you and Ethan meet?”
“We grew up in this same town together.”
“Wrong,” Amity said, leaning over my counter to see if I had any candy near the register that she might want to steal. She smelled like apples and cinnamon. She must have been baking at the café before coming over here to lecture me and steal my candy. “She means, when did you fall in love?”
She found a Tootsie Pop and unwrapped it with relish.
I huffed. “I don’t know.”
“That’s my point,” Bliss said. She snagged the Tootsie Pop out of Amity’s hand, took a quick lick, grimaced because it was orange, and handed it back. “You need a story. You obviously had something going on back in high school. The whole town remembers Ethan walking around with a shiner you gave him during a party.”
“Pantry Puncher,” Amity said, putting the lollipop in her mouth.
“You have to pay for that,” I said.
“Add it to my bill. Better yet, I’ll subtract it from your bill at the café.”
Bliss hiked herself up onto my counter, really getting into this story she was concocting. “Maybe instead of grad school, you followed Ethan to college and this whole time you’ve had this on again off again long distance secret relationship.”
“For ten years?” I said. “That seems nuts. And people know I went to grad school. It was all over my social media.”
“No, I wouldn’t buy it either,” Bliss said. “What if…what if…well, what if you had a little thing in high school, but after he went off to college, you started writing each other?”
“Writing Ethan?”
“Emails. Postcards. Letters,” Amity said. “This could work.”
“You started writing Ethan while he was away in college,” Bliss said, Crossing her long denim covered legs. “And over time,your feelings for each other just kept building up, so that when he finally came home…Bam.”
“Bam?” I asked. Bam, I kind of understood. Bam was how this whole thing felt. One day my life was recognizable, the next I was having multiple orgasms on a couch with my husband.
“Yeah, like insta-love, only not, because you spent those years really getting to know each other. Because there is nothing you didn’t share in your letters to one another.”
Amity and I looked at Bliss like she was a stranger. Bliss was not a romantic. She was the opposite of a romantic. A dead-eyed realist who didn’t believe in love.
Or so I thought.
“I’ll come up with something,” I said. “Now, both of you shoo. If that poster is still up, I’m in for a doozy of a day.”
It was exactlyas I predicted. As soon as Amity and Bliss left, the door didn’t stay closed for more than a few minutes. Each time the bell over the door rang, Jenny got upset, which made Bruce honk, until finally I took the damn bell down.
It was official. I was the center of town gossip.
Damn that stupidwantedsign.
