Page 32 of Our Big White Lie
“Not yet, but I was thinking about making one of the meal kits from this week’s delivery. Are you hungry?”
“Starving. Do you mind making one tonight and I’ll do tomorrow?”
Her smile made my head light. “Sure!” She got up and headed for the kitchen, dusting off some Tucker fluff as she walked. “Do you want the chicken teriyaki or the coconut curry?”
I thought about it. “The curry sounds good. What do you think?”
She seemed to give it some thought, too. “Actually, I’m not really in the mood for anything spicy…”
“The teriyaki is fine, then.”
“You sure?”
“Of course.” I said. “I’ll be back in a minute. Then we can eat and I can help you with the rest.”
With that, I headed down the hall while Tucker joined Ava in the kitchen. “Do you want to help me make some chimkin?” she was asking him. “It’s not the spicy kind, so you can have some. Yes, you can.”
I smiled to myself even as my stomach wound itself into knots.
Then I stepped into my bedroom, closed the door behind me, and exhaled.
Iwasn’tmarrying Ava.
This wasn’t real.
I knew that, and I’d known that all along, but today… the whole time I’d been exchanging barbs with my aunt…
My shoulders sagged, and I leaned against my closed door as my mind whirred. Our wedding was fake and I knew that, but…
As I rewound the argument with my aunt and the more subdued conversation with my dad, it hadn’t crossed my mind that anything was fake. In those heated moments, I’d been so angry and hurt that I hadn’t even paused to remember that this wedding—this marriage I was defending at the expense of a low-conflict family gathering—wasn’t real.
My fury at my aunt had been real. My anger over her saying two women shouldn’t marry was real.
And in that moment, my rage over her suggesting there wasanythingwrong with my marriage to Ava—that, too, had been real. All the way to my core, I’d been livid at the idea of someone so much as hinting that I didn’t belong with this amazing woman.
All those raw emotions. All those things I normally wouldn’t dare say out loud. All those tears I’d been fighting back.
That was all real.
So was the way my whole world had settled when I’d walked in tonight and seen her smile.
I closed my eyes and pressed my head back against the door.
What the hell was happening?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ava
Iwas seriously relieved to watch food, downtime, and a stupid TV show unwind some of the tension in Tori’s neck and shoulders. She was always wound tight when she came back from visiting that side of her family, and it sounded like her twatwaffle of an aunt was in rare form today. I didn’t mind at all that she didn’t invite me to those events, not even now when we were trying to sell it that we were getting married.
“I should bring you along to keep up appearances,”she told me this morning,“but I’d rather not subject you to that garbage. Because it’s probably not going to be a fun visit.”
She’d called that one, that’s for sure.
But some chicken teriyaki from a meal kit, a couple of episodes of an old reality show, and some cuddles with Tucker later, she was breathing easier and didn’t look so tense. Seemed like a good sign to me.
And now that she was finally relaxed, it probably wasn’t the best time to bring up some things I’d been thinking about today. The problem was that I was hard-pressed to conjure up a better time, and we were getting down to the wire on some things. The wedding was still about three months out.
