Page 26 of His Perfect Woman

“Did I miss something here, Lucas?”

“What makes you think that?”

“Umm...well...you’re acting weird. Like you’re...upset with me or something?”

“No. Not at all.” I rolled my shoulders and stepped into my sweatpants. “You’re right. Separate lives. I’m just feeling a little antsy. I’m going out for a run.”

“Okay.” She stared at me while I finished getting dressed, but eventually got sucked back into her work emails. “I’ve got a meeting with a client later, so I won’t be here when you get back.”

“I’ll see you tonight?”

Her arms stretched high above her head with a yawn. “No, not tonight. I need some alone time. Might grab dinner with some friends. All these late nights with you are starting to take a toll on me.”

“We don’t have to fuck every time we see each other, you know. We’re also friends. We can just hang out.”

She cut her eyes up at me. “I know that. And we have been. A lot.”

I needed to get out of there. I was starting to sound like some needy chick. Even if we were a real couple, of course we’d spend some nights apart, doing our own things. But something about this being an arrangement and her insistence on drawing a hard line to keep it that way, had me feeling all kinds of insecure and desperate. It was pathetic.

Resisting the urge to go over and kiss her goodbye, I headed for the door. “Alright then. Cool. I’ll see you when I see you.”

“Have a good...” she yelled through the apartment, but I was already taking off and slammed the front door before she could finish.

The moment my sneakers hit the pavement outside, I broke into a steady sprint. I needed to shake this gross feeling. It seemed like I had everything I ever wanted, but it wasn’t mine. Not really. It was a facade that could slip through my fingers any day now.

Once Victoria got pregnant, we’d stop having sex. Behind closed doors, we’d stop kissing and being all over each other. She was right that it was hard for me to wrap my head around it, but not because of my ego. I just couldn’t figure out if she was so blasé about all of this because she thought she had to be...because it was what she agreed to...or if it was because she really didn’t see me as anything more than a friend and a sperm donor.

As I ran down the city streets, I kept reminding myself that time was running out. If we had any chance of turning back before someone got hurt...before I got hurt...I needed to tell her how I really felt before she got pregnant. Hell, it could already be too late for all I knew. We had been fucking like rabbits. Her enthusiasm for that made me doubt whether she didn’t see some real potential between us.

More and more, I was starting to feel like the media, my image, the company...none of it mattered if I didn’t end up with Victoria. If we announced a break up, I’d find some other trophy wife to hire who things would be less complicated with. We’d recover and make it work. Victoria would have her baby, and I would keep my distance for both our sakes. At least she’d know who her baby’s father was.

It didn’t seem like such a bad worst-case scenario, really. Not when I considered the alternative. Me not being able to hold her anymore. Not being able to touch her or make love to her, or share breakfast in bed. Or romantic dinners. Or even worse...me finding out, through the course of helping her raise our kid, that she had met someone else and suddenly, the prospect of a real relationship didn’t seem so bad to her anymore. Just not with me. And I’d be forced to watch it all play out from the sidelines.

I had been keeping my true feelings for her bottled up since high school. Now I had gotten us into this mess. All my desperation and cowardly inability to tell her how I felt was humiliating, and it was starting to eat me from the inside out. The most manly thing I could do was just tell her I was in love with her and always had been. If she didn’t feel the same way...I’d be no worse off than where I started.

Except the hope would be gone. By keeping my secret, I got to cling to the possibility of what might happen one day. By telling her everything, I risked losing that hope. Then it would be final. I’d know for certain that she was never going to love me back.

It was a grim possibility, but with each passing day, I knew I needed to face it. And sooner rather than later.

I jogged back to my place, but Victoria was gone—like she said she would be. I decided she could have her night off. I’d give her some space. But after that, the time had come. I was going to make a plan to tell her everything.

15

Victoria

I was in a dreamy daze, sitting at a table on the café’s patio with a glass of ginger ale and a salad. Sitting and trying to interpret all of Lucas’s words and actions had become a regular thing for me, and the stress of it had brought an almost constant uneasiness to my stomach. And it was exhausting on top of that. All the nausea and tiredness was enough to make me think we had made a mistake.

Lucas had started this whole thing with his lie to the press. Then he kept it going with his big scheme. Now he wanted us to move in together? He had lost his mind. The most confusing part was that it was his playboy, womanizing lifestyle that had landed him in hot water to begin with. He had always been a ladies’ man. Did he honestly expect to be able to give that up just to keep the lie going?

I kept imagining getting up in the middle of the night to warm a baby bottle only to run into one of the models or actresses he slept with, stumbling into my kitchen half-dressed. I could see it now. Her asking me who the hell was I. Oh, just Lucas’s fake wife and the mother of his child. Don’t mind me.

I laughed and shook my head. It would never work. Worse was imagining me having a guy over and Lucas sizing him up. Mind babysitting for a bit while we dip into the other room and have sex real quick?

It was absurd. And even more absurd than all of that was how Lucas didn’t seem to be concerned about any of it. Sure, he was stubborn once he got his mind stuck on something. He didn’t care what could go wrong. Whatever came up, he’d find some way to obliterate it and keep on moving forward. But in this instance...I didn’t know how he couldn’t see the obvious, glaring problems with the whole scenario. Or if he could see them...why didn’t he care?

There was the other more startling possibility. One my mind had been avoiding like the plague. Could it be that he didn’t care about the obstacles because this was more than an arrangement to him? Did my oldest, closest friend have actual feelings for me? He did have a funny way of mocking me with a bitter grunt every time I referred to our relationship as “fake” or “just an arrangement.” But wasn’t that what it was supposed to be?

It was a vicious rabbit hole in my mind. Once my avoidance allowed me to skip right over the prospect of Lucas having feelings for me, I had to face the other big problem. I was starting to think I might actually have feelings for him, regardless of what he thought of me.

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