How to Marry Your Frenemy - London Casey Page 0,64
one more time.
I finished my shower, got dressed, and walked out of the bathroom to find Callie standing at the counter in my kitchen.
With a bottle of beer.
“Well,” I said. “Did you come to make me something to eat?”
“What the fuck is your problem, Jackson?”
“I’m not sure. Want to talk about it?”
“You want to mess with me? That’s fine. I don’t care. We can go back and forth. But my mother?”
“What? You were going to hide your marriage from your mother?”
“This isn’t a marriage,” she said. “This is fake. This doesn’t count.”
“It doesn’t?”
“No,” she said. “And now she…” Callie took a drink of beer. “You don’t know what you just did, Jackson. She’s going to try and go above and beyond for this party thing. And none of it is real.”
“Callie, get real then,” I said. “By the time she wants to do this, we’ll be over with. Okay? Then you can run to Mommy and cry and she’ll fix it all and life goes on.”
“Fuck you,” Callie said. “You just don’t care.”
“I don’t care?” I asked. “We have an arrangement. You went on a date with another man. You tried to bring that man home to fuck him.”
Callie laughed. “Is that what this is? Punishment? You’re trying to hurt me? Are you serious right now?”
“No,” I said. “I’m just… I don’t know. I was trying to get things back on track.”
“Back on track?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Last night got… intense. We were close, Callie. There were things happening between us. We were both feeling something. Don’t deny that. You teasing me with your dress…”
“Wow,” she said. “You really are a piece of shit, Jackson. You are nothing but a child.”
“Don’t say that,” I said.
“No wonder Vince won’t give you the company.”
Callie wiggled her eyebrows, knowing she went for a low blow.
“Get out of my apartment,” I said.
“You don’t like it, right?” Callie asked. “Good.”
“I was just trying to have fun.”
“That wasn’t fun for me. My mother brought me an unpaid tax bill.”
“For what?”
Callie laughed. “She doesn’t pay anything, Jackson. She doesn’t believe in it. She has her own theories on life and how to live. And each time she gets into a mess, she calls me to help her. And guess what? I always help. I have no choice. If I don’t, she’ll end up broke and homeless. Or she’ll end up broke and on my couch. So it wasn’t a fucking fun visit for me. And the last thing I needed was her even more distracted.” Callie waved her hands. “Oh, pay my fucking taxes? Screw that. I’m going to rub rocks together and throw a party for my daughter’s fake fucking marriage. Nothing bad can happen to me… I have bamboo… and I have…”
I ran toward Callie and touched her shoulders.
“Hey,” I said, getting her to be quiet for a second. “Callie. I didn’t know.”
She shook my away. “Of course you didn’t know. We don’t know anything about each other. This is fake. Remember? Just stay out of it, Jackson. Do your job. Be my husband in front of Vince and everyone else.”
She moved to the door and left the apartment.
I didn’t go after her.
Now I knew something about her that I didn’t know before.
A little more of the truth behind Callie’s persona.
She was a slob at home. Her mother was a financial mess.
Maybe the right thing right then would have been to get her the bonus and get her a new job. She’d have money to help her mother and a new job to take care of herself with.
And I’d be away from her.
It felt logical, but it felt wrong.
In a shocking twist to my heart…
I wanted to know more about Callie and her life.
Chapter Thirty
Callie
The logical question was the same.
How could someone not know to pay their taxes?
Believe me, that question ran through my mind all morning, even after I spread all the paperwork out on my desk to go over it and see what needed to be done and when.
The when part was a long time ago.
These taxes were way overdue.
Not only were they not paid, there was no money to actually pay them.
Which meant my mother was running her little hippy shop like it was a secret cash-only business. Like it was a board game and at any time she could walk away, get a snack and watch a TV show.
She was like a child.
And I was the adult.
The roles were reversed. It had been that way my entire life.