Man Hands 1 Read online

  “This is your last chance to bail out of the fake engagement before it starts making headlines. I’d understand.”

  Oh. “That is very considerate of you. But I’m along for the ride, okay? I’m not exactly famous for my good decision making. But here we are outside a fake international airport, and I’ve painted my toenails for this occasion so let’s be fake engaged.”

  He grins at me like I’m hilarious. “Okay. You’re going to need this, then.” He pulls something out of his pocket.

  Oh, fuck. It’s a ring box.

  He’s doing this. He’s doing this now right by the curbside check-in and a woman saying in her thick Michigan accent, “Oh, fer sure, I hope the plane ride doesn’t make me nauseous, dontcha know?”

  “Brynn?” he asks, and suddenly everything else around us silences.

  Something goes a little wrong with my breathing, because this part is weird. There’s no denying it. When you get out that little square velvet box and hand a ring to a girl, it’s supposed to mean something. It’s supposed to be a moment.

  I’d forgotten how it felt to see that box. It feels like potential.

  “Breathe, honey,” he says.

  Right.

  I breathe. It’s more of a hiccup, really, but then I try again. He holds my gaze, and his eyes tell me that he knows this is weird. “I hope it fits.” He opens the box and sighs.

  The ring inside is beautiful. It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before. Smooth gold surrounding a simple, frosted orb. It’s not a diamond, which is great because diamonds always look like just glass to me. This globe thing seems luminescent. I love it to pieces.

  Shit!

  I love it. And I want it on my hand now. And maybe always.

  “It looks vintage,” I say to cover up my own yearning. It occurs to me that there is no way he found something like this at a jewelry store chain. He removes the ring and slips it onto my left hand. It floats onto my finger. “It fits. Wow,” I say stupidly. Do not cry, I order myself. I refuse to make this any weirder than it already is. “It’s so pretty. It will be, uh, no hardship to wear this for a little while.”

  “It’s a moonstone,” he says, “It…” He stops and I wonder what he’s going to say next. “It’s not a big deal.”

  “It looks like a big deal,” I whisper. “Like a treasure.”

  His big brown eyes soften. “You’re the treasure here.” He leans over and kisses my forehead. “Anyway, we have a flight to catch.”

  I look at the ring, and I’m sort of bursting inside. I want to ask him where he found it, but I can tell he doesn’t want to talk about it. And this is the perfect ring. It’s so me. And I can’t even say so. I can’t tell Tom how much I love it, because it’s never going to be mine.

  And neither is he.

  Tom takes my hand in his. He admires the ring on my finger. I feel the weight of his gaze, but his expression is completely unreadable. Then he curves his hand over mine, and the ring disappears from view. “Thank you,” he says quietly. “Now let’s go to New York.”

  27 Flying High

  Tom

  Usually, I fly to New York in business class. It’s only a couple of hours to get there. There’s a little more legroom in business than in coach, and a guy like me can use that, and it’s a little less pretentious than first class. I’ve never been a suit-and-tie kind of man. I’m a dusty jeans and T-shirt dude.

  But today, with Brynn, I’ve sprung for the first-class cabin. She seems delighted by this and that makes me…well, delighted too, I guess.

  “Oh, they give you blankets!” she cries as we reach our seats. Then she unfurls one. “Blankets for little, tiny people!”

  “Or an arm,” I say. “I find that one arm always has the vent blowing on it, so it’s really useful for that.” She snuggles in next to me, and I wouldn’t mind if there was a little less room in first class, if you know what I mean. Just one little tug on that bow on the side of her dress and she’d be naked.

  I shift in my seat. Feels a little less…roomy in here all of a sudden.

  When we are buckled in, the flight attendant, Tish, brings us two glasses of champagne. (Easily arranged beforehand by my publicist Becky.) “Congratulations, you two!” Tish drawls.

  Brynn has this big smile on her face that doesn’t quite ring authentic, but it’s okay. We clink glasses and say cheers. “Would you mind…” I say quietly to Brynn once she’s taken a sip of the not-exactly-cheap champagne. It’s harder to ask than I imagined. She looks at me, perplexed. I try again. “Can I, uhm, post a picture? Of your hand?” She still looks confused. “With the, uh, ring on it? So that…you know…followers,” I say, hoping she gets what I mean. This is humiliating. Why did I ever listen to Becky? It’s because of all her fucking exclamation points. These were her instructions:

  Make sure you take a pic! Of her ring! To show you’re engaged!!! But don’t say you’re ENGAGED, obvs, cuz social media will do that for you! Keep the MYSTERY!!

  Eesh.

  I snap the photo of Brynn’s hand holding the glass of champagne, and I caption it “Flying High.” With a filter, that fucking ring practically glows. Oh, it does without the filter too.

  Weird.

  I hit the little button to post it. Becky says by the time we land, the whole world will know about my engagement. Our engagement. My engagement to Brynn.

  Fuck!

  My fake engagement to Brynn.

  Then, out of nowhere, my dick whispers, Fake or not, she’s miiiiiine.

  He’s a creepy fucker sometimes.

  Brynn

  I’m in the middle of a fairy tale. Usually at this hour I’m curled up on the sofa eating cheese nips and looking at cookbooks, all while lamenting my lack of a teaching job in September. But today? Today, first class, a beautiful ring, champagne, New York…Tom. This can’t be real! It’s too great to be real!

  And, of course, it’s not real.

  This was such a stupid idea.

  Why did I agree to this? How is this going to fix anything? No one is going to care that we’re engaged. The schools I’m applying to won’t even notice. All they’ll see is Naked Writing Professor, which, honestly, shouldn’t be too surprising because writing teachers are always a little bit hippy-ish.

  Part of my brain is like, Take an antidepressant, and the other part is like, Just shut up and enjoy this weekend.

  I don’t know which part to listen to.

  When the plane lands, and I loosen my death grip on Tom’s leg—fear of flying anyone?—we’re the first ones down the jetway. As soon as we disembark, there are people pointing iPhones and cameras at us. Before I can even process how reporters got past security, Tom gives me a little tug and shows me his phone. It’s vibrating maniacally.

  Then I look at my phone and there are so many tweets and shares of his ring post that I just keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. “What the fuck?” I breathe.

  “Told you I’d fix it,” he says, all proud.

  I look at him with a little bit of awe, and by awe, I mean with my jaw hanging wide open and my eyes all huge and possessed…and that’s the picture that lands on the gossip page of the New York Post.

  28 Svenka & Torvold

  Brynn

  I thought that my first-class seat on the jet was fancy. As it turns out, the plane ride was just the hors d’oeuvre. When Tom opens the door to the main course—our suite at the Mandarin Hotel in Columbus Circle—I literally gasp.

  “Wow,” Tom say. “It’s so—”

  “Beautiful!” I say at precisely the same moment Tom says “hideous.”

  “But…” In the living room, I practically sink into the custom circular rug underfoot. The decor is severely modern—curved walls in grays and purples, with silver flourishes. The sofa isn’t just a sofa. It’s most of the circle. And, fine, it does resemble something I’d expect to find on a spaceship.

  That doesn’t dim the appeal of this room, though. The view is spectacular. All of Central Park
is laid out before us. And tonight the buildings surrounding the great green rectangle will light up in every direction. I stand in front of the floor-to-ceiling window and try to take it all in.

  Behind me, Tom carries our bags through to the bedroom. When I follow him, I find another stunning view in two directions. And the bathroom! It’s enormous and has more gizmos than a bathroom needs. “Tom! There’s a TV screen embedded in the mirror. Just in case you really need to poop during those final minutes of the big game.” I giggle.

  And when I gallop back into the bedroom Tom follows me with dancing eyes. “I’m glad you’re impressed.” He nudges me out of the bedroom towards the oddly shaped sofa. I sit down and he drops down beside me, pulling me in, kissing me on the eyebrow. “You are fun. But that light fixture looks like something from planet Naboo.”

  “But that’s just it,” I say, climbing aboard his lap to straddle his great muscular thighs. “That’s why it’s excellent. We’re never going to live here. But we get to visit this planet as forty-eight hour guests, and be fabulous in an entirely fake way.”

  Heck, I could be talking about our relationship or the hotel. Take your pick.

  “This room is for…” I pause to think of the right names. “Svenka and Torvald. They have a TV in their bathroom mirror at home, and an espresso maker in that shade of puce.”

  “Oh, baby.” His expression softens, and I feel like I’ve just won the lottery. The way he looks at me turns me to goo.

  “What?” I breathe.

  “I love that you know the color puce.”

  We kiss again, and he grins against my mouth. “Okay. You’re right. This is fun. But I have trouble walking into a room without mentally renovating it.”

  “Take the night off, Torvald.”

  “I’ll try.” He puts one thick finger in the V of my wrap dress. “But I have to draw the line somewhere. If I try to do you on a circular couch, we’ll both end up with curvature of the spine.”

  It would probably be worth it. Nobody has ever spoken to me like Tom does. Like I’m sexy. If I do you. He makes it sound so casual.

  I want to be done.

  “Svenka is wearing very complicated lingerie,” I warn him. “Torvald is going to need a few minutes to free her.” Maybe the rope-like set was a bad idea. I don’t want to waste any of our valuable time.

  “It’s probably just as well. Torvald has a meeting with his handlers in twenty minutes.”

  “No!” He’d warned me about that damn meeting, but I hadn’t listened. Maybe he could be late. I put my hands on his broad shoulders and squeeze. “Twenty minutes is plenty of time,” I whisper. Then I hike my body closer to his and rise up on my knees so that my boobs are right in his face.

  He groans, and his eyes practically roll back in his head. “Twenty minutes isn’t enough, though. I’m gonna take my time with you.” He nudges the shoulder of my dress aside, getting a glimpse of the strappy bra I’m wearing. “Damn, Svenka.”

  “That’s what I hoped you’d say.”

  He takes another peek, and he doesn’t have to say anything, because his dick is doing the talking. It’s almost as if I can hear his dick speaking to me.

  Weird.

  He does this sexy little grunt thing and actually bites his bottom lip. A man biting his bottom lip on the dance floor while doing the sprinkler: decidedly unsexy. A man I’m straddling biting his lip because he’s trying to control himself? Swoonworthy. Oh, wait. He’s saying something. I wasn’t paying attention.

  “What?”

  “While I’m gone, you have a big decision to make.”

  “Dinner?”

  He shakes his head slowly. “You have to choose — the bed, the walk-in shower, or the footstool.”

  My mouth goes dry as my mind fills suddenly with multiple images of me being done in various positions. “I only get to choose one?” The last word is a squeak.

  He grins. “The meeting I’m having will probably stress me out. So pick something good for before dinner. The runner-up can be for afterward.”

  Now I’m quivering everywhere. “Does Torvald have a preference?” I’m playing with fire right now. I don’t really want to make him late to his meeting. But I can’t resist poking the beast.

  He makes a hungry growl. “I can see benefits all around. I want you in that shower, all wet and slippery…”

  Jesus. Knowing me, I’ll probably slip and kill myself, though. “Or?”

  “When it gets dark, I’m gonna put you on your hands and knees in front of that window and bang you in front of the city lights.”

  I let out a little whimper and then kiss him. He wraps his arms around me, and as I kiss him, his nice, hard dick thickens up beneath me. “Mmm,” I murmur. “That’s it. I pick that. A do with a view!”

  He kisses me with those generous lips. But then I feel him snort. And then he throws his head back and laughs. “You’re the view, honeybunch. Thank you for making my New York trip more fun.”

  His smile makes my heart happy and sad at the same time. It’s going to be really hard not to fall for this guy for real. I think I already have.

  Tom goes to his meeting on time, damn him. I’m left alone to amuse myself in my favorite city in the world. Oh, the hardship.

  I start by taking myself to Bouchon Bakery. It’s in the same big complex as the hotel, so Svenka doesn’t even need to step into the July heat for her exquisite pastries. I buy three pastries to go and bring them back to the room to photograph for my blog. But after I compose some rather lovely photos in front of the window, I’ve only killed a half hour.

  So I eat one of the pastries, because it’s terrible to waste food.

  I still have at least an hour before Tom returns. He’s off talking to his agent about the next season for his TV show. Apparently they’ve been waiting for him to make some big decisions about the show, but I haven’t asked for details because I don’t want to pry.

  That doesn’t mean I’m not curious, though. So I sit down in the center of the C-shaped sofa, leaning against a silk pillow that probably retails for three hundred bucks. I aim the remote at the giant flat-screen TV on the opposite wall and I sort through the menu options until I find exactly what I’m looking for. Mr. Fixit Quick, season nine.

  I’d rather start with season one, because sometimes you need to see narrative from its beginning. But season nine is the only one on offer, so it’ll have to do.

  The intro is splashier than I expect it to be. There is a montage of a house going up in fast forward, and a jaunty piece of music arranged for acoustic guitars. When the camera pans onto Tom, seated at a desk, I’m not really ready. Even though I knew he had a successful TV show, I’m still taken by surprise when his face appears, larger than life, in all its handsome glory on the screen.

  My fake fiancé is really photogenic. Wow.

  The episode begins with Tom evaluating an old house somewhere in Virginia. He runs his broad hand over an oak banister while admiring the prewar architectural details with the homeowner. “We’re going to save what’s beautiful about this house, while making it into a more functional family home.”

  “That’s amazing,” the woman on the screen tells him. But her eyes are saying something else. Something like: I want to scale you like one of the old chestnut trees on my property line.

  That’s when the truth hits me like a ton of bricks. When I look at Tom, I already see a man who’s out of my league. But now I realize it’s so much worse than that. There’s an entire nation of women for Tom to choose from. All those viewers admiring his power drill in hi-def. In their hearts they already feel like they know him, the same way my mother talks back to the shopping network hosts, as if they can hear her.

  Guess what? I can get the word relationship right out of my head. Because I never had a chance.

  This realization should depress me, except I’m watching some quality TV. And also, I have two pastries left. But I’m not eating them. It’s just comforting to know they’re there.
r />   The first episode outlines a plan for the house. His working crew comes in and demolishes the old kitchen. The female homeowner looks a little horrified as a giant hole opens up in the side of her home.

  “Take that, lady.” I giggle. The second pastry disappears from the bakery bag, and I barely even register eating it. I mean, it was right there a second ago.

  In the second episode, our homeowner looks less unsettled. No—she’s practically enraptured by the kitchen Tom builds for her. And so am I. This woman gets the marble-topped baking station that I’ve always wanted. She has a forty-two inch Sub-Zero and a Wolf range.

  I officially hate her.

  In fact, that might be the point of this show.

  There’s one other character, though, that I hate a little bit more. Mr. Fixit Quick has his very own decorator. Even her name annoys me—Chandra. She’s thin and beautiful, and she apparently gets paid for choosing all the furniture and color schemes on Tom’s show. She picks a sage green for the cabinets. It looks fabulous, which makes me loathe her. And then she finds the most adorable barstools to line the new counter space.

  Grumpy now, I eat the last pastry, because fuck it.

  It’s hard to put a finger on my instant dislike for the decorator. She’s too skinny, for one. If Chandra ever visited Bouchon Bakery, she definitely did not eat three pastries. She probably wouldn’t even breathe inside the bakery in case calories are airborne. I also don’t like her hair. She’s too blond. I hate blondes.

  But my good friend Ash is very blond, and I don’t hold it against her. I love her hair.

  Hmm.

  It isn’t until I watch episode three, when the Virginia home is finally done, that I realize why I hate Chandra more than the woman who gets to live with this new kitchen. It happens when Chandra chooses a color for the Virginia woman’s big dining room china cabinet. Big deal, right? Any hack can choose a paint color called “Deep Coral.”