The Last Eligible Billionaire

Hyacinth won’t quit knocking on my door.

I know it’s her. She has a distinctive knock. It sounds like our mother asking if I took my vitamins.

And just like the last seventeen times she’s knocked on my door, I ignore it.

Marshmallow harumphs.

He and I got back to Richmond two nights ago, courtesy of Jonas Rutherford’s private jet, since Hyacinth was using Hayes’s at the time, and I’m running out of food in my little apartment, and I don’t care.

My only plans are to wither away into nothingness, because that will hurt less. Also, if I wither away into nothingness, I don’t have to pack my apartment and move back in with my mother, which is probably on the agenda since word got out that I was caught giving a man a blow job in public.

Not really what high school parents want in their kids’ art teacher.

My head and a platter are soon to be very intimately related.

I close my eyes and return to snooze-land.

Or try to. Snoozing is hard when you hear your dog unlocking your apartment door.

“Who’s a good boy?” Hyacinth says. “Marshmallow is such a good boy. Where’s the potty, Marshmallow? Where’s the potty before I pee on your mommy’s carpet?”

I grunt.

“Oh, B,” my sister sighs. “Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”

She’s lying.

She’s not right back.

But eventually she joins me, which I know not because my eyes are open, but because she’s as quiet as a herd of rhinos trying to walk across a field of Legos.

“So it was all fake.”

I pry one eye open. “What?”

She waves a tabloid in my face. “You signed a contract to fake being his girlfriend. Why?”

Heat funnels from my chest, up my neck, into my brain, and makes me lightheaded. I’m lying down and I’m lightheaded.

“What?”

“That’s your signature. I know your signature. How did they get your signature if it was fake? And you were supposed to get engaged? What did you do? And talk fast, because I guarantee you, this is hitting the morning shows locally any minute, and Mom will be here like she can teleport the minute it does.”

I push to sitting, ignore the black dots dancing in my vision, and take the newspaper from her.

That’s me.

On my knees.

In the dark.

Giving Hayes a blow job behind a building near the sea lion exhibit.

With a giant blurry spot right in front of my face.

Oh my god.

I fling it away and throw myself back onto the couch. “No,” I whisper.

“Begonia. Ignore the picture. Also, anyone who comes after you for having sex in public will have to go through me first, because hello, that had to be hella fucking hot. But we need to talk about this headline. The Weird Rutherford Fakes A Girlfriend. And this contract that they printed. And how I’m going to murder everyone in the Rutherford family for using you like this.”

“No.”

“Begonia, they have the signed NDA printed in here too. Talk. Now. I knew something was up.”

“How?”

“Hello, twinstinct?”

“No, how do they have the contract?”

“So you’d take the fall for the BJ that’s threatening to destroy the Rutherford family’s reputation. Duh. I really hope he did a lot more than setting up the most gorgeous art room I’ve ever seen for you in that mansion of his, because otherwise, his death will be slow and painful instead of quick and merciful.”

“Hy, he wouldn’t—”

I cut myself off.

Wouldn’t he?

What do I really know about Hayes Rutherford beyond what I wanted to believe?

He stood up to his mother for me, but that was the whole point of the fake relationship. To sell it. To put me between him and her and every other woman in the world.

He treated me like a goddess and told me he liked me for who I was, but was it all pretend? Is he as good of an actor as his brother?

He couldn’t even tell me he loved me.

He preferred letting all of our secrets loose in the tabloids to actually caring about me.

I’d thought I’d cried every last tear I had inside me, but I haven’t.

Not by a long shot.

And they’re coming hot and hard and fast all over again as I tell Hyacinth everything. The mistake with the vacation rental. Him finding me waxing my bikini line in his bathroom. Marshmallow eating the Maurice Bellitano carving. His mother arriving with a more suitable girlfriend. Skipping the lobster dinner cruise for a picnic on the beach.

Asking him to pop my post-divorce cherry.

His panicked call for me to pick his executive assistants.

Our moonlit picnic when we made love.

Running into the woman who broke him and his former best friend at the gala.

Wanting to hug him and save him and protect him from people who only see him as the world’s last eligible billionaire.

But I suppose the joke’s on me.

I was never what he actually wanted, no matter how he made me feel.

Hyacinth’s cradling my head in her lap and stroking my hair by the time I finish.

“Jerry says he can get you a job at his company,” she says. “Just until all of this blows over. To keep you busy, I mean. Until you sue the ever-loving fuck out of that asshole billionaire who’s letting you take the fall for all of this.”

I squeeze my eyes shut. “Despite it all, Hy, I love him.”

“Begonia, you could fall in love with a turd-coated shape-shifting lemur. I realize Mr. Big Bucks was a little more handsome than that, and he gave us a good run of thinking he knew you and liked you, but sweetie, he betrayed you in the freaking gossip rags to save his family’s reputation, and you are going to be okay. C’mon, Ms. Things Happen For A Reason. You can do private art lessons now. Take advantage of the notoriety and get a page up on Etsy with some of your attempts at spin-art. Sign them, and they’ll be worth like, seven times as much.”

“I hate math, but even I know seven times zero is zero. And I don’t care, Hy. I don’t. I don’t care about anything.”

“You fed your dog today.”

“I fed him the whole bag when we got home.”

She looks at me, then over near where Marshmallow’s dog bowl sits. “Oh. I, ah, see. Does he need to go out?”

“Every freaking hour, but he takes care of it himself.”

He’s the best dog. Best best best.

“Begonia.”

“I’ve cleaned up seven thousand dog messes in the park from other dogs! If he makes a dozen messes that I don’t clean while I’m heartbroken and drowning my sorrows on my couch, then I don’t care. And if my dog is smart enough to take the elevator down to the parking lot to poop, then find his way back, then why shouldn’t he have his freedom to do that?”

“Okay. Okay. I’m texting Jerry. He’ll do the whole apartment parking lot. He doesn’t mind. He’s worried about you.”

“You settled.”

“What?”

“For Jerry. You settled. I don’t want to settle. I want love.”

“Oh my god, Begonia. I did not settle for Jerry.”

“But you complain about him all the time. And the last time he took you on a date was months ago, and it was popcorn and hotdogs in your basement while you hid from the kids.”

“Um, hello, that was a good date.” She rubs her belly, which I can feel behind my head. “Too good, unfortunately. And I’m sorry I complain about him too much. It’s not him. Exactly. It’s raising two and a half minions and being overwhelmed and settling into—no, not settling, not like that—but just having routines and being so busy and forgetting to appreciate all the reasons I fell in love with him in the first place. Like, he gives me foot rubs every night. And he takes the kids to the park every Saturday morning so I can have one morning of bingeing adult TV while I drink my coffee hot. And do you remember when the preschool moms all rose up last year to protest Dani saying fuck? Jerry was the first one to tell me that our kids will be just fine, because they won’t be afraid of profanity and they’ll understand how and when to use it and that people are different and see things differently, and he went to the preschool meeting for me and read a list of cuss words and their etymology and talked about how when you stigmatize something, that makes it worse than it is all on its own. And he doesn’t blink when I drink pickle smoothies or have ice cream dribble down my shirt, and he buys me tampons. I know he’s not, like, a billionaire who can take me to Europe on a moment’s notice—which I notice the billionaire who shall not be named didn’t do for you, by the way, despite teasing you incessantly about it—or get me tickets to a movie premiere or send me luxury chocolates every day, but he’s my prince charming, even when I forget how much he does.”

I twist my head to stare up at her for a brief moment, then squeeze my eyes shut.

She loves him.

She doesn’t think she settled.

And that’s what’s important. Especially since neither one of us can have a guy like Hayes.

Or who he pretended he was.

“I thought he loved me,” I whisper to my sister. “Underneath it all, I thought he was falling in love with me.”

Someone else knocks at my door, making Marshmallow growl low in his throat.

I wince. “And now Mom’s here.”

“If she says the Chad word, I’ll threaten to never let her see her grandbabies again, and I swear on my loyalty to you above everyone else, I’ll mean it.”

Marshmallow growls again.

“Begonia?” Mom calls. “Sweetie, open the door. Mommy’s here to fix it all.”

I whimper.

Hyacinth growls louder than Marshmallow.

The lock clicks, the hinges squeak, and more than one set of footsteps makes my small entryway floor creak. “Honey, don’t worry,” Mom calls. “I brought Chad, and he forgives you. Let’s put this all behind us now, shall we?”

Hyacinth and I lock eyes.

I dive for Marshmallow, and I get lightheaded all over again. Maybe skipping breakfast for the past two days wasn’t the greatest idea.

“I’m going to murder them both,” Hyacinth says.

I don’t dive for her.

The authorities won’t put her down if she bites one of them. And I’m pretty sure she won’t bite.

Or murder them for real.

And she has that no-fucks-left-to-give third pregnancy glow.

“Begon—erp.”

“Out,” Hy snarls. “Out, out, out. Mother, you’re dead to me. Chad, you’ll be dead for real if you don’t march your loser ass out of this apartment and stay the fuck away. You don’t get to realize what you lost after it’s gone. You get to wallow in misery for the rest of your freaking forever. No, Mother, dead to me. Go. Go. Before I call Keisha Kourtney and ask her to take Begonia somewhere safe where none of us can ever bother her again, and that means none of us will ever see her again too. Do you understand?”

Keisha.

I miss Keisha.

But I don’t have the right to call her anymore.

That part of my life? That adventure?

It’s over.

And I’m not up for any more right now.