A Year To Be Mr Mercer's Husband

The hospital smell was the worst part. It wasn't just disinfectant. It was the smell of waiting rooms where families cried quietly, of nurses who were tired of asking for money, of my mother dying slowly in a white bed while I stood outside with empty pockets counting coins that would never add up to enough. "Mr. Vale, can I talk to you again, please?" The nurse at the reception desk of St. Jude's said my name softly. Her name tag said Karen. She had told me the same thing every day for a week and I could hear in her voice she hated having to say it. "The deposit for your mother, Mrs. Maria Vale's heart surgery, is two hundred thousand dollars. The finance office told me to tell you if we don't receive the deposit by Friday at five PM, we will have to discharge her. She will go back on the charity waiting list. That list is nine months long right now. I'm so sorry. We really tried to get the foundation to cover her case but they said no because of funding." Friday. Today was Wednesday. I had exactly two days. I had one thousand two hundred and forty seven dollars and eighty three cents in my checking account. I had three hundred and twelve dollars in cash from my last shift at Whitman's Bookstore on 5th Street where I worked part-time for twelve dollars an hour shelving romance novels and poetry books for people who could afford to buy them. I had a hole in the sole of my left shoe that I had colored black with a permanent marker so customers wouldn't see it when I walked around the store. My mother, Maria Vale, who had raised me completely alone since my father left us when I was five years old, who had cleaned other people's houses and sewn dresses until two in the morning for eighteen years so I could go to school and get a degree in Literature that was now completely useless in saving her life, was lying upstairs in Room three hundred and four with an oxygen mask on her face, looking smaller and paler and older than I had ever seen her in my entire life. And she was going to die because her son was poor. Because I was poor. I walked out of St. Jude's Hospital into the pouring rain without an umbrella. My old grey hoodie was soaked through in ten seconds. My jeans stuck to my legs. My hair dripped into my eyes. My shoes made a horrible squelching sound with every step because of the hole. I didn't care. I stood on the sidewalk on Third Avenue and stared at the traffic and at the grey hospital building behind me and thought about how I was going to have to watch the only person who ever truly loved me die, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I had called everyone I knew. My aunt in Ohio had four hundred dollars to send. My best friend from college had two hundred dollars. The owner of the bookstore, Mr. Whitman, gave me an advance of five hundred dollars even though he couldn't afford it. It was nothing. It was a joke compared to two hundred thousand dollars. It was less than one percent. That was when the black Bentley, long and shiny and so clean it reflected the street lights, stopped right beside me on the curb, so close that it splashed dirty rainwater all over my already soaked, holey shoes. The back window rolled down slowly, with a soft electric hum. I will never forget the first time I saw him, because he looked like he came from another planet, another world that had nothing to do with my world of moldy apartments and overdue bills. Rook Mercer. I didn't know his name then. I just saw a man in his late twenties, maybe twenty nine years old, perfect black suit that probably cost more than my rent for a whole year, white shirt, black tie, grey eyes like a storm cloud over the ocean on a bad day, dark hair cut in an expensive way, sitting in the back seat with a leather briefcase on his lap and a phone in his hand, looking at me like I was a file he had been studying for a long time and had finally found in person. "Elias Vale?" he said, and my full name in his deep, calm, confident voice sounded strange, like it belonged to someone more important than a broke bookstore clerk. I stepped back, scared, my heart beating fast. "Who are you? How do you know my name? Do you work for the hospital collections department? Are you a loan shark?" "My name is Rook Mercer. My private investigator has been looking for you for three days all over this city. My mother told me about you last winter. Get in the car, Elias, you're soaked to the bone and you are shivering and we need to talk. It's about your mother, Maria Vale, in Room three hundred and four at St. Jude's. It's important." My first instinct was to run away as fast as I could. Strangers in expensive Bentleys who know your mother's hospital room number and your full name and where you work are not good news in my neighborhood. They are usually trouble. They are debt collectors or worse. But then he said, very quietly, looking me straight in the eyes through the rain, "I can pay for her surgery today. In full. Two hundred thousand dollars. Today. Right now. This afternoon. I can have her moved to a private room and have the best surgeon in the state scheduled for tomorrow morning." My knees almost gave out right there on the wet sidewalk. The rain was running into my eyes and I couldn't tell if it was rain or tears. "What? What do you want from me?" I whispered, because no one in this world gives two hundred thousand dollars for free, especially not to someone like me who has nothing to give back. "What do you want?" He pushed open the car door from inside. The interior light came on, warm and yellow. "Get in. I'll explain everything and you'll be dry and warm. My driver will keep the car warm. I have a business proposal for you. A contract that will help both of us." I got in. The car smelled like expensive leather seats, expensive cologne that smelled like wood and rain and something rich, and money. Real money. The kind of money I had never smelled before. The door closed with a soft, heavy, expensive thud that said this car cost more than my entire life and my apartment building combined. The driver in the front didn't look at me. The glass partition between front and back went up. He handed me a black folder, thick, heavy, with legal paper inside, tabs on the side in different colors. On the top page, in big bold capital letters that made my hands shake: CONTRACT MARRIAGE AGREEMENT. Party A: Rook Mercer. Party B: Elias Vale. I laughed. I actually laughed out loud, a short, broken, hysterical laugh, because it was so insane, so out of a movie, so impossible that it could only be a joke or a hidden camera show. "What is this? Is this a prank? Is this for a YouTube video? Is this for t****k? Are you filming me right now?" "It's not a prank, Elias," he said calmly, his grey eyes on me, not laughing at all, studying my reaction like a businessman studies a contract before signing. "My grandfather, Thomas Mercer, died ten days ago. He founded Mercer Corp eighty years ago from nothing, just a small shipping company with one boat. Now it's worth four billion dollars, shipping, real estate, tech. His will, which was read last Monday by his lawyers, states that I must be legally married within thirty days of his death to retain my position as CEO and primary shareholder. If I am not married by that deadline, which is in nineteen days, I lose everything — the company goes to a full board vote, and my cousin Richard Mercer will become CEO. Richard has wanted my job since we were kids. He hates me. My family built that company with their blood and sweat for eighty years. I cannot lose it because of a sentimental clause my grandfather wrote when he thought I would never grow up and would never love anyone because I was too cold." He flipped the folder open to a page with numbers highlighted in bright yellow marker. "You need two hundred thousand dollars by Friday for your mother's heart surgery. You have other debt — I checked public records — eighteen thousand dollars student loan, four thousand dollars rent arrears to your landlord Mr. Patel, two thousand dollars credit card debt. You need housing because you will be evicted next week, your landlord filed papers. I need a husband for three hundred and sixty five days. Not a wife, a husband, because my grandfather wrote spouse and I am gay and the board knows it. You will be paid two hundred thousand dollars today for the surgery, transferred directly to St. Jude's Hospital, plus an additional one hundred thousand dollars at the end of the three hundred and sixty five days for yourself, deposited to your personal account, plus full housing in my penthouse at Mercer Tower, all expenses paid — clothes, food, medical, transport, everything you need for a year. You will attend board meetings, galas, family dinners, charity events with me, you will live with me in the penthouse and pretend to be deeply in love with me for the press, for my board, for my mother Helen. At the end of one year, we divorce quietly, no drama, no press. No one will ever know it was a contract except us, my lawyer Mr. Harris, and my mother Helen. Your mother lives. You get a new life for a year. I keep my company. We both win."