COLD TERMS

EPISODE THREE CONTINUE

The first was around what 'convincing' meant in a public context. The contract said the parties would present a 'genuine and convincing marital relationship' at public events, but it didn't define the physical parameters of what that required. Hand-holding? Proximity? Something more?

The second was around schedule changes. The contract specified fourteen days' notice for any additions to Appendix C, but it was silent on what happened if something came up with less notice than that. She'd seen enough contracts to know that silence was not agreement.

She wrote both questions in the notepad she kept for important things.

Then she wrote four more questions she hadn't meant to write, that had been sitting at the back of her head getting louder since she'd left his office. She looked at them for a long moment. Then she turned the page and left them there, in the pink section, in handwriting that was slightly less steady than her usual.

She got up, filled a glass of water, drank it at the sink looking out at the dark street below. A cab went past. Someone walking a dog at 2 a.m. with the particular energy of someone who had also not slept.

She'd been alone in this apartment for four months. She'd been alone in a lot of ways for longer than that.

She went to the bathroom mirror. Looked at herself straight on, the way she usually avoided doing.

Dark hair. Brown eyes. A face that people called 'interesting' when they were being polite about the fact that it wasn't symmetrical. The scar on her chin, white against her skin, from a bike accident when she was nine. She'd cried for about ten minutes and then gotten back on the bike because her dad had told her she had to, and that was the last year her dad had been around to tell her anything.

She was going to have to walk into rooms next to Damian Crest.

She was going to have to convince people who were very good at not being convinced of things that she was in love with a man who had catalogued her failures before he'd asked her name.

Something tightened in her chest. She identified it carefully, the way she identified everything that made her uncomfortable, with the clinical distance of someone who has learned that feelings are safer observed than experienced.

It was not entirely dread.

She told herself it was anxiety. Just anxiety, about a very unusual situation, in which she was considering doing something that was either the most practical decision of her life or the beginning of a very complicated twelve months.

She went to bed.

She slept four hours.

In the morning, she called Jade.

'He WHAT,' said Jade.

Jade Cole was Aria's best friend in the specific way that a person becomes your best friend when they have seen you at your absolute worst and responded by buying you chips and telling you to stop being an i***t. They had met at twenty-two, at a community legal aid night where Aria had been volunteering and Jade had brought in a tenant dispute and had ended up staying for three hours talking to Aria about everything except the dispute. Jade was a nurse. She had exactly zero patience for people who were mean, vague, or dishonest, and exactly infinite patience for people she loved.

She was also currently making a sound that was technically a question but functioned more like a small explosion.

'He offered me a contract marriage,' Aria said. She was on the phone walking to the coffee shop on the corner because she'd run out of everything at home and also needed to not be inside her own head in her own apartment for a few minutes. 'For twelve months. For a business thing.'

'Aria.'

'What?'

'Damian CREST.'

'Yes.'

A pause that contained multitudes. 'How much?'

'Three hundred thousand.'

Jade was silent for four seconds, which for Jade was the equivalent of a very long time. Then: 'And your mom's debt?'

'Cleared.'

Another pause. 'What are the terms?'

'I have the contract. I've read it twice. It's clean, J. No physical requirements, separate rooms, limited public appearances. It's — it reads like a real contract. A fair one.'

'It reads like a fair one,' Jade repeated slowly. 'You've already decided, haven't you.'

'I haven't—' Aria stopped. Started again. 'I have questions.'

'You have questions,' said Jade, 'which you are going to go back and ask, and then you are going to sign it. Because the alternative is—'

'I know what the alternative is.'

The alternative was thirty days and sixty-two dollars.

'Okay,' Jade said. 'Okay. But Aria — be careful. Not with the contract. With you. With the part of you that's very good at deciding something is just business when it's actually...' She paused, choosing. '...complicated.'

Aria pushed open the door to the coffee shop. The warm smell of it hit her. 'It's a transaction,' she said. 'I'm going in with my eyes open.'

'Sure,' said Jade. In the tone that meant: I love you and I reserve the right to say I told you so later.

Aria ordered a black coffee and a muffin and sat by the window and looked at the contract one more time.

She already knew she was going to say yes. She'd probably