Arranged(2)

My hands never stopped trembling but I didn’t hesitate, and my voice was strong and steady as I sealed my fate.

His I do was indolent to the point of defiant.

I stole a glance at his face. He was looking at me. His eyelids were at half-mast over his stormy eyes. As I watched, the boredom on his face turned to belligerence.

I looked away.

Even now, when our lives were being bound together—till death do us part—I felt like I couldn’t stare. Every glimpse I got today was as furtive as all of the past ones I’d stolen during our two neat, obligatory, sterile ten minute meetings.

Roughly twenty minutes together before we met at an altar in front of seven hundred and fifty wedding guests, but I’d gathered plenty of intel during those meetings; none of it good.

To say my groom was not happy about this wedding was a bit of an understatement. He had to hide it from our wedding guests and the world, but I doubted he’d ever bother to hide it from me. Somehow or someway, his father was forcing him into his.

I wasn’t sure what leverage was being used against him, but I had a few ideas, all of them involving his potential inheritance or the lack thereof.

Knowing all this, I didn’t assume he’d be any kind of a decent husband to me, and I’d already made my peace with it.

I, on the other hand, had agreed via prenup to be an exemplary trophy wife.

You can get away with more weird shit in a prenup than in any other legally binding contract. Ah, marriage. What a stellar institution. They had slipped some real fun stuff into ours. Including six months of training.

Yes. Training. I’d been remade for this man. Groomed, tutored. Schooled and instructed. I was well aware of what I should expect and how I should perform.

My duties consisted of:

1. Maintaining an impeccable appearance as the perfect trophy wife at all times—I was not allowed to miss a gym or grooming appointment without a very convincing and pressing excuse.

2. Keeping a team of my father-in-law’s choosing on hand for purposes of security, tutoring, training, and general behavioral policing. They were there to keep me in check and keep on polishing me until I shined.

3. Making intelligent and appropriate conversation with his friends and business associates—I’d become well versed in social niceties and business talk. I spoke three languages conversationally, and I was to use this skill whenever it was necessary or requested.

4. Attending any functions: galas, balls, parties, soirees, anything he required me to. What good was a trophy wife if you couldn’t show her off?

5. Spreading my legs and/or sucking my husband’s cock whenever he needed a release—I’d been advised that this could happen multiple times a day when he was at home or if/when I was traveling with him.

I was informed (quite firmly) not to ask or speculate about where he put that dick when it wasn’t being shoved somewhere inside of me.

There were rules in the cash-for-beauty game. The money held the power. The beauty followed the rules and jumped through the hoops.

I’d been vetted in every imaginable way. IQ and personality tests. Physical exams. Psych eval upon psych eval.

Over the past six months I’d been forged into the perfect combination of untouched and knowledgeable. Chaste but polished.

I’d been made into a jaded, skilled virgin, and from today forward, I existed for my husband’s pleasure.

I was jolted out of my fatalistic musings when the officiator pronounced us man and wife.

I turned to kiss my groom. I had to tilt my head back to look at his face. He was very tall.

He bent to me, the corner of his mouth twisting down just the tiniest bit. His lips looked soft and lush, but his eyes were hard.

I closed mine, tilting my head up to seal the deal with my very first kiss.

It was the briefest moment, the barest press of lips, but it signaled the beginning of my new life.

I was his now. I belonged to Calder Banks Castelo.

He owned me but he didn’t love me.

He never would.

I blinked my eyes open, seeking his indifferent gaze, but he didn’t look at me again. His eyes were on the cheering crowd. For them he smiled. They were all his. No one had come for me. Everyone I knew I’d left out of this.

He held out his arm, and I took it dutifully, bestowing my own practiced, demure smile on the crowd of his friends, family, and business associates. He walked me out of the church with a confident stride. I had to hustle with my elaborate train and needle point stilettos to keep up.

Hours of photo ops followed. It was one of the more comfortable parts of the long day. Just the kind of thing I’d been doing for years. Modeling. Today I was selling the perfect wedding day of a pretty, rich boy and his innocent eighteen-year-old bride.

It wasn’t much different than a day at the job except for my trembling hands and what was to occur after.

Still, I sold it like it was an average day at work, and I was getting paid top dollar.

It was simple if I looked at it like that. Fake smiles, staged touches, choreographed embraces, and counterfeit laughs.

It was a particularly warm March this year in Portugal. It was a sunny, idyllic day for a beautiful wedding. If it was happening to someone else, someone who wasn’t living a lie, I’d have found it charming.

I made a big show of pretending that I was close with his parents, which had been planned beforehand. They were in on the act. In fact, his father had written the play. And both of my new in-laws were good at playing this game. They were used to being spectacles. Used to playing happy for the cameras. They had decades of experience.