Complete We (A Her Billionaires Novella #4) (16 page)

He said nothing, just stood and marched outside, Alex on his heels. As he pushed the glass door open, a shower of color greeted them both, filling the sidewalks and the streets.

A rainbow of brightness, people dressed in costume, riding decorated bikes, carrying folded-up banners, all headed for the T station to take the subway into Boston.

“What’s this?” he said to no one in particular, though Alex was closest.

“SUPPORT GAY MARRIAGE,” one of the signs screamed, carried in the arms of a woman who could have easily been Dylan’s mom, white-haired, wrinkled, yet walking with a ramrod straight backbone and a look of grit and determination, her arm around a man about Dylan’s age, with facial features that instantly told Dylan he was her son.

“Pride,” Alex said with a sly smile. He was clearly trying not to laugh. “They’re on their way to the Pride Parade.”

The gay rights parade. That’s right. Dylan had forgotten that was today.

His eyes took in the line of signs. “Stand On the Side of Love,” one of them said. “Love knows no gender,” another called out in rainbow colors. “Love people, not genitals,” said yet another. The flow of signs and costumes and—
smiles!
So many smiles, grins, and laughter filling the scene, and all making Dylan’s fury and confusion die down slowly, tamped by the sheer weight of love out here.

Alex gave a rowdy group of college students a thumbs-up as they strolled past, making them cheer and wave.

“Support gay marriage,” Dylan mumbled.

“You don’t have to do it,” Alex said in a neutral tone, running a hand through his hair, sheltering his eyes with an outstretched palm as the sun burst out from behind a cloud. The two men backed up a foot or so, closer to Jeddy’s, as a huge group poured out of a bus on the corner. People dressed in pirate costumes tumbled out of the bus.

“Do what? Protect my and Mike’s rights to Jillian?” Dylan sighed. “Until the law catches up to threesomes, we don’t seem to have a choice.”

“You always have a choice,” Alex said reasonably, placing a friendly hand on Dylan’s shoulder, turning to look at him.

“Out and proud!” one of the college kids screamed, giving Alex and Dylan two thumbs up. To Alex’s credit, he didn’t flinch, didn’t pull away from Dylan. Just laughed.

“They think we’re a couple,” Dylan said seriously. “You don’t care?”

“Why should I care what the world thinks? I’m secure in knowing who and what I want. People will think what they want to think. Can’t control that. All you can control is what you do and why you do it. If you need to marry Mike to secure Jillian’s future, then that’s what you do. On the outside, it means one thing. To you, it means something completely different.”

“I know that.”

“But can you
live
it?”

Just then, Mike burst through the throng of people, a vision in pale blue amidst a sea of primary colors. He jogged over to them, carefully making his way through the crowd, his face covered in sweat, pits soaked through and neckline wet.

Dylan knew him so well.

Mike was barely panting, though Dylan imagined he’d run a few miles in the short period of time he’d been gone. Alex acted like it was no big deal for Mike to reappear, and let go of Dylan’s shoulder, crossing his arms over his chest and taking in the people.

“So,” Mike said, huffing out the last little bit of exerted breath in him.

“So?” Dylan asked.

Mike’s eyes burned, his nostrils flared, but it wasn’t with anger. Something deeper and unknown, something that made Dylan’s inner self go calm, was in those eyes.

And then:

“You ready to make an honest man out of me?”

The actual process of marrying Dylan turned out to be remarkably unremarkable. Thank God for that, too, because if it had been too complicated he might very well have exploded and disintegrated into a million tiny pieces, carried off in the wind.

Instead, he signed his name a few times, filled out a million forms, went to the town hall for a license, and took care of it all before a judge.

Wham, bam, thank you…
man
.

Married. Not to Laura. And Dylan wasn’t, either. But in a court of law, they were now the legal stepfather to each other’s children, and that provided a modicum of protection. Mike had consulted with a family law attorney who had thrown out points of law and terminology like
psychological father
and
stepparent rights
and
next of kin
, and who had concluded that while they did not
need
to marry, it couldn’t hurt to bolster a case should the worst-case scenario happen, should Laura and one of the fathers died.

All this for a one-in-a-million chance of the worst possible outcome in life
ever
.

It hardly seemed worth it until he realized: he, Laura, and Dylan were long shots, too.

And so he was married.

No rings. No celebration. Nothing to indicate this was a special occasion—on that, he and Dylan had agreed. This was a contractual formality, a point of law, a
marriage of convenience
, and by God, that’s all it was going to be.

He loved Dylan, but he adored Laura, and the ache inside him persisted. He wanted more. The piece of paper now on file with the town clerk didn’t remove his ability to find that
more
with her, Dylan, and Jillie, but it left a bad taste in his mouth anyhow.

“Have a great honeymoon!” the town clerk’s office worker called out as they exited the building, his pleasant wave making Mike’s guts tighten. Dylan snorted. Laura groaned but said nothing.

Jillian waved back and squealed.

At least the whole family had been there.

His family of creation, that is. His family of origin was a whole other story. He snorted as he imagined making that phone call.

Hi, Mom and Dad. I just got married!
Her
name? Her name is Dylan.

Giving Dylan the side eye as Laura corralled them all, Jillie in her arms, he relaxed his shoulders. Being married to Dylan wasn’t the worst thing in the world, right?

“Doing taxes just got more complicated,” Dylan said with a laugh.

Ah, God.

“Stand close! Let’s get a nice wedding photo of the happy couple!” Laura chirped, holding up her smartphone and tapping the screen a few times.

Out of the corner of Mike’s eye he saw movement, his mouth frozen in a smile for Laura’s sake, teeth grinding together so hard he could crack walnuts.

A white van. An antenna. Something black and machinelike, moving toward them. Mike’s arm was around Dylan’s for the picture and he felt his partner stiffen, the two turning toward the motion in unison.

A camera.

A video camera.

A big one, too, from a news station.

“Fuck,” Dylan said, drawing out the word, just as Laura turned around to see what they were staring at.

“Oh, no!” she gasped, pulling Jillian in to her chest, covering her face.

“Get in the Jeep,” Mike snapped. He didn’t have to say it again, all the adults scrambling in, Dylan on one side of the back seat, protecting Jillie from the camera.

“Mike! Dylan! How’s the happy day? Did I hear someone say ‘wedding’?” The same news reporter Mike saw on the morning news channels was clip-clopping over on high heels that looked like rock-climbing crampons.

Fuck. The hulk inside him roared to life, his insides like a Bessemer furnace fed a half-ton of coal, the embers about to fire up and flame in glory and destructive heat. A series of clicks, snaps, and mutters from the back seat told him Dylan or Laura was putting Jillian in her carseat, and then the snap of two car doors shutting entered his consciousness, his foot easing off the brake, Jeep in reverse, his impulse to floor it tempered only by the fact that a second news van had pulled in, half blocking him.

If he didn’t maneuver very, very carefully, he would have more than a gay marriage announcement in the news within the hour.

The slow, tedious process of moving the Jeep out of the parking spot gave the two cameramen plenty of time to capture them in the Jeep, though Laura threw a blanket over Jillian. A few months ago the baby would have thought it was a game, but toddlerhood had turned Jillian into an independent being with her own very firm ideas about how the world worked, and it did not include being covered.

Thrusting the blanket to the floor, Jillian looked right at the bright lights on the cameras.

“Jillie,” Mike heard Dylan say as the Jeep’s bumper cleared the second white news van, as two reporters with microphones now dodged the line between getting the story and not being run over, as the two cameramen clearly experienced a different, more adventurous line. On multiple occasions, as the seconds rolled out with agonizing slowness, Mike was certain he’d run over someone’s foot, or would pin one of the men carrying the bulky cameras under a tire.

Thankfully, no. Cleared of the vehicles and the people, he pulled out of the parking lot with painful slowness, caught at the right turn by gridlock in the street, held up by a red light.

His teeth were grinding so hard they’d surely become bone dust soon, and Jillian began to wail. “No bankee! No bankee!”

Mike caught a glimpse of Laura trying to play “peekaboo” and failing, covering Jillie here and there. The two female reporters with microphones now held up cell phones, obviously snapping photo after photo as he sat there, rage flowing through his veins like blood.

Finally, traffic cleared, and he pulled out, signaled right at the light, and headed for the Mass Pike.

Dylan’s sigh of relief matched Laura’s, but no such sound could come out of Mike.

“What in the hell just happened?” Laura asked in a breathless voice, mindlessly stroking Jillian’s hair to the point of the baby’s annoyance.

“Mama, top!” she shouted, pulling her head away. Mike saw Laura fold her hands in her lap and pick at a cuticle.

“We just got stalked,” Mike said in a bitter voice. “Someone tipped them off.”

“No, it’s my fault,” Laura declared in a shaky voice. “I made that ‘married’ comment in the parking lot a little too loudly, and I’ll bet the camera people just happened to be there for—”

“For what?” Dylan said. “For nothing. You saw the town hall. It was dead. Empty. No election, no event, no scandal.”

“
We’re
the scandal,” Mike muttered as he floored it, ripping the accelerator up to seventy-five miles per hour cruising. His eyes jumped to the rearview mirror to find Jillian’s eyes drooping, ready for a nap. Perfect timing. The longest part of the drive home was on Route 2, with smooth sailing.

By the time they got home, he could put in a call to their lawyer and see about damage control.

“Frank,” Dylan muttered. “I’ll bet this was all him.”

Laura just stared out the window, wringing her hands now that Jillian was slumping against one side of her carseat. Mike saw Dylan reach across the baby to hold Laura’s hand. She grasped it like a lifeline. Mike smiled, a sad stretching of muscle triggered more by relief than anything else.

The drive home was quiet. Too quiet.

Just married.

The first thing Dylan did when he got home was to call Nick, to find out if he could learn who had tipped off the news reporters. He suspected Frank, but wanted to know as much as possible before letting the accusations fly.

The news coverage of his wedding was about as bad as he’d anticipated.

His
wedding
.

His…whatever.

Dylan Mike and Laura took Cyndi’s time with Jillian to regroup and examine the news online and on television.

“Date with a bachelor won by the billionaire!” screamed one headline, a front-and-center photo of an oiled-up Dylan in suspenders and a firefighter’s pants, strolling down the charity auction runway. The picture itself was surreal—had he really been
that
guy? Two or so years felt like a lifetime ago as he watched Laura and Mike huddle over the laptop on the kitchen bar.

“We have a hashtag,” Mike declared, shocked.

“What is it?”

Mike sighed but said nothing. Laura just frowned.

Dylan walked over and looked at the Twitter account.

#billionairebisexuals

“Oh, great,” he sputtered, not sure whether to laugh or punch something.

“Oh, there’s another one,” Laura muttered. He looked again.

#billionairesandwich

As in: Hey @lauramichaels you go girl #
billionairesandwich

He and Mike shared a scorching look as Mike closed the laptop with a sharp slam.

They’d been the butt of jokes and scrutinized by the media before. As long as no one listened to commuter radio for the next few weeks, and Josie and Darla screened calls and online threats, they should be fine. Dylan thought about Frank, considered what Nick had told them, and turned to Mike.