CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“I LOOKLIKE a Russian trophy wife,” Olive said as she settled back into the leather armchair on the plane, one booted foot stuck out in front of her. She was wearing spiked heels in a camel color, and a long white jacket, with a furry white hat perched atop her head.
He thought she looked soft, and far more delicious than any woman had a right to. But he could also see Russian trophy wife.
“Well. As of next week you will be my trophy wife.”
“The idea of being your trophy sticks in a particularly...” She made a stabbing motion with her hand. “Rough place.”
“To the victor go the spoils. In this case, I suppose the public notoriety.”
“Well, we’re going to be notorious, all right. Have you checked all of the socials?”
“Hell no,” he said, waving a hand. “I have management teams for that kind of thing, I don’t concern myself with the inanity of Internet chatter.”
“Oh, you should,” she said. “Sometimes it’s hilarious. Honestly. Some people think that we are part of the evil one percent, conspiring to take over the world with this present merger. The wedding is obviously fake. We are aliens. We don’t marry.”
“I admit, that is a slightly more interesting take than what I expected.”
“There’s more.”
“I told you I don’t read these kinds of things.”
“But I do. Welcome to marriage.”
She grabbed her phone and sat up, scrolling through something. He didn’t know what. “OMG, it’s like a rom-com. Enemies to lovers.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know. But somebody said it on a social media site, therefore it’s news.” She continued to read. “For sure she is getting the better end of the deal. I hear that his broadsword is the size of—”
“What is this garbage?”
There was something about this that worked its way deeply beneath his skin. No one knew him. He didn’t allow it. And all these people were talking about him as if they could.
If he would ever have allowed anyone to know him, it might have been Olive.
“I believe broadsword is a euphemism for your—”
“I am aware of what it is a euphemism for. What I don’t understand is why. Why do people concern themselves with these things. They could be living their own lives, rather than chatting about the lives of others.”
His life was not a spectator sport. Not a game. It had been marked by abuse and an extreme need to fix that which his father had done to scar the world.
He was marrying Olive to right yet more wrongs, and it was sharp and filled with danger. And these people called it a rom-com.
“People chat. They like to do it. It makes them feel connected. See, this is the thing that you missed. You make technology, but you failed to see the ways in which it can make beautiful things. You like to make functional things.”
“People discussing a stranger’s penis is hardly beautiful.”
She scooted to the edge of her seat and doubled over, her furry hat falling into her face as she laughed. “Okay. Maybe beautiful is a stretch on this score. This is a shallow way that people use the Internet, but it’s fairly harmless.”
“Is it harmless? They talk about us as if they know us. They don’t.”
“Well, they feel like they do. And it has little reflection on our actual lives, it certainly doesn’t impact us. But people connect. I think it’s kind of beautiful. Something that could be cold, something that could be difficult... People have found a way to make it something different.”
“Except when they decide to use it to burn down the lives of others. To hunt them down mercilessly and bring up a comment made ten years ago, and determine they’re not allowed to have jobs or friends or... Even live.”
“Granted,” she said. “It has a dark side. Everything does. Because people do. Fundamentally, however we are expressing it, we are who we are. Isn’t that the case?”