My Fake Husband

A Pitch Perfect Story

Chapter 6

Disclaimer: I do not own anything familiar.

Author's Note: Oh, wow! Your reviews made me giggle, guys. Thanks. I hope you like the next chapter. I know they are all morose right now, but I have a plan!

The next day at work, Beca's boss (yes, that boss) and some of her coworkers gave her a bunch of expensive, rare records in honor of her engagement. Yes, was friends with many of them on Facebook, and after she "admitted" to all of her friends that she and Jesse were dating, she actually put a relationship status up, saying she and Jesse were together. (She felt like such an idiot for doing it, because she was never the type to say that she should be defined by her relationship status, but Chloe kept posting comments about when she was going to finally actually put it on Facebook and make it "official.") So, after the housewarming party that turned into an engagement party, Donald's wife had posted the proposal on Facebook, tagging both her and Jesse in it. So, she this morning, when she signed into her work email and onto Facebook (you would be surprised just how much networking is done through social media like Facebook), she saw that she had a ton of comments about how great it was and how cute the proposal was. Everyone kept asking to see pictures of her ring. It was all a little much. But, she got some awesome vinyl records out of this, so she wasn't too embarrassed by it all. She didn't really care about her coworkers much, especially her boss after their terrible one night stand, so she didn't have any sadness over having to tell them in the future that she was single again.

When Beca came home from work that afternoon, she heard the clanging sound of someone banging on a keyboard and groaning in frustration. She sighed, putting down her stuff by the door, hesitant to investigate what was wrong. She and Jesse hadn't really recovered from the incident the previous day, so she wasn't sure what to say to him. They barely spoke that morning. She knew one of them had to make the first move and make things less awkward between them, but that didn't mean that she wanted to be that person. Still, she had a question to ask him, so she carefully made her way up the steps. She crept down the hallway, stopping in his doorway, watching as his fingers ran up and down the keys of his keyboard, and some sheet music in front of him. A pencil was jammed behind his ear, and his eyes were latched onto his hands as he played. He was composing, and she knew that she shouldn't disturb him, but he groaned in frustration again, banging on the keys a few times before throwing his pencil across the room, which happened to be towards her, so she had to duck behind the wall before she got impaled by the sharp writing utensil.

"Shit, Beca, sorry!" Jesse said, jumping up and going over to her to see if she was alright. Beca stood back up, smacking him in the chest with the pencil that she collected from where it bounced into the hallway. He grabbed the pencil and sighed, looking very apologetic for throwing it at her. "I didn't see you there."

"I was just coming to see if you were okay. You were murdering your keyboard and sounding like someone was breaking all of your DVDs." She crossed her arms and looked away. "Now that I know you are okay, I'm gonna go." She pointed towards her bedroom and started to walk past him.

"I reached a standstill. I can't seem to get what I wanted to portray onto the page." He said, leaning against the doorframe, watching her as she opened her bedroom door. She paused in the doorway, glancing over her shoulder at him. "I don't know if this is against the rules, but…I would appreciate it if you looked it over. Fresh eyes and all that."

"Well, you won the bet, so you could make it apart of the rules." She told him. His jaw tensed, and she realized that wasn't the right thing to say. "I was…I was just kidding, you know."

"I think I'm going to throw all that out the window. I'm not going to force you to do anything you don't want to do, so I will talk to you later." He went back into his room, shutting the door behind him. She sighed, needing to get changed out of her work clothes. She walked into her room, shutting the door behind her. She could still hear the faint sounds of the keyboard coming through the wall, as well as his groans. She quickly pulled off her jeans and button-down shirt, tossing the shirt into the hamper, whereas the jeans were folded and returned to her drawer to be worn again. She pulled on a pair of blue Capri pants with ice cream cones on them (Chloe had bought them for her during college, and she thought that they were cute) and a lightweight white sweatshirt jacket over her white tank top. She pulled her hair into a ponytail and then slid her feet inside of her fuzzy slippers. She left her room and then walked down the hall, stalling when she reached his door.

Feeling bold (and wanting to get rid of the chill that was between them—they did have to live together, after all), Beca knocked on the door. A few moments later, Jesse pulled the door open, blocking her entrance to the room, chewing on his bottom lip. "I would love to help you…if you still want it." He stepped back, allowing her to come inside the room. He walked over to the keyboard, sitting down. She moved to stand behind him, her eyes locked onto the music. He began playing, his fingers flying over the keys. She smiled as she listened to the music. It was good. Really good. But, she could understand why he was getting frustrated. There was something missing. He stopped play and groaned, throwing his hands up in the air. "Stop. It was good." She moved closer, reaching over his shoulder to grab the sheet music to look more closely at it. She found a spot that she could maybe tweak, giving him ideas of where he might want to make future changes. "Move over."

Jesse stood up, allowing Beca to drop onto the bench. She put the sheet music down and grabbed the pencil from his hand. Using the point of the pencil, she indicated the section that she thought could be tweaked. "See how you repeat the same pattern over and over here." She moved the pencil along the sheet music, showing that he had written the same pattern of notes for several bars.

"You want me to change that? I wrote that as the hook." She shook her head.

"No, it's good. I like it. What I was showing you is that you have this all written for one hand, but you don't really have much for the second hand, just a couple of whole notes that don't really do much. Since it is pretty much the same pattern over and over, what if you slowed it down and wrote it an octave lower for the other hand. It would extend the pattern throughout those five bars. Like this." She put the pencil down and then laid her hands on the keys. "I'm a little rusty; haven't played the piano since I was sixteen, but I will see what I can do." She told him apologetically. She then began playing the bars that she had indicated, all the while playing a slower version at a lower octave on her other hand. She repeated it twice while she played the rest of the music in the way that he had it written before. "What do you think?"

"That's good." He sat down on the edge of the bench beside her, bumping her with his hip to get her to move over. They were sharing the bench, their sides pressed against each other, and it took her breath away for a moment. He was too busy being worried about the music to notice, though. He reached an arm around her to write on the staff, making the changes that she indicated. She tried to remain completely still, ignoring the heat of his arm where it touched her skin. When he was done, he dropped his hand, clutching the underside of the bench by her side. He didn't have anywhere else to put his arm, so it was still wrapped around her. "Um, thanks, Beca."

"It's fine, really. I'm glad I could help." She moved to stand up, but he grabbed her wrist, getting her to sit down again.

"I hate fighting with you. I feel like all we do is fight lately." He sighed. "I know that things are gonna be weird between us for awhile, but I just…I don't want it to be that way. We had fun in the beginning. Everything kind of went downhill after the proposal, and I hate that things changed." He was rambling, and she didn't want to think about the day before or the proposal or all the times she showed weakness and vulnerability in front of him.

"It's okay." She said quickly, hoping that he would just stop. "Eventually, things won't be as weird. We just have to give it time." She paused, chewing on her bottom lip. "Are you good with your hands? I mean, with tools? Oh, shit this keeps sounding dirtier and dirtier…" She pressed a hand to her forehead. He tried his best to suppress a laugh, but he couldn't do it, and he began laughing loudly, his body shaking next to hers. "It's not funny!" She moaned, backhanding him lightly with her free hand on the chest.

"What were you trying to ask me?" He finally got the words out, after a few false starts, and he was wiping at the tears that were leaking from his eyes from laughing so hard. "Thank you for that, by the way." She groaned, standing up and putting some distance between them, smacking the back of his head as she walked toward his door.

"I was trying to ask you if you were good at making things. I need another shelf for my records. Apparently, my coworkers and boss thought that they would all chip in to buy me some new records as a gift for the engagement." She leaned against his doorway.

"Wow. You get records and I get a slap on the back from by boss telling me that I better get used to the idea of a sexless marriage. I didn't think it was appropriate to tell him that I was completely prepared." She looked away, blushing, because hazy images memories of what happened the previous afternoon started to come to the surface. He cleared his throat, and she figured that he was thinking the same thing. "Right, so, anyways, my dad tried to get me into that stuff, but I was always into music, so I never really got into the sports thing or the playing with power tools thing." She couldn't help it, but the dirty joke just slipped into her mind. She bit her lip to keep from saying it, and he seemed to notice her facial expression, because he groaned. "You're a child." She shrugged her shoulders, grinning. She decided to go with a non-dirty joke instead.

"You know, with the amount of flannel you have in your closet, I was suspecting and kind of hoping you were a lumberjack. What kind of Canadian are you? You really are useless in every way." She sighed, shaking her head. He rolled his eyes, giving her a sarcastic "haha" in response.

"You know nothing about Canada, do you? It's a lot like the US, you know. It's not all forests and people living off the lay of the land." He shook his head, but he was smiling. They both were. It was nice. Things felt almost normal between them again. "Although, I do enjoy camping; have you been camping, Beca?" She shook her head, looking at him like he was crazy. She might not be a girly-girl who would cry about breaking her nails or not having access to her curling iron or whatever, but she definitely wasn't the camping type.

"You already told me that you were throwing out what you won from the bet, so you can't force me to go fucking camping and be miserable in a tent with no access to a toilet or a shower." She said, pointing a finger at him. He laughed, shaking his head.

"No, as much fun as it would be to watch you fend for yourself in the wild, I know you are not Katniss, so you wouldn't last more than five minutes after you decided to kill me in retaliation for forcing you to go camping." She frowned at his reference. "Oh, God! That's it. I am reinstating my rights to your slavery purely for the reason that you have to watch The Hunger Games. You would like it, you know. There is death, violence, a chick that kicks ass, and rebellion of the oppressed. It is the perfect example of sticking it to the man, Beca!" She shook her head, because he got crazed when it came to movies and her "movication."

"You're such a weirdo." She muttered.

"Anyways, what I was trying to say is that it is a shame that you have never seen Canada. It's great, really. So, I was thinking…you know how we were gonna start planning the wedding and everything? What if we decided to do a destination wedding."

"You're kidding, right?"

"Nope, I'm not. Niagara Falls. We could start in New York City, get the marriage license squared away, and I could show you all my old stomping grounds in the city. Force you to see a show, maybe. Then, we could go to the Falls, get married, have a lot of cheesy pictures by the waterfall and doing all the attractions Stateside, then hit the Canadian side, and finish off our 'honeymoon' in Quebec City. I grew up there, so I could show you around. Plus, we could take a couple of day trips to Toronto and Montreal. They are some distance away, but it would be worth it. Montreal is closer, and it has some pretty good summer music festivals." He stopped talking, running a hand over his hair, blushing. She looked at him with her eyebrows raised, because he put a lot of thought into this—turning it into a very real wedding and honeymoon. "Too much? I just thought that it would be cool to show you around my home, and plus, the pictures would be great for immigration, but it is a stupid idea. I don't know what I was thinking. So, we could just like spend a week in San Diego or San Francisco or something, and it—"

"Jesse, stop talking." She rolled her eyes at how unsure he looked. She didn't know what to say, because it would be a very romantic trip, and this wasn't a real union between the two of them, but he was right, because it was good for 'proving their so-called' union to immigration. She bit her lip. She would just have to put aside her discomfort for the sake of not being fined out her ass and sent to jail. Plus, it would be nice to see where he grew up. "This is a rather extravagant honeymoon you have planned…"

"Well, it was kind of what I always wanted to do."

"If that is your plan for a real honeymoon with someone you actually love, then why would you choose to do it with me?" He hesitated a moment.

"Well, Benji knows like everything about me. We did live together for four years. Plus, when Donald got married, all the guys and I got together, and we were talking about where they were going to go for their honeymoon. I mentioned that I would want to do the whole bring the girl home to where I grew up if we hadn't already done that. Plus, Niagara Falls is fucking cool." He shrugged his shoulders. "They would think something is up if I didn't go there with you."

"Maybe we could tell them I hate Canadians?" Beca joked. Jesse rolled his eyes, walking over to her. "We could tell them that I always wanted to see Disney World."

"You've never been to Disney World?" She shook her head. "What about Disney Land?" She shook her head again. "Oh, my God! You were deprived as a child!"

"Pretty much."

"Well, it's official. We are going to Disney World to celebrate making it through the hell of being married for a year. But, you're kind of stuck with NYC-NF-QC." Her eyes widened, because, what the fuck?

"What the fuck does that mean?"

"NYC, New York City. NF, Niagara Falls. QC, Quebec City." He said, rolling his eyes. "C'mon. It will be fun! You can drink the entire time!" She crinkled her nose. "And, I won't!" He added, making her chuckle.

Her head fell back, and she groaned. "Fine." He grinned, pulling her into a hug. She froze for a moment, not returning it. "Um…"

"Beca, I'm gonna hug you. I'm a hugger, and I'm not gonna just stop hugging. Just get over it." He said into her hair. She sighed, finally wrapping her arms around his waist. She could get through this…

Beca barely got any sleep that night, because she and Jesse began looking into marriage licenses for the state of New York, weddings at Niagara Falls, and hotels and such in Quebec City. "Oh, look, Beca. This B and B has soundproof rooms," Jesse said, pointing to his laptop screen, to which Beca responded with a grimace and muttered "gross" to his cheeky grin and wink. She called her dad and told him their plan, considering he was going to paying for everything.

Beca had gotten him back however with a comment about wanting to get married at Rainbow Bells. Jesse looked up the wedding site and glared at her when he read that it catered to same-sex couples. "Really?" he asked her, and Beca, shrugged, responding, "with a name like Jesse and your girlish appearance and demeanor, we could totally get away with passing as a lesbian couple."

"I think we both know I am most decidedly not female." He said pointedly, and she shrugged, refusing to look at him, because she was once again slammed with a few hazy images of them doing things that they agreed to never do; she couldn't see them doing anything clearly, because of the alcohol that she had consumed (and possibly because she repressed what transpired).

"I don't remember much from yesterday, so I really couldn't tell you. Although, I have slept with a few women before, so it wouldn't surprise me if I slept with another one." She grinned when he groaned and walked out of the kitchen, refusing to talk to her for awhile, probably because he was imagining her with faceless women, and it would make things even stranger between them. She could tell that things were getting back to the stage they were in before all of the strange events happened (aka their kiss after the proposal, the kiss before they both got drunk, and then the incident).

They finally settled on a location for the wedding when Jesse had finally returned to the kitchen and saw that there was a renovated movie house called the Rapids Theatre. He refused to get married anywhere else, saying that they could do all the bullshit weddings right by the falls and get soaked by the mist and all that, or they could get married somewhere awesome like a renovated movie house. Beca agreed simply because he wouldn't shut up about how perfect the Rapids Theatre was. It did seem like a Jesse-like place to get married, so she told him that she would get married there if he would shut up. He called the theatre almost immediately, finding out the next available date they could get married there, which wound up being a Wednesday in the last week of June, as in four weeks and two days. They were on a time crunch, they had barely three months until Jesse was going to be kicked out of the country, and the paperwork could take months to get squared away, so they needed to get everything taken care of as soon as possible. At the same time, though, this was happening a lot sooner than either of them realized. They were going to be married in barely a month.

So, by the time they got a hold of her dad, telling him where they were getting married, where they would be staying, and what their plans were. He agreed to pay for all of it, except for the weekend before that they were going to be staying in New York City, when they were getting the marriage license, or their official honeymoon, which would begin in Quebec City on the Friday after their wedding. Her dad decided to "splurge" on a suite for them for the four nights that they were going to be in the Niagara Falls area—one with a king-sized bed and a Jacuzzi bath that was big enough for two. Beca responded to this announcement when her father called her back with all the confirmation details was "yay! Now Jesse and I can have sex in a big bathtub four nights in a row, and then go have sex in our really big, comfortable bed" which made her father get flustered on the phone and hang up on her and made Jesse get red in the face and leave the room, again. She felt quite pleased with herself to have gotten those reactions from the men.

He returned a few minutes later, complaining about how she couldn't say things like that to her dad when he hadn't even met the guy. "What? You're afraid of making a bad impression with my dad?" She looked at him like he was crazy, considering he had gone on and on about how much of a dick he thought her dad was.

"No, I still think your dad is a total douche bag, but it's gonna be awkward when we do meet, because he is going to be imaging all the dirty things that I am doing to his daughter. The sucky part is that I don't get to do any of those things." Beca rolled her eyes at his comment.

"You are such an idiot."

Suffice to say, getting most of the wedding plans squared away, as when, where, for how long, and who was invited, was tiring, but not enough to help Beca get to sleep that night. They had started texting people, figuring out who they wanted in their wedding parties. It was a really hard decision for both of them to decide to not ask their best friends to be matron of honor or best man, but to instead ask the people who knew that this wedding was in fact a farce. Fat Amy agreed the second that Beca called her, and Bumper told Amy to tell Beca to tell Jesse that he was in, too. Chloe was hurt that Beca didn't ask her, even though she had asked Aubrey and not Beca to be her maid of honor, and Benji thought that the reason why Jesse didn't ask him was because he didn't live in LA, so he thought that Jesse didn't like him enough anymore. It almost killed both of them, but they knew that if they were ever in this position again (well, Beca knew that Jesse would be, because the guy would be only thirty when they divorced, and he was a hopeless romantic, so he was bound to get married to the love of his life the second they divorced—hopefully, he would find said girl when they were still married, so they had an excuse to break up), they would be asking Chloe and Benji, instead, because they were the people who should be in those roles. The rest of Beca's wedding party was to include Chloe, Aubrey, and Mia; unfortunately, Beca couldn't get out of asking her step-sister from being a part of the wedding party, because her dad and Sheila thought the sun shined out of Mia's ass. For Jesse, he had Benji, Dean, and Donald as the rest of his wedding party. The rest of the wedding guests invited to the wedding included Beca's mom, Stacie (although, Beca kind of was still pissed at the girl, even after a month and one week had passed since the ditz left the keys to the goddamn moving truck), Jessica, Ashley, Cynthia Rose, Lilly, and Unicycle, as well as everyone's dates or spouses, rounding out the total number of guests to thirty people.

Beca had asked if there was anyone else that Jesse wanted to invite, but he said that the only people he really wanted at the wedding were in his wedding party and Unicycle. He had no family, and the other guys that he was friendly with in college whom he had invited to the housewarming party turned proposal were great, but that he didn't need them at his wedding. She asked if he had any friends from work, and he said that he didn't need anyone from there either. Beca wondered if the reason he was keeping his guest list so small was because he wanted all those other people there when it was a real wedding, but he invited only his best friends for the fake wedding, because it would be strange if they weren't there for it. If that were the case, she wasn't sure why they didn't just elope instead. Sure, their friends would have been pissed, but it would have made things that much easier.

After work the next day, Beca stopped at a carpenter's store that a coworker suggested to her. She was going to get a custom-made shelving unit that would hold all of her records, including the new ones. Her old one was going to be used in her room, after she stained it to match the furniture in her room, as an actual bookshelf and decorative storage. She had wanted one to take up some blank space, so now she could use the left over shelving unit instead of buying a new one. She parked her car on the street, grabbing her bag and the bottle of soda that she had grabbed from the vending machine on her way out of work. She walked towards the door, and when she saw a handsome man behind the counter in the store, which was filled with custom wood pieces, she hesitated. Balancing the closed bottle under her arm, she stared at the ring on her left hand. She debated whether or not she should remove it, because she and Jesse agreed to hide their relationship from all potential relationships or flings until they were sure that the said relationship was one that could be trusted. Wait, was she actually going to try and sleep with the handsome stranger who was going to make her shelving unit? Probably not. She told herself. She stepped into the store, taking a huge gulp of her soda.

"Hello," the man said, smiling. She ignored the way he combed over her body with his eyes before settling on her face. He was very attractive; he had about a hundred pounds on her easily, and about thirty to forty pounds (of muscle) on Jesse. His hair was blond and wavy, and he had green eyes. He looked like an underwear model. She smiled at him.

"Hi, I need to get a shelving unit made." She put her soda bottle down and dug through her purse until she came across the measurements that she had written down. She handed the paper to her. "These are the exact measurements I need."

The man looked it over, nodding his head. "What kind of wood?"

Beca hesitated, not sure what kind of wood they had in the living room. She could call Jesse, but she wasn't sure she wanted to talk to him around this handsome stranger. "I'm not sure. My living room has yellowish wood?" She tried. The man grinned, waving his hand. He left the counter, heading towards the back, which was apparently his work room. He showed her all of the wood that he typically used, asking her which one looked closest to the wood that she wanted. "This one looks right." She told him when she saw a wood that looked like the wood Jesse's furniture was made out of, pointing to it with her right hand, and the man wrote it down on the order form that he was working on. They walked back to the front counter.

The man talked about how much he suspected that it would cost, how long, et cetera, all the while giving her a sexy smile. She blushed a few times when she caught him staring at her in a way that was definitely not how a carpenter should look at his client. She bit her lip, looking at her feet. When she accidentally caught sight of her ring on her left hand, she immediately felt guilty, which pissed her off, because she had no reason to feel guilty. She and Jesse weren't a real couple, anyways.

As she was leaving the store, the man called out to her. "Um, Miss Mitchell," she hesitated by the door, turning around. She wasn't going to be Miss Mitchell for much longer. Soon, she was going to be Mrs. Swanson. She gave him a smile, hoping he didn't notice that it was strained. "My name's Cole." She nodded her head, her brow furrowed, wondering why he would want her to know that. "Just so you know…in case I have to call you or text you…about your shelving unit." She bit her lip, because the guy was beating around the bush, asking to call her without actually asking her out. He had to know that he was attractive, that he could probably ask out any woman he wanted, and she wouldn't hesitate to say yes; what did he have to be worried about? She didn't know how to respond—did she want to open the door to dating this guy? Did she want to be the first one to 'cheat' on the relationship with Jesse? She glanced down at her left hand discreetly, trying to make a decision. The ring suddenly felt heavy on her hand. She didn't want to be in this position, marrying a man she didn't love (a man she barely even liked), so why should she stop herself from having fun with a handsome guy? She looked up, smiling at Cole.

"I look forward to hearing from you, Cole." She told him before she walked out the door. She wasn't going to let her life stop just because she and Jesse were going to get married.

Author's Note: Okay, so this one was a little shorter than the others. Also, you guys aren't going to like where it ended, but I had to include it for the storyline.