I already had my next read planned, but it seems My Fake Marriage volume 6 was prepping me for it. You see, Yae and Takumi head to Dubai, and there she captures the attention of one of Takumi’s clients/friends…and he happens to be a sheik who wants to make Yae his fourth wife.
Takumi isn’t going to take that lying down! But he is going to take Yae lying down…and standing up…and whenever and wherever. However, as Yae spends the rest of the volume riding highs in both her personal and professional lives, it’s all meant to give her a rude awakening at the end of the volume.
Now, while a lot of romance stories love to shoehorn in drama just to mess with the couple whenever things are going well between them, in this case, Our Fake Marriage‘s ending developments make sense, unlike the first half’s conflict. The sheik was entranced by a Japanese maid whom Yae bares a striking similarity to. So a combination of that resemblance and knowing Yae being forced to be a fake wife after being homeless makes Prince Adul kidnap her. The author assures readers in her notes that Adul didn’t undress her and the knock-out agent he used was harmless, but that doesn’t stop Adul from announcing his intention to sleep with her by force if necessary to get her to be un-brainwashed by Takumi.
The manga doesn’t ramp up its violence quota though, and the episode ends with humor and smuttiness. I think there could have been laughs without Adul almost becoming crazy-obsessed with Yae, but I also don’t think Our Fake Marriage needed to have a Middle Eastern royal decide to meet and marry her in about 10 pages either.
After that arc, Takumi and Yae return to Japan. Her friend and boss invites Yae to a dinner party (read: goukon), and guess who shows up. After some role-playing, the story moves on to Yae’s promotion, and more importantly, Yae talking a bit about Takumi with her friends. As she starts to imagine how the next stage of their relationship will go (including the wedding ceremony), well, cold water is poured all over those dreams.
There are a couple of ways the story could go from here, and although it may seem like it’s the usual end-of-series setup, I know Our Fake Marriage will continue beyond a seventh volume. I’m sure this situation will lead to a lot of misunderstandings, especially since Takumi is hardly the type to speak openly and honestly. This is likely when we’ll truly to begin to understand him, but this situation could last one chapter or several. So while I found the last two chapters of volume 6 rather dull outside of the couple’s usual flirting and hanky-panky, I appreciate Our Fake Marriage may finally be going somewhere in regards to their relationship instead of just having them physically go somewhere to have others hit on them.