Chapter 5 Adam
Currently playing: Break My Stride by Matthew Wilder
***
She wouldn’t stop laughing.
It had been all of five minutes since I broke the news about the diamond on her finger, and all she had done was laugh.
I usually liked her uncontrollable giggles. It brought a tiny bit of sunshine into my mostly quiet days. It was always nice to hear, like wind chimes in the spring air or the sound of a puppy eating. Cute. I wasn’t exactly a comedian, but knowing I somehow always managed to make her chuckle was something I proudly clung to.
But this laugh didn’t feel like sunshine, or rainbows, or everything good in life. It felt like a homing beacon of death.
Every minute or so, she would settle down, her shoulders slumping and chest heaving as she let out a comical sigh. But then her attention would go back to the rings on our fingers, and she would burst into fits of giggles again.
“Rachel.” I gritted my teeth.
She sniffled, wiping a tear from her eye and slowing her breathing. “Sorry, sorry.” She let out a breath in a phew and then lifted her chin up and poked her chest out. “Nah, that didn’t happen. We probably went through one of those dreams where people hallucinate the same thing. Like that group of guys who all saw spaceships in the woods. Or was it Bigfoot? Honestly it could have been a sasquatch. But what’s the difference between a sasquatch and Bigfoot, really?”
“Rachel.” I lowered my tone.
“Yes?”
“We got married.”
“How are you so sure?” she questioned in this sugary-sweet tone that made it incredibly hard to stay frustrated with her.
“I remember every second of it.”
Well, most of it. There were a few blurry moments between leaving the wedding chapel and arriving at the bar. Then the trip back to my room that felt like long, slow blinks. But the rest all fit together.
She waved a noncommittal hand at me. “No, no, no. Last night, Marigold and Liam got married and ran off. Everyone else went to go see shows, and your parents took the boys to some arcade and climbing thing. I told you I felt like having a drink, and you did your little growly grumble and followed me. I had a few glasses—”
“An entire bottle.”
“—of whiskey, and then we joked about how I was sick of going to weddings.”
I nodded along, dipping my chin in an attempt to force those doe eyes to look at me. “And then I said ‘what about when it’s your own?’ And then you said you want to get married now so you can be a housewife and take care of plants all day and stare at your records and—”
“—dance in fuzzy socks in the kitchen to Stevie Nicks—ohmygosh. We got married.” Her green eyes widened in shock as she rapidly blinked.
My hand lifted to the back of my neck as I moved my eyes to stare down at the floor. I didn’t want to see how disappointed she was. Maybe it would be best if I just left.
I stood from the bench, feeling a little faint because of the giant empty pit in my stomach. She needed time to process, and she probably couldn’t do that when I was in her face. She could have my room. I would come back later. It was fine—
A small tug behind me made my shirt pull tight around my stomach. I turned to look down, finding Rachel staring up at me with those big blue eyes. My legs instantly crumpled, forcing me to take my rightful seat next to her.
Her chest hitched a little. “But why did you ask me?”
“I don’t remember that one part.” My throat cleared. “Just the rest.”
Rachel’s eyes moved back to her ring. She twisted it with her thumb underneath, watching as the overhead light caught it. Her head dipped to one side, and she squinted. “Where did you even find this?”
Did she not like it? I thought she would. I wasn’t an expert on rings. Or people. Or anything that wasn’t my job. But when I saw it, I had this feeling of yeah, that’s my Rachel. I wasn’t exactly good at reading situations either. I was better at looking at things from afar. That was hard to do when you were constantly with each other like we had been for the last few years.
I looked down to the swirled design on the navy-blue carpet, my eyes dialing in on a gold circle. “There was a jewelry place a couple of doors down from the chapel. I grabbed the rings and told you to get a dress.”
At the word dress, she perked up, her neck craning to see the crumpled and ripped pretty white fabric in a ball on the floor. Her eyes went wide again at the sight, her chest picking up pace and her thumb twirling her ring back and forth even faster.
Desperate to steady the shaking in her fingers, I splayed my hand over her dainty one. Her pearly white nails were barely visible under my grasp. “I told you this was fixable. Don’t freak out.”
“Fixable?” Rachel’s voice was a shriek now. She stood up, her hands flailing. “Adam, I am yourwife.”
It was probably the wrong time for it, but her emphasis on your wife gave me this surge of pride. Felt like I could beat on my chest or knock down a whole building. Or call up any guy she had dated before and tell them to suck it and then immediately hang up.
I coughed, forcing the vibrations in my throat first so I didn’t scratch my words out. “We can get an annulment.”
“Yeah, yeah. An annulment before I brunch with your entire family in…” She looked at the time on her phone. “Thirty minutes?” She whispered it like they were already in the room with us. I fought the pull of my lips for her sake.
“Breathe, Stevie.” I only pulled out the middle-name card on rare occasions. This felt like a good one.
She pointed a menacing finger at me, as if to silently say don’t you dare use that against me right now, and I raised my hands in a shield.
“We can both take the rings off for now. Go downstairs and eat like nothing happened. I’ll talk to an attorney when we get back to Philly.”
I made sure to keep my tone even and calm for her. Not that it was necessarily hard. It was my job to stay calm under pressure, and waking up to find out I had somehow married this woman was not the worst pressure I had been under, that was for sure.
Rachel looked from me back to the oval-shaped diamond taking over her finger and looked almost disheartened. Her throat bobbed in a heavy swallow, and she let her eyes lift back up to mine. She was practically a big, blue-eyed puppy, looking as though I was taking its bone away.
Relief flooded me. She did like the ring for sure, then. I assumed she would when I purchased it, but her freak-out earlier had me second-guessing everything.
Despite wanting to smile, I groaned and avoided her stare. She wanted to keep the ring on. Of course she did. She’d always loved jewelry. A shock to me, since I hadn’t expected her to be such a pink-bowed, always-wearing-heels, nails-never-not-done kind of girl when I met her, but that was exactly Rachel. A mind full of wit and music wrapped up in the prettiest packaging. Unapologetically high maintenance, with no interest in changing that for anyone. As she should be.
For our first Christmas as friends, she forced me to do a gift swap. I didn’t understand at the time how much of a holiday nerd she was, so I had no complaints when she said we had to draw names and couldn’t tell each other who we had. I didn’t have the heart to tell her we were the only two playing, so I kept quiet. She seemed really pleased about that. I got her earrings, remembering her mentioning in a text once about her losing a pair in an Uber. The ones I got her weren’t super nice or anything, but she went on about them for an absurd amount of time and still wore them to this day.
So it shouldn’t have shocked me to see Rachel looking at her ring as if she was being forced to say her hardest goodbye. I squinted down at her.
She huffed. “It’s just so pretty.”
I let myself admire the rock on her finger. Clear stone on a gold band against her tanned skin. It did look good on her. I fought the smile that threatened to break out of me.
Rachel lifted her left hand, letting the ring sparkle in the light once more. She shrugged, slowly dropping her hand back to her lap. “They won’t even notice. Luke and Layla were too clueless to see they were in love with each other for three years, and Nathan and Calla are always busy staring at each other’s butts, so they’re not an issue. Crew will probably be at the buffet the whole time, and your mom and dad…let’s say a prayer they won’t notice.”
Mom would notice. Chances were that she already knew through some kind of telepathic motherhood instincts, but I knew that was bound to scare her more, so I stayed quiet.
“You could…just leave it here,” I suggested once more, but I immediately winced as her eyes cut daggers at me.
She flashed the diamond my way, as if I hadn’t studied it before. “And risk someone stealing it? This ring is worth more than me.”
“Nothing could be worth more than you.”
Silence fell between us after I said it. The bench, the entire room, was suddenly too small for both of us.
This time she was the one to cut the silence by clearing her throat, looking from me to the ring. “Let’s go downstairs and take it a moment at a time. You go first, though. It’s more realistic for me to be fashionably late than you.”
I rose from the bench and reached for my tennis shoes, where I’d left them perfectly lined up by the door. My fingers itched to align the heels that were haphazardly thrown about, but I was working on suppressing that side of me. Pushing down the part that needed control, needed power. If I was going to somehow get her to stick around, then I would have to.
My fingers were reaching for the doorknob when her voice stopped me.
“How are you so calm right now?” she asked with this hint of awe. As if the thought of her wearing my ring on her finger was something I should have been disgusted at.
The best answer I could muster without tipping my cards too much was “When have I ever been known to freak out?”