CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE #2
It was better to rip this off like a Band-Aid, I decided. “What did you think we needed to talk about?”
He couldn’t look me in the eye.
What if he wasn’t proposing? What if he was—
“Are you breaking up with me?” I blurted.
“What the fuck?” came out of his mouth so fast, I knew I was wrong. “Why would you—”
“Fancy restaurant, so I wouldn’t make a scene?
” I tried to explain, but it sounded so absurd to me.
Why would he do it in a private room if he wanted to avoid a scene?
“I’m sorry. I’ve been freaked out about this all day.
And now you’re saying you want to talk..
. either you’re breaking up with me or you’re proposing. ”
Why did I say that? The words had spilled out by themselves.
“I mean—” I started, but I didn’t get to finish my sentence before his whoop of laughter interrupted me.
“Seriously?” He tilted his head like a dog that couldn’t understand why I hadn’t thrown the imaginary tennis ball yet. “Wait, you thought I was going to break up with you?”
“Y-yes?” It irked me a little that he seemed to find the notion foolish. “Or propose.”
“If I was going to propose to you, it would be in an underground bunker with three sealed vault doors so you couldn’t bolt out of panic.”
Fair.
“We go out to eat all the time. Why would this be something bad?” he went on, adding, “Or something you apparently view as bad.”
“I don’t view it as bad.” I decided to get it all out in the open, because it was going to eventually get there, anyway, and honesty saved time. “I heard you talking to your mother. When you were arguing about the family engagement ring.”
His eyes lit with recognition, and he uttered a long, drawn out, “Oh...”
“Yeah. So. You can probably see why it was one or the other?” I squirmed in my chair.
I hoped he would understand why my thoughts went to those options.
“Based on the fact that your mom really, really doesn’t like me, and your insistence on taking the family ring against her objections.
.. it could have gone either way, right? ”
To my relief, he nodded. “Yeah. Out of context, maybe I would have come to the same conclusion. But what did you hear?”
I hated remembering that night, how small and unimportant I’d felt standing outside the parlor doors. “Not much. I wasn’t eavesdropping. I came looking for you and heard the two of you. I was waiting outside to make sure I didn’t interrupt anything and—”
“What did you hear?” he asked, his tone a little firmer.
I sighed. “She said ‘that type of woman’ didn’t deserve to wear your grandmother’s ring. And you said her thinking was archaic, that she should be happy that her child found real love, and that you were taking ‘the god damned ring.’”
“I wish you would have mentioned this to me sooner,” he said. “Because none of that was about you. It was all about Catherine.”
That didn’t make any sense. Catherine was rich and successful and had a rich, successful husband— Well, she’d had a rich successful husband. “I’m not following.”
“Mother is furious about Catherine’s divorce.
It’s quite the scandal among all of her friends.
It’s one thing for a man to cheat on his wife and leave her.
It’s another thing entirely for a woman to do it.
” He rolled his eyes. “They can sit on the pool boy’s face, that’s socially acceptable, but they’d better stick to the ‘till death do us part’ clause. ”
“That pool boy thing is oddly specific,” I said quietly.
“Mother doesn’t want Catherine to have grandmother’s ring because of Catherine’s infidelity, and because she was the one to call the marriage.
She demanded that Catherine return the ring, and Catherine did.
I went to get it back,” he reassured me.
“Do you think we would have stayed the night under Mother’s roof if she’d said those things about you? ”
“But it’s okay for her to say them about your sister?” I argued.
“No, of course not. But I can’t control the relationship between my mother and my sister. I can protect you from all that society nonsense and expectation.” He studied me, and I realized my face was probably doing the betrayal thing again. “You were terrified.”
“I was.” There was no sense denying it. “I thought you were finally going to realize that our worlds are too different, and you needed to cut me loose.”
“You also thought that I was going to propose to you.” He wouldn’t let me get away without addressing that. I’d known, on some level, that would be the case, but I wished I hadn’t brought it up because of the hurt he couldn’t quite disguise. “You were afraid of that, too?”
“Don’t take it the wrong way.” Now that the ring issue had been cleared up, I didn’t want to ruin dinner by hurting his feelings.
“I’m not sure how I’m supposed to take it. You thought I was going to propose, and you approached it with all the enthusiasm of a person going to get a root canal,” he said.
Another fair observation. “I also thought you might be breaking up with me.” Although, I hadn’t worried about that until the car on the way over, when I was desperately searching for reasons not to panic about a potential engagement.
I’d been more afraid of the proposal than of losing him.
What did that mean?
Looking across the table at him, in the glow of the soft golden lighting in the otherwise dark room, the candle in the center of the table casting flickering shadows over the sharp line of his jaw and picking out the reddish highlights in his black hair, my heart squeezed.
Of course, breaking up would have been worse. So much worse.
And that’s when a little stab of disappointment, like the needle-sharp tip of a much wider blade, pierced my chest and blossomed into breathless pain under my ribs. Disappointment. I was disappointed that he hadn’t proposed.
“I was afraid.” I shrugged helplessly. “Breaking up and getting engaged are opposite each other on the reason-for-a-fancy-dinner scale. How was I supposed to get my hopes up for a proposal if it meant those hopes were going to be obliterated by a break-up?”
He waited for more, because damn him, he could read me like a large print book.
“And I’m still afraid of commitment, okay?” I said softly.
“If I had proposed,” he began, and cleared his throat. “If I had proposed to you tonight, what would your answer have been?”
“I would have said yes,” I answered automatically.
He thought about my answer, tapping one finger on the tabletop as he did. I wanted to say more, but adding to the statement would feel too much like digging a hole.
Finally, he broke his silence. “You were right about one thing. I wanted to talk to you here tonight because I knew you wouldn’t make a scene about what I needed to tell you.”
My gut cramped with dread. Or maybe it was the prospect of eating the by-now-room-temperature scallop arranged pretentiously on my little plate.
“I’m giving the ring back to my sister,” he began cautiously. “Because she’s getting married again. To your brother.”
He was right about one thing. I wasn’t going to make a scene. I was going to make a hole in the floor as my rage summoned the magma from the core of the earth up to meet the raging temperature of my fury. “The hell she is!”
He held up his hands. “Don’t shoot the messenger.”
“The messenger doesn’t usually help the enemy,” I shot back.
“Well, I guess that all depends on which side the messenger works for—”
“No! You will not throw a bunch of RPG crap at me right now,” I seethed. “Your sister cheated on my brother!”
“They were on a break.” The unintentional sitcom reference did not help his case.
“That show sucks!” I snapped. “And your sister sucks!”
He nodded. “Yup. She’s awful. And mean and superficial and money obsessed. And she’s willing to destroy an image she’s carefully cultivated her entire life, and a bank account that would make the vault at Fort Knox look like a shanty town, to be with my goofy best friend.”
“Your best friend, but my brother,” I reminded him. “I have every right to worry about this!”
“You do. But you don’t have the right to forbid it happening.” He paused to let the weight of that sink in. “Like he didn’t have the right to forbid us from being together.”
He didn’t have to add the last part; I already knew that was the direction he’d been headed in with his argument.
“I don’t know why, but your brother, with his terrible taste, loves my sister. And I love your brother, so I want him to be happy.” He balked. “Oh my god. I realized that if we reversed it—”
“You’re describing how he felt about you?” I snorted. “Okay, I guess I can see where maybe I’m being unfair. But dude. She cheated. ”
“And if you’d heard her reasoning for cheating, you would understand.”
“I doubt it.”
“She was scared.”
The sentence jolted me.
“She was afraid of leaving her husband, potentially losing her children, her home, all of it. She slept with someone else because she was trying to convince herself that what she had with Scott was meaningless. And it wasn’t.
” Matt reached across the table and took my hand.
“Your brother forgives her. And I would forgive you, too, if you’d done that to me.
I’d forgive anything if it meant you’d come back. ”
That was true. He’d forgiven me when I’d chosen plane tickets instead of communication. If he could handle that kind of dramatic overreaction hitting him out of nowhere…
“I wouldn’t do that to you.” I wanted that to be totally clear. “But I believe that you’d forgive me.”
“And what about me? Would you forgive me?” he asked.
“Why, are you about to confess to something?” I countered.
“Of course not.”
“I would forgive you.” I would be devastated, but I would forgive him. Without hesitation.
“Then you understand Scott’s position. And since you were coming in here ready to change your identity and flee to another country because you thought I might ask you to marry me, I think you can understand Catherine’s, too.” He tried to make it sound like a joke. He failed, big time.
I watched his thumb stroking back and forth over my knuckles. I could imagine a ring there on my finger. I waited for my brain to transform it into a tiny pair of handcuffs. To my surprise, it didn’t.
“I wouldn’t have run away,” I said quietly.
“I’m glad to hear that.” He offered me a tremulous smile. “Because someday, I’m going to ask you to marry me.”
“Someday,” I echoed, “I’m going to say yes.”