2. Charly #2
“Hold on, let me confirm if your taste buds are correct.” Adam leans over and forks a bite off my slice, considers it with his head tipped, and a stripe of frosting catches at the corner of my mouth when I steal a second taste straight off his fork.
His gaze drops to it and stays there, the cake forgotten. “You’ve got a little...”
“Then fix it.”
He fixes it with his thumb, slow, then leans in and kisses the spot anyway, sugar and lemon.
“Oh my God, get a room, you two.” Rebecca flicks a napkin across the table at us, grinning. “We’re in public. There are cakes present. Diane is a professional.”
Diane, for her part, has suddenly found paperwork that needs her full attention.
“Okay, verdict.” Pulling back, he turns and holds a forkful out across the table. “Bec, settle this. Tell her the chocolate deserves the title.”
Rebecca leans in and takes the bite off his fork. Off my slice, off his fork, easy as anything, a whole little ceremony of it, and the table laughs and I laugh too because this is what we are. Family. The three of us have eaten off each other’s plates for years.
“Oh, that’s annoying.” Her eyes close around the bite. “I’m with Charly. Lemon raspberry takes the belt.”
“Traitor. I bought you coffee.”
“You bought everyone coffee.” She points her fork at him, queen of the table. “The cake speaks for itself.”
The laugh moves through the table and on past it. Then it’s gone, and Rebecca’s smile isn’t. It stays exactly where it was, aimed at him, at the fork still in his hand, a half-second too long for the joke that already ended. I catch it.
“And the final guest count by the fifteenth.” Diane writes as she talks, then glances up. “Rebecca, you’ll get me that number?”
“I’ll get that for you.” I raise my hand, half a joke, half not. “Bride. Hi. Right here.”
“Right, of course.” Diane’s pen keeps moving, her smile apologetic. “Old habit.”
***
The folder lands next to our dinner plates, and Adam slides into the chair beside me instead of across from me, close, his knee finding mine.
There’s a nervous energy coming off him I haven’t seen since the night he proposed, like he’s been holding something all day and can’t hold it another minute.
“Okay. So I know we’re still sad about Alder.”
A printout of it sits right on top when he opens the folder. The little house I fell in love with back in March, the one that sold before we could even get a second look. I press my hand flat over the picture like that’ll do anything.
“I drive past it sometimes,” I admit. “On the way home from nights. It’s pathetic.”
“It’s not pathetic.” He covers my hand with his, both of us pressed over that stupid beautiful porch.
“I think about it too. I keep going back to why we lost it, and it wasn’t that we didn’t have enough between us.
It’s that ours is scattered across different accounts and theirs was all in one place.
They could put down earnest money that same afternoon, and we were still three phone calls away from being ready. ”
“So we were too slow.”
“And I’m never being slow again where you’re concerned.” His arm comes around my waist, tucking me into his side. “So here’s my idea. Tell me if it’s crazy.”
“It’s probably crazy.”
“Everything we’ve got. Yours, mine, all of it, one account.
” He turns my chin so I’m looking at him instead of the porch.
“Charly, in three months you’re my wife.
It all becomes one pot anyway, I’m just getting there early.
And the next time you stand in front of a house and get that look on your face, I don’t have to watch you fall in love and then lose it because we couldn’t move fast enough.
I just say yes. We just go.” His thumb moves over my knuckles, slow, back and forth across the ring.
“I want to stop almost-having things with you and start having them.”
And that’s the part that gets me. Not the plan. The way he says it, like every house we missed cost him something too.
“You’ve thought about this.”
“I think about it constantly. I think about you on a porch swing when I’m supposed to be working.” He laughs, a little embarrassed by it. “I’m a disaster over you. It’s been three years and it’s gotten worse, not better.”
I look down at the folder. At the line near the bottom where my name goes, his already signed beside the space, his handwriting looping and certain. He signed his first. Before he even asked me. He put everything he had down on the table and then drove home to ask if I’d put mine next to it.
Everything I’ve saved is inside this. The holidays I worked so the nurses with kids could go home.
The doubles that left me crying in my car.
The girl eating crackers over the sink so the number would grow, because that money was the only thing that ever felt like solid ground under me.
I have more saved than he does. I’ve always known that and never once said it out loud, because it never felt like it should matter.
He knows all of that. He’s watched me white-knuckle it for three years.
“You know what this is to me,” I say quietly. “You know I don’t hand this to anyone.”
“I know. That’s why I signed mine first.” He slides the page across so I can see his name already on it, ink dry. “I wasn’t going to ask you for anything I hadn’t already done myself. Everything I have is going in the same pot, Charly. I just got there a few hours ahead of you.”
People talk about trust like it’s a leap. Eyes shut, stomach in your throat, the big brave jump.
It isn’t.
Trust is the most ordinary thing in the world. Trust is putting your name under the person you love because the man holding the pen has driven you home from every bad night you’ve ever had, and signed his own name first so you’d never have to jump alone.
I sign.
“There. Done. You’re stuck with me and every dollar I’ve got.”
“Best signature I’ve ever seen.” He pulls me out of my chair and into his lap before I’ve even set the pen down, his arms folding all the way around me, his face going into my neck. “When we get the house, and we will, porch swing first. I’m putting that in writing too.”
“You can’t sit still for ten minutes, can you?”
“I’ll learn.” Another kiss, just under my ear, his voice dropping into the register that ends conversations. “Strong motivation.”
His phone lights up on the table beside us, and I reach for it on reflex, grinning, because last time it buzzed at dinner it was the groomsmen’s group chat and the photos were incredible.
“Is it the guys? Did Tommy try the lilac vest? Because if there are pictures, the bride has rights to see it.”
Adam’s hand gets there first. His arm crosses the whole table before mine clears half of it, and the phone is facedown and gone into his pocket before I’ve finished reaching, and I don’t think a thing of it, because I’m laughing and he’s laughing and it is the easiest night of my whole life.
“Absolutely not. There is wedding-gift contraband on that phone, future Mrs. Carrington. You’ll ruin a surprise I’ve spent months building, and then you’ll cry, and then I’ll cry, and I will never let either of us live it down.”
“You’re hiding funny vest photos from me.”
“I’m hiding a lot of things from you. All of them wrapped, or they will be.” He kisses my knuckles one at a time, eyes laughing at me over the top of my own hand. “Three months, baby. You can survive three months without snooping.”
And I laugh, because I love surprises, and because this is the man who pressed his hand to a hot radiator just to ask me out on a date.