24. Charly #2
“So.” He reaches into his pocket, and for a dumb second I think he’s getting his phone. Instead he sets a small gold thing in his palm. The ring. Our ring. The fake one we’ve been wearing since the start, the prop that was supposed to mean nothing and turned into the realest thing I own.
He turns it over in his fingers. “This thing. It started as a lie we told everybody. A whole story we made up so people would buy our story and leave us alone.” He reaches for my hand, slow, his thumb dragging over my knuckles, and works the fake ring up and off my finger.
The bare spot it leaves feels a mile wide.
“I’m done with the fake version, Charly.
I don’t want to pretend to be engaged to you anymore. ”
My heart drops for one horrible second before he keeps going.
“I want to actually be engaged to you. For real this time. No made up story.” His hand is shaking around mine and he doesn’t even try to hide it.
“I’ve wanted that for a long time. I just kept telling myself to wait.
Wait till you healed up, wait till things were calm, wait till I was sure I wouldn’t scare you off. ”
“You’re shaking.” I wrap both my hands around his to hold it steady.
“Yeah, well. I’m terrified.” He huffs a laugh and reaches into his other pocket, and this time it’s a small velvet box, and the whole room just drops away. Just my heartbeat and his face and that box.
He opens it. The ring inside isn’t huge and it isn’t flashy and it’s nothing like the one Adam gave me with a lie attached. It just looks like me. Like he climbed inside my head and found the exact thing I never would’ve known how to ask for.
“Oh my God.” My free hand comes up over my mouth, and the tears spill before I can stop them.
“That’s still not technically a yes, for the record.”
“Shut up and let me have my moment. I’m having a moment here.” I wipe at my face with the back of my wrist, which does nothing.
He laughs, and it cracks right down the middle.
“Will you marry me, Charly?” His voice barely holds.
“I love you. I’ve loved you longer than I admitted to either of us, and I want the whole thing.
The boring grocery trips, the stress free mornings.
I want to build a life and a family with you.
Every day I will let you steal my coffee, if you agree to do it for the rest of our life. Just say yes.”
“Yes. Obviously yes.” I grab his face in both hands, laughing and crying at once, which is a terrible combination, do not recommend. “It was always gonna be yes, you idiot. You know I’ve been saying yes to you for months. You’re just slow.”
That’s what takes him down. My unshakable Clarence, gone, eyes closing like the word lifts something straight off him, and when he slides the new ring on it sits there like it’s been waiting the whole time.
Then he’s kissing me, and I’m crying into it, and he’s half laughing against my mouth, and somehow I’m in his lap with my arms around his neck.
“Okay,” he murmurs against my lips, a little breathless. “I’m taking you to bed.”
“Your ribs.” I pull back to look at him, hands on his shoulders.
“My ribs are fine. Stop talking.” He gets an arm under my knees and one around my back and stands, lifting me clean off the couch like I weigh nothing, and I grab his shoulders and shriek and tell him he’s going to drop us both and kill us, and he just grins and carries me down the hall anyway.
He doesn’t drop me.
***
We call my dad later that night, because there’s no way I’m sitting on this until morning.
He’s crying before I even get the words out. I barely get to “Dad, Clarence asked me to” and he’s just gone, full-on sobbing, and Clarence has to hold the phone away from his ear while my dad falls apart on the other end.
“Dad. Dad. You have to let me finish the actual sentence.”
“Okay. Okay, fine, sorry, go ahead, finish it.” He’s still crying, I can hear him moving around, probably pacing the kitchen the way he does when he can’t sit still. “Go on. I’m listening.”
“Clarence asked me to marry him. And I said yes.”
“Oh, FINALLY.” It bursts out of him, half laugh, half sob.
“Finally! I have been sitting on this for a month, Charly. A whole month. He called me before all of it, asked for my blessing like an actual gentleman, and I said yes, of course I said yes.” His voice drops.
“And then the accident happened, and I thought, God, I thought he wasn’t going to make it, and on top of everything else all I could think was that boy loves my daughter and he might die before he ever gets to tell her properly.
I couldn’t say a word to you about any of it.
I just had to pray. So yeah. Finally is the only word I’ve got. ”
I have to sit down. “You knew? For a month?”
“Hardest secret I ever kept in my life.” A wet laugh comes down the line. “Now stop talking to me and put the boy on the phone. I’ve got things to say to him.”
So I hand the boy the phone. His whole face changes the second he takes it, soft and a little scared all over again, and I can hear my dad going fast and tinny on the other end, and I watch Clarence say “yes sir” and “I know, sir” and “I promise” until his eyes go shiny too.
I laugh so hard I nearly drop the phone. And then my dad says, “Your mother’s here, she wants to talk to you,” and the laugh dies in my throat.
There’s a long pause. Shuffling. Then her voice, careful, smaller than I’m used to. “Charly?”
And that stops me dead. Because she has never called me Charly.
Not once, not ever. It’s always been Charlotte.
Charlotte when I was late, Charlotte when I wasn’t Rebecca, Charlotte in that clipped little voice that always made me feel like I’d done something wrong just by existing.
Charly is what everyone who actually loves me calls me.
She’s never let it out of her mouth before tonight.
“Hi, Mom.” My voice doesn’t come out right.
“I heard the news.” She pauses. I can picture her standing in my dad’s kitchen, holding the phone too tight, not sure what to do with herself. “He’s a good man. Clarence. He treats you right, doesn’t he. The way you’re supposed to be treated.”
It’s not I’m sorry. It’s not anything she should’ve said years ago, about Adam, about Rebecca, about all of it. But her voice catches on that last part, just barely, and my mom never lets her voice do that. I press my hand over my mouth so she can’t hear me come apart.
“He does, Mom. He really does.”
“Good. That’s good.” She clears her throat, pulls herself back together the way she always does. “I’m happy for you, Charly. I really am.”
And I believe her. That’s the part that gets me. I’m going to save the rest of that cry for a day when I’m not already the happiest I’ve ever been.
For the first time in I don’t know how long, I’m not scared of what comes next. I actually want to get to it.
***
It’s past midnight when we finally fall asleep, tangled up under the blankets, the new ring still on my finger because I wouldn’t take it off, not even to wash my face.
Then I’m awake.
I don’t know why at first. The room’s dark and dead quiet and Clarence is a warm line down my back. Then it comes again, low in my stomach, a cramp that pulls tight and mean, and I suck in a breath through my teeth.
“Ow. Okay. Ow.” I press my hand flat against my belly and curl in on myself a little.
He stirs behind me right away. “Hey. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Just a cramp.” I breathe through it. “I think my period’s coming. Go back to sleep.”
“You don’t usually wake up for cramps.” His hand finds my hip in the dark. “You want me to get you anything? Heating pad, ibuprofen?”
“I’m okay. Honestly. It’s not a big deal.”
The pain rolls through again, and this one’s worse, meaner, and it pulls a sound out of me I don’t mean to make. “Okay, ow, that one actually hurt.”
“Charly.” His hand lands warm on my shoulder, and his voice loses the sleepy edge completely. “Talk to me. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. It’s just, it’s not like normal cramps.” I press harder against my stomach, like that’ll do anything. “It’s fine. I’m fine. It’s probably nothing.”
And I am fine. It’s not even that bad. It’s just enough to be there, just enough to feel wrong, and the cold thing I’ve been waiting for all day finally uncurls quiet in my chest.
It isn’t fear, not yet.
It’s just a deep, certain knowing that wrong is exactly what this is. And for the first time since I said yes to him, I can’t talk myself back out of it.