Chapter Five #2
I laugh. It comes out before I can stop it, surprised and sharp. He doesn’t flinch or smile. I stop laughing because he’s not bluffing, which is nothing. His expression is calm and almost neutral, which is how I know. “You’re serious?”
He nods once. “I’m serious.”
I open and close my mouth a couple of times before managing words. “We’ve been dating for six weeks.”
“I’m aware of the timeline.”
“Sterling, you’re asking me to marry you in the middle of an argument about a plane.” My brain feels broken as I struggle to put it all together.
“I’m asking you to marry me in the middle of a Saturday morning in my kitchen, and the argument about the plane is why, because I just watched you tell me no about something most people would say yes to, and I’ve been trying to figure out for six weeks why that makes me want you more.
The answer is that I want to marry a woman who tells me no.
That’s the answer. I’ve been looking for a better one and there isn’t one. ”
His voice drops. “You tell me no because you aren’t intimidated by me, and you aren’t impressed by what I can do for you. You’re with me because you want to be, not because of who I am.”
My heart is going too fast, my feet are cold on the marble, and I’m holding a piece of toast I made twenty minutes ago that I haven’t taken a bite of.
This isn’t how proposals happen. This isn’t how anything happens.
You don’t meet a man in a trauma bay, carry his phone number in your pocket for nine days, eat eggs at a diner, and then marry him in the middle of a fight about Charleston. You don’t do this.
“You don’t know my middle name.” It’s a nonsensical response, but it’s also valid. How can you marry someone without knowing their middle name?
“It’s Marie. It’s on the license you showed me the second time you drove us to Sal’s because you wouldn’t let me drive. You handed me your wallet to get out change for the parking meter while you parked. I read it while you were finding parking.”
Of course he did. Of course he read the whole thing.
Sterling Hollingsford reads everything in every room he enters.
He remembers all of it, and that he memorized my middle name off a driver’s license in a parking lot should concern me.
Instead, it makes me want to cry, and I don’t cry about men in kitchens.
I’m thirty percent sure this is the biggest mistake I’ll ever make.
I’m as certain of it as I’m certain of a rash that’s probably nothing and might not be.
I should wait. I should think. I should call Marnie and let her talk me through the thirty percent until it becomes a number large enough to listen to.
Independence isn’t a preference for me. It’s what I built after my mother died, and there was no one to catch me.
I learned to carry my own weight because there was no one else to carry it, and eventually, relying on myself became part of who I was.
Six weeks isn’t long enough to know whether Sterling can be trusted enough to let down my guard.
Six weeks isn’t long enough to know anything.
Sterling Hollingsford is asking me to trust him in his kitchen, over cold toast, while my feet are freezing on his marble floor. I open my mouth to refuse. “Okay,” emerges instead.
“Okay?”
“Okay, I’ll marry you. On two conditions. One, I’m not getting on a plane to do it. Two, you’re making me new toast, because this piece is cold. I’ve been holding it for this entire conversation, and I’m starving.”
He crosses the kitchen and kisses me while I’m still holding the toast. His mouth tastes like the expensive coffee I pretend I don’t prefer to mine.
My feet are still cold, I’m kissing a man I’ve known for six weeks, the thirty percent is screaming, and I don’t care.
I don’t care. For the first time in my life, I’m choosing the thing that isn’t the sensible option.
The ground hasn’t opened, his arms are around me, the toast is getting crushed between us, and I start laughing against his mouth because this is absurd but I’m going to do it anyway.
I call Marnie from the bathroom twenty minutes later because I need to hear a sane voice, and she’s the closest thing I have.
“You’ve known him for six weeks,” Marnie says.
“I know.”
“Six weeks, Casey. I’ve had yogurt in my fridge longer than you’ve known this man.”
“I know.”
“Is he standing right there? Blink twice if you’re under duress.”
“I’m in the bathroom, and you couldn’t see me blink on the phone anyway.” I laugh. “He’s making me new toast. No, I’m not under duress. Yes, I know this is insane. Yes, I’m doing it anyway. I called you because I wanted to hear you tell me it’s insane so I could say I know and do it anyway.”
“Then why are you calling me?”
“Because you’re my person, and I want you there.”
She’s quiet longer than I’ve ever heard Marnie be quiet. “Courthouse?”
“Courthouse, Tuesday. Can you get off?”
“I’ll trade with Fenton. He owes me. Casey?”
“What?”
“If he hurts you, he’s going to need a consult from proctology, and not to remove anything with batteries.”
That makes me chuckle. “He’s not going to hurt me.”
“That’s what I said about Derek, and Derek left me for a yoga instructor named Sage. So I’m just letting you know my intentions. Tuesday, I’ll be there with a clear conscience and a watchful eye.”
“Deal.”
WE GO TO THE COURTHOUSE on Tuesday as planned.
I buy a dress that morning from a shop on East Boulevard that I’ve walked past a hundred times and never gone into.
It’s cream-colored, simple, and not a wedding dress, because I don’t want a wedding dress.
I want a dress I chose in an hour that fits and looks like mine.
It runs more than I usually spend on a dress but less than Sterling spends on a tie.
That ratio will be the ratio of our lives, and I’ve already accepted it.
Sterling wears a suit he already had, dark and well-cut.
He stands in the clerk’s office as though he belongs there, but he has the knack to look like he belongs everywhere.
Marnie is my witness, wearing scrubs because she came straight from a shift and didn’t have time to change.
The other witness is a woman from the clerk’s office named Pauline, who has done this four hundred times and still tears up, which is either professional kindness or genuine sentiment, and I don’t mind either way.
The civil ceremony takes just a few minutes. The magistrate reads the script. It’s the standard one, and I’ve been to enough weddings to know the words before he says them. Nothing lands until Sterling says the line about forsaking all others.
His voice catches. It doesn’t break. It hitches, briefly enough that Marnie doesn’t hear it, the magistrate wouldn’t notice, and Pauline is already dabbing at her eyes about something else entirely.
I catch it because I’m standing eighteen inches from him.
I’ve spent six weeks learning the sounds he makes, and this sound is old.
It comes from somewhere he’s never shown me, somewhere that existed before I did, and it turns the word forsaking into something that has already cost him.
I look at him and realize he’s been hurt in a way he’s never told me about.
I don’t know who left or who chose differently, but they broke the word he’s saying right now, and he’s saying it anyway, to me, in a courthouse on a Tuesday with a clerk named Pauline and my best friend in scrubs.
The catch in his voice is the truest thing I’ve heard from him.
I should ask. Later, tonight or tomorrow, I’ll sit him down and ask what happened, who left, and what it did to him, because that catch is a warning and I’m trained to read warnings. I should ask.
I don’t ask right now though. I say my vows instead with no hesitation, because he needs them to be steady and sure.
I sign the license, and my name changes from Weaver to Hollingsford with a signature if I choose to take his last name.
I hadn’t considered doing so until this moment, but I’m not opposed to the idea.
Sterling watches me sign my old signature with an expression I’ll remember for the rest of my life, which is relief.
Not joy, though the joy is there. Relief, as though he expected me to stop.
I’ve done the stupidest and best thing I’ll ever do.