1. Charly #2
“You don’t get what that is, Charly. You looked at me and saw a man who burned his hand on a stove. Not what I could do for you. Not what I was worth. Just a person who needed a hand looking after.”
“You asked if I’d keep it clean. That was it. That was the whole thing you wanted from me.”
He huffs out a laugh, wrecked already and we’re barely in.
“You were the first person who was ever just nice to me. For no reason. Nothing in it for you.” He shakes his head. “I’ve been falling for you since about four minutes into that conversation. Four minutes. I had a needle in my hand and I was already done for.”
“Adam, I swear to God.”
His name comes out of me in pieces. The room has started to blur at the edges.
“You work these insane shifts. You hold total strangers through the worst day of their whole life.” He shakes his head like he still can’t get over it.
“And then you come home with something left over for me. Every time. You ask how my day was like my answer is the most important thing you’ll hear all night. ”
His voice frays. He lets it. Doesn’t smooth it over, lets the whole restaurant hear it tear.
“You think you don’t belong in rooms like this one.”
“Charly. You’re the warmest thing in any room you walk into. People feel better just standing near you. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve watched a whole table go soft because you laughed at something.”
“And I know that little voice you’ve got. The one that’s sure everything good is borrowed. That somebody’s going to come collect.”
“I’ve watched you brace for it for three years.”
My grip goes tight around the stem of my glass. A tear lets go and runs hot down to my jaw. Rebecca’s hand finds my shoulder and grips.
“So here’s the thing I want to say.”
He sets down the glass. Reaches into his jacket. Lowers himself onto one knee on the floor of this restaurant we’ll be paying off for a month.
The box opens.
The ring scatters candlelight all over the white linen.
“I can’t imagine spending one more day just being your boyfriend, you are the love of my life. I will spend the next fifty years trying to be worthy of your love, Charly June Scott.” His voice cracks. “Marry me.”
“That wasn’t a question.”
I’m already sliding out of my chair. Already crying in front of every stranger in this place. Ugly, unbudgeted, free of charge.
“I know it wasn’t.” His hands are shaking around the box. “Marry me anyway.”
“Then yes.” My knees hit the floor in front of his because standing is for people whose legs work. “Yes, you absolute lunatic, Yes!”
The room detonates. Applause and whistles.
A man by the bar shouting she said yes even though the whole place just witnessed it firsthand.
Adam slides the ring onto my finger on the second try because neither of us is steady.
Then he’s kissing me with both hands cradling my face, salt on our mouths, mine or his, no way to tell.
“Holy shit.” I gasp it against his lips. “We’re getting married?”
“We’re getting married!” His forehead drops to mine and he laughs, wrecked, undone, nothing composed left in him, and I love him so much it scares the hell out of me. “You stepped on my question.”
“It was a slow question. I’m sorry I was scared you’d say no.”
Rebecca crashes into us at floor level, all three of us kneeling on the floor of a restaurant neither of us could justify on a normal week, her arms thrown around our necks.
“She said yes! Everyone, she said yes!”
“They saw, Bec. There were witnesses. There’s applause.”
“Let me have this!”
She hauls back, grabs my hand, holds the ring up to the light. Mascara surrendering down both cheeks.
“Three months. Three months I have kept this secret, Charly. He made me look at fourteen rings, and he saved up for the one I picked. I deserve a medal and a spa weekend.”
“You deserve an Oscar.”
I drag her into my side, my mirror, my person since the womb, and over her head Adam is asking the waiter for a bottle of the house sparkling, the cheapest thing on the list and the only celebration that matters, and a stranger two tables over is dabbing her eyes with a napkin.
“Hold on.” I turn back to Adam, ring hand pressed flat to my chest. “Did you ask my dad?”
“Drove out Saturday.” His ears go pink, which means the story embarrasses him, which means it’s about to be my favorite story. “Told him over coffee. He didn’t say one word for a full minute. Then he got up, walked outside, and made me help him fix the back fence.”
“That’s a yes. That is the most enthusiastic yes my father has ever produced.”
“He hugged me at the truck after. Cracked two of my ribs and said it was about time, that he’d been ready to give me his blessing for a year and I was the one dragging my feet.”
Adam’s voice goes rough on the last part, and I press my napkin to my face because the mascara situation is past saving.
“Okay, okay.” Rebecca is bouncing in her seat, already somewhere else, already three steps ahead the way she always is.
“Fall. You want a fall wedding, I know you do, and the Lindenwood has that garden room that opens onto the terrace, it’s perfect, and they do a Sunday rate that won’t bankrupt you, we are getting you in there before someone else does. ”
“The Lindenwood.” I lower the napkin. “Bec, I’ve never even said the name out loud. How do you know about the garden room?”
A beat. Barely one. Her smile doesn’t slip.
“You showed me. Months ago. That bridal account you doom-scroll at two in the morning, you sent me about forty of them.” She flicks her hand and reaches for the bread basket. “The garden one stuck. Sue me for paying attention to my own sister.”
“I don’t remember sending it.”
“You’d had wine.” She grins, and it’s so easy, so her, that I let it go before the catch in my chest can turn into anything. “You always forget stuff when you have wine.”
The sparkling arrives in three flutes, and Rebecca rises to her feet and lifts hers to the whole room, because subtlety has never once lived in her body.
“To my baby sister.”
“Four minutes, Rebecca.”
“To my baby sister by four crucial minutes, who works too hard and cries at dog food commercials and just got engaged to the only man alive good enough for her.” Her glass tips toward Adam, then back to me.
Her smile bright enough to light the block.
“Take care of each other. To Charly and Adam. To forever.”
“To forever,” Adam echoes. His hand finds mine again, automatic. The ring already warming on my finger.
The glasses chime. The room settles back into its candlelight and quiet conversation.
We don’t leave for another hour, and when we do, Adam goes to settle up at the front and I turn at the door to find my sister.
She and Adam have drifted together by the coat stand. Heads bent close. Not touching. Just near, the way you stand with someone when the conversation doesn’t need volume, his mouth moving low, her nodding once, fast, like an answer to a question I didn’t hear asked.
Then Adam laughs at something and the picture breaks, ordinary again, and Rebecca catches me watching and lights up and mouths I love you across the room.
He was thanking her. For the rings, for looking at fourteen of them, the three months of secret-keeping. Of course he was.
I hook my arm through my coat and don’t think about it again.
Outside, the cold is clean and the ring is a small private weight on my hand, and Rebecca tucks herself under my arm on the curb while we wait for our ride.
“Tell me this is real,” I whisper it. “Tell me I get to keep this one.”
She squeezes until my knuckles ache. Eyes shining. Steady as a heartbeat.
“It’s real, Char. I promise you.” She presses a kiss to my temple, and for just a second she doesn’t look at me. She looks back through the glass, to where Adam is shrugging into his coat. “Nobody’s taking anything that’s yours.”