Chapter 27
?
My wife likes Christmas and essays. How unbearably cute.
Damion
“It could have gone worse,” I say as I help Mirabelle pack up the leftover food we couldn’t pawn off on Forrest.
Face scrunched, she glares at me. “It went terribly.”
“We knew they’d love or hate each other.”
“Fawn laughed the second Forrest opened his mouth, and she did not stop laughing every time he spoke afterward. At one point, she fell out of her chair and was on the floor, dying.”
Extremely interesting character, that Fawn. “Any feasible reason as to why she behaved the way she did?” I ask.
Mirabelle sighs and shakes her head. “Not a clue. It’s not exactly like she got enough air all evening to elaborate, assuming she even would. Clearly, she likes keeping the dramatic irony alive.” Losing all her scrunch, Mirabelle smiles up at me, a gleam of excitement in her eyes. “Damion?”
My heart thumps. “Yes, precious?”
“When are we going to decorate for Christmas?”
“Christmas?”
She nods. “You can put up Christmas lights. I’ve never lived in a house of my own with Christmas lights before.
Fawn hates Christmas, and I’m worried I’d fall off a ladder, but you—” Her shining eyes flick up and down across me.
“—you wouldn’t even need a ladder!” She reaches up.
“You can just put them up, like this. Boop.”
I genuinely don’t know about that, but I also am unsure how my heart is intending to recover from the sheer cuteness I just witnessed.
Boop.
She said boop.
The natural cuteness paired with the deep browns and pale creams of her outfit today make her a vision of flawless perfection.
She always is, of course, but after an evening watching her host our Thanksgiving with an elegance I’ve never seen anyone else muster, it’s hard to think of anything other than the potential that we really could have a June wedding.
Surely nine months of dating is long enough.
It’s long enough to bring life into the world.
My biggest concern is whether or not it’ll be long enough for Mirabelle’s inevitable maid of honor to stop laughing any time my inevitable best man opens his mouth.
“Damion,” Mirabelle urges, brows tilted. “Focus, please. Christmas.”
“Sorry,” I murmur. “I was just thinking about marrying you.”
She blinks, then her cheeks flame. “How is that important when we don’t have any Christmas decorations beyond the teeny-tiny little tree Fawn let me get at a Dollar General three years ago?”
“She wouldn’t let you decorate beyond a tiny tree?”
“She kept saying it was her apartment, too.”
I arch a brow. “Wouldn’t that go both ways?”
“That’s what several of my argumentative essays focused on, yes. But in her responding essays, she insisted that she was allergic to holiday cheer and would die, which took priority over my carefree wishes for gaiety.”
“She is so weird.”
“She is so weird.” Mirabelle huffs, dividing cookies and slices of bread into dedicated snack-pack freezer bags.
“I love her so much. I wish I hadn’t been so nervous around your friend, and I wish Fawn hadn’t interrupted every possible conversation with laughing her head off.
Forrest seemed nice. I would have liked to get to know him better. ”
I date the freezer bags when Mirabelle passes them to me and hum. “You could get to know him at a wedding, or while we prep for a wedding.”
She snaps her fingers in my face. “Damion, focus. We need to prep for Christmas. What if my parents come?”
Frozen in front of the freezer, I blink. I have heard nothing about Mirabelle’s parents. I’d assumed, given her modest livelihood, career path, and general cautious demeanor that her parents were either gone or better off gone.
But if she’s bringing them up as though they might come by for Christmas, that means I’ve been wrong.
She grew up here, which is why she went to school with idiots like Jeffry who also grew up here.
That means…either her parents are here, or they’ve moved away. Would they really have moved out of their quaint and quiet little town and away from their daughter, though? That seems unlikely, somehow.
A prickle of unease settles in my stomach. “Mirabelle…”
“Yes?”
“Where do your parents live?”
“Off Azure Lane, why?”
Azure Lane? That’s ten minutes from here.
I stare at her. “Why…weren’t they here today?”
Horror creases her brows. “Why weren’t they here? Today? At this Thanksgiving? The one Fawn cackled through?”
I nod.
“Possibly because there is a merciful God. What do you mean why weren’t they present for this train wreck?”
“It’s Thanksgiving.”
“Your parents didn’t come!”
“My parents are on the other side of the world, launching extensive business plans and making social calls in places that don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. Yours are down the street.” I swallow, cut my fingers through my hair. “Do…do they know about me?”
Mirabelle fixes her attention on the last few slices of pumpkin pie and toys with the cling wrap covering the dish. “I…told them I got a new job. Back when I got this new job.”
So, no, then. Her parents don’t know we’re dating.
“Do your parents know…about me?” she asks with the tone of a woman who already seems to know the answer.
“Yes.”
“Right.”
“They are leaving June open, in case we get married.”
“This June?”
“This June. Next June. Every June, until we get married.” I stare into Mirabelle’s beautiful blue eyes and hope I’m conveying we will get married. Inevitably. Some day.
“But…that’s so soon. That’s what your PR team wanted. And, speaking of PR, I’m still not sure I’m comfortable with the publicity aspect involved in being with you…”
“There hasn’t been another rude article for weeks.
We’re boring now. A wedding will likely make us less boring for a minute, but that minute will come and go.
After, we’ll fade back into the mundane.
We aren’t the kinds of celebrities that people create cult followings for.
We’re just a brief moment, now and again, to meet someone’s story quota.
It’s been that way my entire life. Twenty seconds of fame every so often, overshadowed by months of business as usual. ”
“Isn’t this kind of fast?” she asks, large eyes pinned on me.
“I have filled one and a half pro and con notebooks in the same number of weeks with nothing but pros. I am sure I want you. Forever. Endlessly. Since I made a promise I’d be honest for six months, that’s the honest truth.
If you tell me yes at any point during them, I’ll promise to be as honest as I can be with you for the rest of my life.
” Capping my Sharpie, I set it down and cup her cheek.
“I love you. I don’t want to live in a world where I don’t.
I can’t imagine waking up and not having you be the first thing on my mind.
I don’t want to. This is how serious I am, Mirabelle.
So I’m a little frazzled to learn that your parents live down the street, you don’t appear to hold them in poor regard, and I have not yet begged your father for his blessing. ”
She jerks, taken aback. “You’re intending to get my father’s blessing?”
“Obviously.”
Her expression mutates, rife with disgust.
I poke her in the nose. “What’s all this mean?”
“Nothing.” She continues to glare at me with a face that very obviously means something. “How old are you again?”
My shoulders sag. “Thirty-four.”
“Thirty-four,” she echoes. “I didn’t know people from your generation still did that whole getting the father’s blessing thing.”
“I am fairly certain most people still do that.”
Her head shakes. “No, no. Kids these days are out here eloping and living together without a single word to their parents. Babies are having babies, and parents might learn about it months after it’s impossible to hide anymore.”
“Kids these days,” I echo.
She nods. “The rowdy youths!”
My lips tip in a soft smile. “Are you trying to close the distance between our generations, or are you making yourself out to be one such rowdy youth?”
“I’m clearly a rowdy youth, considering my parents know you as Mr. Anders, my new boss, not Damion, man attempting to make me his fiancée.”
I take a moment to scan her, then I sigh. “You’re right. I’ve never seen a rowdier youth. So. When are we telling them I’m robbing the cradle?”
Heat crawls up her neck. “When are we putting up Christmas lights?”
“Are your parents coming to help us?”
Her lip juts. “You’re not going to drop this, are you?”
“I will if it’s making you uncomfortable. But I am also willing to draft an essay discussing the matter of my wish to marry you and why you should say yes.”
Her face lights at the idea of me writing an essay to convince her to marry me
My heart squeezes, and I find it painful to keep myself from wrapping her up in my arms.
“A…Baconian essay?” she hedges.
“A persuasive Baconian essay. In MLA format. Undergraduate level at roughly five thousand words.”
Very seriously, Mirabelle says, “Part of what makes an essay Baconian is its concise and impersonal nature.”
Right, yes, impersonal and impartial. “I imagine this will be quite the undertaking…but I suppose I can make an effort to accomplish what I mean to say within a modest three thousand words.”
“One thousand.”
“Two.”
“One thousand, but it can be a little personal. And I’ll even allow first person narrative.”
I ponder, then I lift my hand. “Deal.”
She shakes my hand. “I look forward to reading what you come up with.”
Smiling, I say, “I look forward to marrying you in June…and meeting your parents before Christmas.”
Smiling, she says, “That sounds like two separate essays.”
That it does.
Looks like I’ve got an all-nighter to pull.