You Deserve Each Other(96)

“No, but—”

“It should be about us,” he continues urgently, taking both of my hands in his and turning us fully to face each other. “And the guest list! It’s a mile long. I don’t know most of the names on there. Why would we crowd all of these strangers around us for the most special moment of our lives?” He crushes an invitation into a ball, and I wheeze out a gasp. “These are for a fake wedding. I threw away the invitations because I don’t want any of those people there.”

My eyes are saucers. “None of them?”

“Why would I? This isn’t about anybody but me and you. The only people I care to have at our wedding are those who have treated both of us well. That rules out just about everybody I know, including the person who designed these invitations.”

I can’t conceive of a wedding between us in which Deborah isn’t the grand marshal. She’d never let us get away with excluding her. For Deborah, our wedding is a social event at which she can preen and trot around her son like a pageant mom. She can’t wait for all the other moms in her circle to congratulate her. “What about our families?”

“Fuck our families. Fuck everybody.” He throws the crumpled invitation at a dumpster. It bounces off the rim.

I burst out laughing. I know he doesn’t mean that, but maybe for one day, he’s right. On a sacred day that signifies putting each other above all else, celebrating a deeply personal commitment, maybe we shouldn’t have to accommodate the wants or opinions of others. We should do what feels right for us and no one else.

“We’ll make our own family,” he says earnestly.

I shake my head and muse, “You’ve lost it.” I take an invitation from the box, smash it into a ball, and shoot it at the dumpster. It misses.

“If I’ve lost it, then good riddance to whatever it was that I had.”

Scrunching up our wedding invitations and vaulting them in the general vicinity of a garbage can is strangely cathartic. Once we get started, we can’t stop. We pile them up like snowballs on the hood and take turns trying to make it in the dumpster. He scores eleven and I score nine.

“This one’s my grandmother’s,” I tell him as I hurl a snowball of paper and ribbons. “For pressuring me to wear her veil even though she could tell I didn’t like it, and for suggesting I might be too old to bear children.” I land my shot and Nicholas cheers. “Suck it, Edith! You’re officially uninvited!”

“This one’s your brother’s,” he replies, swinging an arm around like a baseball pitcher and letting it fly. It misses its mark by a mile and ends up in the road. “I know you stole my sunglasses, Aaron!”

“I can’t wait to throw your mom’s.”

“Oh, please, let me. I’ve earned it.”

He’s right, this honor belongs to Nicholas. I hand him a fresh invitation just so he has the satisfaction of crumpling it with Deborah’s name in mind. He grinds it with precise ferocity and it arcs over the dumpster, pinging off a stop sign.

“If I make this one,” I say, tossing an invitation snowball from one hand to the other, “you have to pick up this mess by yourself while I watch and eat fries. I’m not getting fined for littering.” I squint and aim carefully, but miss. Of course.

“Ha!” he crows. “Sucker. If I make this, you have to go back inside and buy me a chocolate shake.”

Nicholas misses, too. “Damn.”

I snort. “Your aim’s even worse than mine.”

“Your face is worse,” he mutters, to which I have to laugh.

There’s one last invitation in the box. I wad it up with purposeful slowness. “If I make this shot …” I think of the craziest outcome to all this I can come up with. It makes perfect sense. “You have to marry me. Not someday, and not maybe. We do this now.”

I swing my arm back and am about to let it go when Nicholas catches my wrist. He plucks the invitation from my fingers, slips down off the car, and walks over to the dumpster. He very deliberately drops it inside.

I raise an eyebrow at him when he walks back to me.

He stops a foot away, hands sliding into his pockets. His eyes are no longer teasing. “I’m not leaving you and me up to chance.”

I stare at him. He’s dead serious. “Really? You want to get married?”

“Really. There’s no one else I want to torture but you.”

I can’t stop staring at him. The way he’s talking, it sounds like he’s offering me everything I want. I’m dying to take it on trust, but there’s a crucial part of myself I’ve given him, which he hasn’t yet given in return. “But you still haven’t said you love me.”

“That’s not true.”

“You haven’t.”

“I say it all the time, I just say it very, very quietly. I tell you when you’re in another room, or right after we hang up the phone. I tell you when you’ve got headphones on. I say it after you shut the door behind you. I say it in my head every time you look at me.”

He steps closer, until we’re breathing each other’s air. I don’t know what the right thing to say is, but luckily Nicholas does. He’s got me.

He cups my face in his hands and brushes his lips over mine, his gaze so soft, a smile curving the edges of his mouth. “Of course I love you, Naomi. I never stopped.”