Love and Other Words(71)

“I do,” he growled. “I love you so fucking much. I love you, and I lust you and want you. I love you as the person I want to be with forever. I just… Macy? Will you marry me?”

Time stopped. Planets aligned and then shifted apart. Years passed. The voices and music and clinking of glasses all around me faded to nothing and all I could hear was the echo of his blurted proposal.

I stuttered through several sounds before I was able to speak.

Unfortunately, “What?” was the first thing to come out coherently.

“Shit,” he groaned. “Shit, I just totally messed that up.”

“Elliot…?”

His voice came out muffled when he said, “Will you come see me? I want to ask you to marry me. In person.”

I looked around the room, my heart a blazing thunderbolt in my chest. “I… Ell… I’m not sure I can come up tonight. This is huge.”

“It is huge. But it’s real.”

“Okay. I hear you,” I said, pinching my eyes closed. He told me he loved me and asked me to marry him in one conversation. Over the phone. “It’s just… there is no way Dad would let me get on the road with all the drunk people.”

He was silent for so long that I looked down at my phone to make sure I hadn’t lost the call.

“Elliot?”

“Do you love me?”

I exhaled, blinked away tears. This wasn’t how I wanted this conversation – how I wanted to discuss our future – but here it was, in my face, demanding to happen like this. “You know I do. I don’t want to do this over the phone.”

“I know you don’t, but do you know what I mean? Do you want to marry me? Do you want to make this forever? At Goat Rock, and the library, and walking everywhere, and traveling. Do you want to touch me and be with me and wake up with my mouth on you and do you want me to be the one to give you orgasms or… fuck, watch you have them or whatever? Do you think about a life with me or marrying me?”

“Ell —”

“I do,” he said in a breathless rush. “All the time I do, Macy.”

I almost couldn’t speak, my pulse was firing so heavily. “You know I do, too.”

“Come to me tonight, please, Macy, please.”

Noisemakers started blowing and confetti fell from invisible containers somewhere high above my head, but all I heard was the crackle of the line.

“I’ll come next weekend, okay?”

He sighed: a universe of weight buried in the sound. “Do you promise?”

“Of course I promise.” I looked across the room and saw Dad walking toward me, a rare wide smile lighting up his face. Noise filled the other end of the phone and I could hardly hear Elliot anymore.

“Macy? I can’t hear you! It’s super loud here.”

“Ell, go have fun, but be careful, okay? You can give me my New Year’s kiss next Saturday.”

“’Kay.” He paused and I knew what he was waiting for me to say, but I wasn’t going to say it on the phone. Especially not when I would have to yell it and I wasn’t even sure if he would remember it.

“Good night,” I said. He went quiet, and I looked at the phone briefly before bringing it back to my ear. “Ell?”

“Night, Mace.”

The line clicked dead.

I don’t think I could have described a single thing about the party after that phone call. After a hug and a dance with my dad, I paced around the hall outside the event room for about a half hour.

I hated not being with Elliot for that conversation.

I hated that we’d crossed this enormous line, that we’d acknowledged a future for us – outside the closet, in the real world, with a real relationship – and he’d been miles and miles away from me, and drunk.

I hated how he’d sounded when he said good night.

“Macy, why are you out here?” Dad asked. His shoes clicked on the marble as he made his way to me, and the roar of the party felt like cold water spilling across my skin. “You want to leave?”

I looked up at him, nodded, and burst into tears.

“I don’t understand the problem,” Dad said, maneuvering into a sharp turn. I eyed him to make sure he was really sober. I hadn’t seen him drinking, but he seemed about as mentally collected as I felt. “You had a good conversation with Elliot, and you’re upset about it?”

“I just don’t like how the call ended,” I admitted. “I felt like he really wanted me there.”

“I realize you’re home more than you’re up there, but that’s how you two have always done it. What’s the stress?” Dad asked, always logical. To be fair, he didn’t have all the details. I didn’t tell him that Elliot said he loved me. I certainly didn’t tell him that Elliot had proposed.

“It just felt… weird.”

Unlike Elliot, my Dad rarely pressed.

After twenty minutes of silence, Dad pulled into our driveway and slowly shut off the car. Turning to me, he said quietly, “Help me understand.”

“He’s my best friend,” I began, feeling the tightening of tears in my throat. “I think we’re both nervous about what happens when we figure out what we’re doing for college, and what we do after this – after our lives aren’t just punctuated by weekend trips. It felt bad tonight, the way the call ended, and I don’t know what I’d do if something bad happened between us.” I sat, staring at the dashboard in the quietly ticking car. “Sometimes I wonder if we should just be friends, so that I don’t have to worry about ever losing him.”