The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(109)

The students loved them, and in turn Erik and Melanie were mentors, involved in the kids’ lives and helping them build dreams. Most of all, they had fun. Pure, careless amusement. They had a wide social circle, went out all the time with the Kellys. They gave parties. They went away on romantic weekends. They did everything a couple was supposed to do, laughing their asses off.

“You’re so good,” Melanie said to him. Not just in bed but in passing. She whispered it while running her hand over his head or along his face. Growled it playfully while grabbing his ass.

“Your heart is huge. Your love is amazing.”

She loved him. Why wasn’t it enough?

What more do you want? Erik asked the ceiling, his fingers reaching up to toy with invisible charms on his long-lost necklace. He was happy, yet he felt strangely stagnant. Everything was right, yet something in his soul moped. Not every wire was connected. Some essential part of him still felt missing. Something felt unfinished.

You’re looking for what you had with Daisy.

It was an old thought. In the dark in his new home with Melanie, a new thought gradually emerged:

Maybe Daisy was the dream.

He had loved her in the enclosed and insulated universe of college. Sure, they moved off campus and had to start paying rent, the electric bill, buying groceries. It felt like being an adult, but were they just kids playing house?

He tried to picture living with Daisy but couldn’t seem to get out of her mother’s kitchen at La Tarasque. He was stuck there with her in a perpetual tableau of holiday joy, making gnocchi and decorating the Christmas tree, surrounded by their circle of friends and Nat King Cole songs. He didn’t envision taking her car in to get the oil changed, cleaning the oven, defrosting the refrigerator and plunging the toilet—things he’d done while cohabitating with Melanie.

Would she and I have survived in the real world?

Maybe she was the dream the whole time.

Maybe it would have ended anyway. On its own. We would have grown different ways or pursued dreams in different places and it would have ended. We still wouldn’t be in touch. There just wouldn’t be all this bad feeling about it.

This was the real world: standing in the lounge of the performing arts complex, clustered with students and faculty. They clung to each other, horrified as they watched the events of 9/11 unfold on TV.

This was real: Erik holding Melanie tight in his arms, turning her face to his chest and not letting her look when the towers fell. He watched in disbelief, but he did not fall. He stood strong, his arms crossed over Melanie’s back, protecting her. She had saved him once. Now he would be her hero. He was good. His heart was huge and his love was amazing.

Melanie deserved both.



*



“I’d like to get married,” Melanie said.

Erik looked at her a long moment.

“To you, smartass,” she said.

“You’re not even kneeling,” he said, with his most affronted expression.

She laughed.

“No ring? Seriously?” He gestured around them to the bedroom. “This is how you propose?”

She seized a pillow and smashed it on his head. “You know I can’t stand contrived, sugary, romantic crap. We’re naked in bed, this is as genuine as it gets.”

His fingers trailed over her collarbones, down her chest, cupped her breasts in his palms and put his face to them. “You want to get married,” he whispered.

“I do. Let’s just do it. I don’t want a big wedding. I don’t want any wedding. Let’s just drive to city hall. I’ll call my sister and you call your mother and brother. We’ll go somewhere nice for lunch then we’ll fly to Jamaica…”

Her voice trailed off as they both silently rejected the idea. It was two weeks after the terrorist attacks. With the smoke still billowing over lower Manhattan, who could fly anywhere, or would even want to?

“We’ll go to Vermont,” Melanie said. “Or the Berkshires or Saint Lawrence. We’ll take a nice trip somewhere. I haven’t had a vacation in years.”

He pushed up on his elbow, his other hand still running over her body. “I’d like to get you a ring,” he said. “Would a ring just be unbearably contrived? Sickeningly romantic?”

She kissed him. “You’re adorable. You know that?”

“So you tell me.”

She turned into him, burrowed her head against his chest. “I would love to have a ring.”

They got licenses, made an appointment at city hall and reservations for lunch afterward. They bought matching platinum bands. Erik owned one suit, and it was an embarrassment, so they went to get him a new one. Melanie bought a lovely sheath dress in ivory wool.

Erik’s mother would come, but his brother was participating in clinical trials for a new kind of cochlear implant and would be under the knife in Chicago. He and his wife sent their best wishes and a beautiful set of cast-iron skillets which Melanie all but took to bed with her.

“If you ever touch these with soap, I will beat you senseless.”

So it was Christine Fiskare and Melanie’s sister, Julia, who would stand up with them. The only other guests were Miles and Janey Kelly. The night before, Erik approached Melanie as she strode from closet to dresser to suitcase, packing for the trip they had booked to the Thousand Islands.