Page 57 of Fan Favorite

“There’s nothing like traveling and losing yourself in a new culture. But it can get lonely, you know? Like during the day, I felt like I could do anything, but at night, you’re lying on the ground in the middle of the desert, staring up at the stars, and you feel very small. It’s a weird sense of accomplishment mixed with total insignificance.” He paused and sighed thoughtfully. “I guess that’s how I ended up here.”

She nodded and signaled to Jessa for more champagne. For a moment he felt like there was a weird gulf between them. Was she bored? But then Jessa came over and refilled their glasses and Edie smiled at him, a little elastic, a little drunk, with that sort of toothy smile she’d always had, and for some reason, it reminded him of playing Monopoly on her back porch. And then, between the memories and the champagne, he felt warm and schmoopy all over again.

“Do you remember when we first met?” he asked.

“Hmm…” She looked up at the sky. “One of my earliest memories of you is at Lauren’s birthday party. We were, like, five? Six? I don’t have kids—I’m not good with ages—but remember it was a roller-skating party? And you didn’t know how to skate, so one of the moms was teaching you on the carpet?” She was looking at him merrily now. Something like fear pricked the back of his neck. The cameras pushed in. “Like while everyone else was going around in circles on the rink, you were on the carpet by the tables—”

“No, I mean literally the very first time we met, like the first time you said,Hi, I’m Edie,and I said,Hi, I’m—”

“—and right when we came back to sing ‘Happy Birthday’”—she was laughing now, pretty uncontrollably actually—“Mrs. Wasserman came around the corner with the most beautiful birthday cake, with these gorgeous piped roses, and somehow you roller-skated right into it, like with your arms directly planted into Lauren’s cake.Smash!”

Bennett clenched his jaw. This was not the memory he would’ve chosen to play out on national television. He tried to smile—ha-ha, what an idiot, fun!—but he felt pinched, like he wanted to tip the stupid table over and watch the votives with their artificial flames explode against the concrete. Why would she bring this up? Was she trying to humiliate him? But why would she do that? He was being crazy. He was being a guywho was so insecure he couldn’t handle being the butt of a joke. Well, ha-fucking-ha, yes he could.

“Oh man,” he laughed. “I don’t remember that! Are you sure that was me?”

“Oh, it was definitely you,” she said. “I remember thinking,Charlie Bennett, he is fucking fun.”

“That is not what you thought.”

“Of course that’s what I thought! I was like, this kid knows how to have a good time. Skate into a cake today, what sort of shit will he get up to tomorrow? Lauren—she was the one who cried. But somebody’s dad went and bought Twinkies and it was fine.” Edie started laughing again and shaking her head at the memory. “God, we were a bunch of nerds.”

“You still talk to Lauren?”

Edie nodded. “Every day. She thought it was insane I was coming here. She says marriage is oppression.” Edie put her champagne down and looked at him, her face suddenly serious. “Do you think marriage is oppression?”

“Wow. That’s an intense thing to say.” Of course Lauren would say something psychotic like that, and for a second, Bennett wasn’t sure if he’d always disliked Lauren or if he disliked Lauren because Lauren disliked him. But what he did know was that this was an opportunity for him to deliver one of the marriage speeches the producers went crazy for. “I’ve wanted to get married my entire life,” he said, taking her hand. “I want the whole thing, you know? The partnership. Where my wife is the first person I want to talk to in the morning and the last person I want to talk to at night. And we have a couple of kids and a big Christmas tree and a dog and probably more like a Land Rover than a van, but you get me—soccer practices and birthdays, and when they’re old enough, adventures, like the whole family riding camels across the Sahara. And my wife,she’s the center of it all.” He looked at her, and what was that? Some mistiness in her eyes? “What could be better than that?”

“Nothing could be better than that.”

“I remember theveryfirst time we met,” he said. “It was in the cafeteria.”

“Oh my god, the allergy table!” Edie exclaimed. “I completely forgot about the allergy table. It had a sign! With a dancing peanut! What’d it say?” Edie thought about it for a second. “It said something silly.”

“‘It’s Cool to be Peanut-Free,’” he supplied.

She clapped her hands with joy. “That’sexactlyright.”

“You were wearing red overalls,” he continued, suddenly able to see five-year-old Edie and her messy blond hair like it was yesterday. “You had aBabysitters Clubbook stuck in the front pocket.”

“What can I say?” She crinkled her nose. “I was an early reader.”

Suddenly the past, all the things they knew about each other, didn’t seem so scary. They were just kids. Bennett thought about his five-year-old self in that cafeteria. He’d had a Care Bears lunchbox. He’d really loved it, with its happy rainbow and bouncing bears floating along clouds of hearts and stars. That is, until his dad had told him it was “super gay.” Thinking about it now, Bennett couldn’t help but marvel at how all these little moments, they just came together, one by one, until suddenly you’re thirty-five years old and you’ve spent your entire adult life making sure everybody knows how tough you are. That you can easily bench 150 pounds. That you can swipe right and be having sex within the hour. That you haven’t cried in fifteen years.

“You were walking by, and you had the hot lunch,” he continued. “And I was so jealous. Inevergot hot lunch.”

“Because Helen was looking out for you.”

“Because Helen was looking out for me,” he agreed. “But you asked me why I was sitting by myself. And I said they made me sit there. Because everybody’s PB&Js could kill me.” It seemed so ridiculous now, he couldn’t help but laugh. He took her hand in his. “You threw away your lunch so you could sit with me.”

“Of course I did.” She placed her hand on top of his and stared straight into his eyes with a soft smile on her face. “You had Cool Ranch Doritos.”

He laughed. The moon was bright, casting everything in a soft, magical glow. He looked to her again, continued more seriously. “I never forgot that, you know.”

“You never knew what a great kid you were. I’m pretty sure I loved you from the very beginning,” she said, looking at him like she could really see him, both the five-year-old versionandthe man he was and maybe could be. All at once he realized something he thought he already knew, except perhaps he’d only known it as an idea before. It wasn’t the Instagram followers or jumping out of planes or climbing mountains or even having twenty gorgeous women fighting to marry you—it was simply the people in your life that made you happy, that gave you everything you needed.

In one fluid motion he was up from his seat and kneeling before her. Not a proposal, but perhaps a sort of nod to their future. He put his hand in her hair and pulled her to him, kissing her, Edie Pepper, this girl who’d always been kind to him. He kissed her tentatively at first, different from the way he kissed the other girls, more Charlie Bennett than Bennett Charles.

Because maybe, for the first time, his whole heart was in it.

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