Page 109 of Consummation

“Really? Congrats. That’s great. When are you gonna do it?”

“As soon as I can get a ring and figure out how the fuck to do it right this time. There’s no margin for error—failure isn’t an option.”

Jonas looks genuinely elated. “Well, do you have any ideas? Bounce ’em off me—I’ll help you figure it out.”

“Dude, I have no idea how to do it—that’s why I’ve got insomnia. I can’t just, you know, take her to dinner and pull out a ring or take her to a basketball game and ask her on the fucking Jumbotron. Whatever I do, it’s gotta bebig.” My stomach clenches. “Honestly, I’m kind of freaking out about it, bro. I asked Kat once and totally fucked it up. I gotta do it right this time or I dunno if she’ll give me a third bite at the apple.” I rub my forehead. “Kat didn’t just turn me down the first time—she gotpissed. And even worse than that, she got her feelings hurt. I’m the first man in the history of the world to ask a woman to marry him and make her feelshittyabout it.”

Jonas grimaces. “How’d you manage that?”

I shrug. “I have no fucking idea.”

“Come on. You must have an idea what you did wrong. How’d you ask her? You never told me any details. All I know is your proposaldidn’tinclude the words ‘I love you.’”

I shake my head, not wanting to relive it.

“Tell me, Josh. We gotta figure this out.”

I begrudgingly tell Jonas every detail of how that night at the hospital went down. “And then the whole next week, I felt so rejected and bummed and confused, I actually told myself I was done with her,” I say, rolling my eyes at the absurd thought. “And the most aggravating part was she kept calling me ‘Mr. Darcy,’ and I have no idea why.”

“You mean fromPride and Prejudice?” Jonas asks.

“Why the fuck do you know that? I had to Google that shit to figure it out.”

Jonas shrugs.

“You amaze and appall me,” I say. “But we’re off track here. The point is, I fucked it up and Kat said no and I’ve never felt so rejected in all my life. For both our sakes, I couldn’t handle a repeat performance. I have to do it right this time.”

“Yeah, well, proposing in a hospital waiting room when the girl’s sitting vigil for her brother definitely doesn’t sound like a story Kat would wanna ‘tell her grandchildren one day’—unless, of course, you want her to tell her future grandchildren ‘The Story of How Grandpa was a Dumbshit.’”

“The scary thing is I truly didn’t realize I was fucking up at the time—I thought I deserved a fucking medal for being so honorable.”

“Well, that’s the problem right there. Women don’t want honorable—they want love.”

“Yeah, I know that now. Duh.NowI realize Kat just wanted to hear me say ‘I love you’ and ‘you’re the woman of my dreams’ and all that—okay, I get it—but at the time I was too freaked out to say any of that. But still, I’m not sure why she punched me so fucking hard in the balls. She could have just said ‘no thanks’—that would have been sufficient, thank you very much. But not Kat. Of course, not. She waslivid, man—and, honestly, I still don’t fully understand why. Which means I could totally piss her off again and fuck it up completely and not even realize I’m doing it.”

“Well, duh, Josh. You seriously don’t know why?”

I shrug.

“Josh, you made Kat feel like you were doing her a fucking favor by marrying her—likeshewas the lucky one. No woman wants to feel like that, especially when a man’s proposing to her—she wants to feel like a princess out of a fairytale. She wants to feel like the grand prize.”

“Holy fuck, Jonas. That’s exactly what she said.Exactly.” I close my eyes, chastising myself. “How is it possible you know more about this than I do?”

“Because I’ve watchedPride and PrejudiceandFools Rush Inand a bunch of other chick flicks—and those movies tell a guy everything he needs to know about the female psychology, you dumbshit.”

“Well, I fully realize I’m the lucky one now, believe me—I’d be the luckiest bastard in the world to call Kat Morgan my wife.”

“Well, just tell her that, then. Perfect.”

“No, that ship has sailed man,” I say. “I’ve gotta bring out the big guns now—this is round two, bro. I need a whole lot more than a good proposal—I need a shit-ton more than ‘I love you’—I needredemption.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Jonas says. He squints, clearly thinking hard about something. I’ve seen this look on my brother’s face a thousand times when he’s poring over an acquisition report and crunching numbers in his head. “Okay. If you wanna crack Kat’ssecret code, you gotta figure out what makes her tick. For Sarah, it was overcoming her lifelong fears and finally letting go completely. That was the key with her—making hersurrenderand let go. So, first off, I took Sarah to the top of a thirty-foot, underground waterfall in Belize and made her jump off. That was stage one. And, then, when I finally proposed to her, I took her to the highest mountaintop in Greece and made her jump off and paraglide down to the beach.” He chuckles, apparently at some memory. “I made Sarah face her fears and let go and, man, it was fucking epic. You’ve just gotta figure out how to do the same for Kat. Unlock her. Figure out her secret code and crack her. And that’s how you’ll deliver her unto pureecstasyin the way the ancient Greeks defined that word—’the culmination of human possibility.’”

I roll my eyes. My brother is such a fucking freak. “Well, Kat’s not afraid of a goddamned thing,” I say. “I could take her to the top of a waterfall and she’d cannonball off it, honking her boobs as she plummeted down.”

Jonas laughs. “Well, then, fine—overcoming fear clearly isn’t the ticket with Kat. But there’s got to besomethingthat will unlock Kat’s deepest desires—something her soul is desperately yearning for.”

I’m silent.

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