Page 41 of Now That It's You
“That’s not true,” he insisted, even as a tiny voice in the back of his brain asked, Isn’t it?
Meg sighed and leaned against the door. “It’s okay, I knew. I mean, we dated for more than eight years without him ever once bringing up the subject of marriage.”
“You didn’t talk about it at all?”
“I said he didn’t bring it up. Once a year, I’d broach the subject. I tried to play it cool, to act like I didn’t care that much, but all I had to do was say the word marriage and he’d act like I just shoved his testicles in a vise and started cranking.
“Ouch,” Kyle said, trying not to picture it. “He obviously changed his mind at some point. I never thought he had it in him to make such a romantic gesture with a proposal.”
“He didn’t.”
“What?”
“He didn’t make a romantic gesture with the proposal. That whole story we told the family was completely made up.”
Kyle stared at her, remembering the glow in her cheeks, the beautiful wildness in her eyes that autumn when Matt had stood up at the dinner table and said they had an announcement. Meg had sat there beaming, regaling them all with the story of Matt getting down on one knee at a candlelit restaurant with a solitaire in a champagne flute and a cello quartet playing their favorite song?—
“I don’t understand,” Kyle said.
“We made it up,” she said. “Well, I made it up. I was embarrassed about how it really happened, so I just sort of blurted out this imaginary version of events. When Matt saw how everyone ate up that version of the story, he just sort of went with it.”
“What really happened?”
Meg sighed. “Like I said, I made a big effort to only bring up marriage once a year. We were watching a football game on TV and one of the players started talking about his wife in an interview—about how she was always there for him and was his rock through all the ups and downs. Anyway, I made a comment about how sweet that was. How the word wife sounded so much steadier than girlfriend or partner.
“What did Matt say?”
“I believe his exact words were ‘Jesus Christ, Meg—enough with the nagging already.’”
“God.” Kyle felt his hands clenching at his sides, and he cursed the part of himself that wanted to go back in time and punch his brother. Admittedly he hadn’t been on the same page as Cara when it came to marriage, but he liked to think he hadn’t been a dick about it.
“Normally, I would have just let it drop,” Meg continued. “I never wanted to be a nag, you know? But I guess I was thinking it had been eight years and I wasn’t getting any younger and—well, anyway, I asked why he was so opposed to marriage.”
“Why was he?”
“I don’t know. He never said. He picked up a bowl of potato chips and walked into the guest room to watch the rest of the game. We didn’t say another word about it until two nights later when he came home from work and slammed this little velvet box on the counter while I was in the kitchen making crab cakes.”
“The ring?” he guessed, hating this story the more he heard.
“The ring,” she confirmed. “I looked up and he said, ‘Here. We might as well do it.’”
“‘We might as well do it,’” Kyle repeated. “It has a certain romantic flair to it.”
“Matt never claimed to be a romantic,” she said, sounding a little defensive. “I knew that from the beginning, and I was fine with it.”
The prickly note in her voice made Kyle bite back the criticism flaring up at the back of his brain. “Okay.”
“Anyway, he tried to put the ring on my finger, but my hands were covered in crab meat and egg, so I tried to rinse them off really fast, but the ring slipped off and went into the garbage disposal, and I spent the next twenty minutes trying to fish it out.”
“I guess that’s more unique than fishing it out of a champagne flute.”
“I don’t really like champagne anyway.”
“So you said yes?”
She hesitated, and he watched her brow furrow a little in the muted half-light. “You know, he never actually asked. And come to think of it, I never said yes. I just started wearing the ring and planning the wedding and trying really hard to believe he’d love being married once it actually happened.”
“I guess you never got to find out.”
