Page 48 of Merrily Ever After
“Something you could do for what?”
I stare at her. “I didn’t think I said that out loud.”
“You were mumbling.”
“Who was mumbling?” Andrew asks, slipping past her. “Was your room always this small?”
“Only with you in it,” I tell him, but he ignores me as always, poking at my make-up. Molly lingers where she is but keeps her eyes on me. Whatever she sees makes her pause.
“We need a moment,” she says to Andrew. “Go away.”
He starts to smile before it drops. “Oh, you’re serious.”
“Yes. Leave.”
“But I’m her brother.”
“Exactly. We need to have a girl chat.”
“I can have a girl chat,” he protests, but she grabs his sleeve and tows him to the door.
“Five minutes,” she says, and he frowns.
“Fine.” He points a finger at me. “I’ve got to get more stuff down from the attic. But if a ghost takes me on an adventure through Christmases past, don’t yell at me that they didn’t take you.”
Molly closes the door after him and perches on my bed, her hands clasped in her lap. “All right,” she says. “What’s going on? You’ve been in a funk since I got here.”
“It’s because I’m in love with my girlfriend,” I tell her. “And one day, I want to marry her in a castle in a really big dress and then grow old together and die. I’ll have to die first because my life would be unbearable without her.”
Molly nods, used to me by now. “And that’s a problem?”
“No. The problem is that what if instead of any of that, she decides to move away and we try to make it work, but we can’t and then we break up and I’m so miserable I start putting poems I wrote online?”
“Right.” Molly just blinks. “Okay, start again.”
I sigh. “I don’t want her to move away.”
“And have you told her that?”
“Of course I have! But I don’t want to force her. I want her towantto be here and this Christmas is my last chance.”
“For what?”
“Forus,” I say, propping an arm into the mattress to sit up. “For her to realize that what we have is rare and special and perfect. I want to do something memorable. Something that everyone will talk about. That will be passed on to our children and our children’s children. Like when you and Andrew got engaged and you ran away.”
“I didn’t run aw—”
“And you just started sobbing in the hallway. And you—”
“I remember,” Molly interrupts, flustered. “It was an emotional moment.”
“But that’s what Iwant. I want to make Daniela cry with how much she loves me.”
Molly bites her lip and turns to sit cross-legged beside me. “Why don’t we work on getting her a really nice gift,” she begins, and I collapse back down.
“It needs to be special. I could like … I don’t know, throw her her own personal Christmas festival. Or hire a flash mob.”
“That seems like a lot of work.”
