by Hart, Staci
Rin, Val, and I held armfuls of tulle and chiffon with Amelia’s face in the middle, so much fabric that we couldn’t see around it.
“This dress is ridiculous,” Amelia said shortly as she finished up.
“It’s gorgeous,” Rin amended.
“Gorgeous and ridiculous.” The toilet flushed somewhere beyond the layers of white fabric.
She sighed and stood, and we shimmied out of the stall, Val scanning the room to make sure it was empty before an unprepared guest accidentally saw her ass.
Once in the safety of the space in front of the sinks, we helped set her to rights.
“God, Amelia, everything has just been perfect,” Rin said with a wistful smile.
Amelia smiled. “You’re next.”
Rin laughed. “I’m not in any hurry. In fact, I bet Val will be before me. I told Court two years, and I meant it.”
Val snorted a laugh. “If Sam and I get married before you and Court, you and me are going to have a sit-down. Court’s waiting on you, you know.”
“I do know, and he’ll keep waiting until I’m sure he’s not going to club me over the head and drag me back to his cave.”
Amelia gasped. “Oh my gosh—you should have a double wedding like in a Jane Austen novel.”
One of Val’s eyebrows rose. “Would you have wanted to share your wedding day with one of us?”
She laughed. “Fair point.”
“Anyway,” Val started, “who knows? Maybe it’ll be Katherine and Theo next.”
It was my turn to laugh. “Theo and I are perfectly happy exactly as we are. He knows I don’t believe in marriage. We’re partners. We’re committed. We don’t need the party and the ring and the name change.”
“You have to admit, the party and the ring and the name change are appealing,” Val said.
I shrugged. “It makes me more uncomfortable than anything.”
“Okay, what about the tax break?” Rin asked.
“Now, that I can understand,” I answered.
“You two look so happy.” Amelia beamed. “Wedding or no wedding, I’m glad you found him. I’m glad you found each other.”
“Me too.” I beamed back.
She straightened herself up in the mirror, and we talked and laughed as we walked out of the bathroom together.
Effervescent. It was the perfect word to describe how I felt, like fizzy, floating bubbles and sparkling joy. It was an effect of the psyche, I knew. But I didn’t care.
It felt too good to question.
Theo and Tommy stood side by side at the edge of the dance floor like they’d been waiting for us, twin sentinels in midnight suits, hands hooked in their pockets and matching expressions of joy when they saw us. And without forethought, I found myself in his arms.
He kissed me tenderly, and before I knew it, my hand was in his. I thought we would head for the dance floor, but instead, he towed me toward the garden.
I didn’t ask why, didn’t wonder what we were doing, just blissfully followed him.
I’d follow him anywhere.
It was quiet outside the tent, the music and laughter far away. The night was warm and cloudless, the garden lush and green, dotted with low lights. Past a fountain we went and into an alcove of vines and wisteria.
And there we stopped. We said nothing. He turned to face me, the adoration and reverence on his face filling me with a surge of that feeling. The rightness. It was everywhere—skating across our skin, zipping in the air between us, filling our lungs and transferred in our breaths. He kissed me, kissed me with a deep longing, a hundred promises, a thousand wishes.
He kissed me until I was breathless and boneless, my self quiet and my body alive.
“When I met you, I never thought we’d end up here,” I mused, my hands skimming the lapels of his suit.
“Making out in a garden?” he asked with a sideways smile. The Look was on his face, but something about it was deeper. Different.
“Oh, I might have guessed that, but not that I was pregnant. And not that you would become my partner.” I searched his eyes. “I’m so happy I found you. I’m so thankful for you, for the way you understand me. I just…I’m so happy, Theo. And it’s all because of you.”
“Really? Because I think it’s because of you.”
“Why?” I asked with a laugh. “For incubating our baby?”
He pulled me closer, his smile shining on me like the sun, warming me all over. “Among other things.”
“Kiss me,” I whispered with a smile I only granted to him.
So he did. He kissed me softly, a tender exchange, touched with veiled intention that sparked my curiosity.
Theo broke the kiss to gaze into my face with adoration. “Remember when you wished it could be like this forever?”
“I do,” I said with a smile.
“Is that still what you want?”
“More than ever.”
“Good. Then I have something to ask you.”
My smile slid off my face as he dropped to one knee. His hand disappeared into his pocket, returning with a little velvet box, which he opened with a creak. And on a bed of white satin sat a band of gold adorned with a sparkling diamond, shining with moonlight.
His face, his beautiful face was turned up to mine under the soft light of the moon.
“Theo, what are you doing?” I breathed, panicked.
“Asking you to marry me. Because all I’ll ever want is you.”
The ring blinked at me. I blinked at it.
Shock, cold and sharp, ripped through me. Everything I’d thought I knew, everything I’d thought we were, came to a halt, the brakes slamming with all their force. But the contents of the car kept moving, flying into the windshield, testing the limits of the seatbelts, leaving bruises and broken bones that I had the horrible realization would never heal.
The construct of my life and my future came crumbling and tumbling and rumbling to the ground of my heart.
I dug through my thoughts with frantic hands, trying to find something, anything to make sense of what he was asking. For months, he had challenged my beliefs until the boundaries were confused and the fences weak. But on the proposition on his lips, I realized with shattering certainty that I hadn’t abandoned them.
I’d built my life inside of them, and they wouldn’t be breached so easily, so quickly.
Of all the people in all the world, I’d thought he was the only one who understood me. All this time, I’d thought we were on the same page. But the ring in his hand and the look on his face told me we weren’t. I had been grossly misunderstood.
I had never considered marriage. I had never spoken the word love. I wanted him, wanted to be with him forever if he’d have me. But not like this.
Anything but this.
I couldn’t make snap decisions. I wasn’t capable. Especially when it came to something of this magnitude.
In that moment, without the comfort of warning, without the time to consider what he was asking, there was only one thing I could do.
Default to the relationship construct I’d stood upon my entire life.
“But…Theo, I…I don’t believe in marriage. I told you in the beginning.”
The flicker of fear on his face gutted me. “You were serious?”
“You’ve met my mother, and you know me better than I know myself. Whenever am I not serious? I…I don’t know how…I can’t…”
Panic, caustic and bitter, buckled my knees.
Before I knew I was falling, I was in his arms. He helped me to a concrete bench where I sat with tingling hands.
“Breathe, Kate.”
I drew a loud, deliberate breath through my nose and held it.
“Let it out,” he commanded.
So I did. “I…I’m sorry. I was unprepared for that question.”
A loud sigh of his own, the hurt in his voice clear as he said, “I should have known better than to surprise you. You hate surprises. I justified this to myself so far that I was convi
nced this was what you wanted. I love you, Kate.”
Love. The word knocked the wind out of me, tilted the horizon. I leaned into him so I wouldn’t fall.
“I thought we were on the same page,” I said half to myself, the words quiet and mournful. “I thought you understood.”
He shifted, moving to kneel before me again, taking my hands in his. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry to have caught you unaware. But from the second I met you, I have loved you. I didn’t understand how or why…at the time, I didn’t realize what it even was. And once I figured it out, there was only one thing to do. This.” He looked down at my hands, thumbing my left hand, third finger. “I’ve only ever wanted two things in this life—to be the father I never had and to be a husband to a woman I love. Then I met you. And now my dreams are all right here in front of me.” He shook his head, raised his gaze, met my eyes. “I can let go of marriage if you love me. I can do anything if you love me.”
A succession of words, letters strung together to make sounds. A paragraph. A question.
And everything changed.
He’d impressed his boundaries on me, and now that I knew, I had to respect them—I had no choice. He had always respected mine. Had I known his, I would have done the same.
With the truth, I would break his heart.
I would break my own heart.
“Theo…” I whispered his name, and he knew. I saw the tear of his soul in two syllables.
A pause, thick with a truth neither of us wanted to acknowledge. “You don’t love me.” Cold. Distant. Broken.
My throat closed, stinging and hot. “I’ve never felt like this about anyone.”
“But you don’t love me.” His face was stone. The words were miles away.
“I don’t believe in love,” I said, begging him to understand. “And I can’t promise you something I don’t believe in.”
He let go of my hands and stood, blocking the moon, casting me in his shadow. The moonlight threw a halo around him like an angel.
“If you don’t love me, there’s nothing left to say. If there’s no hope that we can be anything beyond a set of rules and a baby, then we’ve reached an impasse. If there’s nowhere to go but here, I won’t be satisfied. I love you, Kate. I’ve done all I can to prove that love. I’ve given you everything, and gladly, because I thought we were moving in the same direction. But you stopped, and I kept going.”
My hands found each other, twisting together like the twist in my chest. “I thought you knew. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” The word choked off, my tears rolling down my cheeks, my chest split and burning. “I don’t want to be without you.”
“I don’t either,” he said, his voice low and trembling. “I haven’t asked you for a single thing but this—to love me. And this, I can’t let go.”
This was what he wanted—to break up. I couldn’t say the words he needed to hear, but I could respect this. I could give him this even if it killed me.
Val ran up, smiling and panting and completely unaware. “God, there you are! Come on, they’re leaving! We need to go light sparklers!”
She snagged my hand and ran, pulling me behind her. And when I looked back, there he stood in the moonlight, watching me leave.
And I knew then that our forever wasn’t the one I’d envisioned.
It was one I’d never imagined.
One without him.
Part III
Third Trimester
24
The End of That
Theo
27 weeks, 1 day, 12:01
The cab was silent as a tomb.
Katherine sat close enough to touch, her face turned to the window and her hands clasped in her lap.
She should have been in my arms. She should have been smiling instead of crying. She should have had my ring on her finger.
But none of those things were true. And our reality had shifted into a place I didn’t understand and had no patience for.
A matter of inches separated us. But it was a chasm, a yawning, empty space with nothing but wind and broken dreams.
I’d never been one for frivolous dreams. Tommy was the one with the wild imagination. I was the one who relied on the tangible, the fact. I’d thought Katherine and I were a fact, a solid truth. I’d thought we were on the same page. But what I’d thought was a step, she’d thought was the pinnacle. We’d reached the top for her, and as I looked up that staircase to the future I wanted, I found I couldn’t let it go.
So I had to let her go.
I tried to reject the thought, the impossibility of it staggering. But facts were facts.
I needed her love, and she didn’t love me.
And that was the end of that.
The taxi pulled up to the house, and silently, we exited. Through the front door, into the dark house. Up the stairs and into our living room. My living room.
She stopped, turned to face me, stood in the middle of the room in that beautiful dress, swollen with my child, my heart in her palm and tears in her eyes. “Theo, I’m sorry. I wish I’d known what you needed.”
My chest, my shoulders, rose and fell with a weighted, definitive breath. “I thought it was clear, Katherine. This was never casual for me.”
“It wasn’t for me either,” she said quietly, shining tears on her cheeks. “This was why I didn’t want to see you this way. Because I knew either I would hurt you or you would hurt me. I knew it would fall apart. I knew we would end up here, and now, it’s happened.” She shook her head, her eyes cast down. “I should have stayed away.”
“I’d argue that this was probably inevitable. And I’m not sorry we tried. I’m only sorry I failed.”
“You didn’t fail.”
“Are you sure about that? This was what I wanted. It was what I’ve always wanted from you, from the first second I kissed you.”
“But I can’t give that to you. I-I told you,” she said through a sob.
“I should have listened,” I said, my voice rough. “But I thought I knew better. That’ll teach me.” I turned for my room, more exhausted than I’d ever been.
“What do we do now?”
I glanced back at her over my shoulder. “You don’t have to do anything. It’s me who has to figure out how to stop loving you.”
And I walked away with no hope that I actually could.
25
Impassable
Katherine
28 weeks, 1 day
Pity was written all over Amelia’s face, and misery was written all over mine.
It had been a week since the wedding. Since the end.
Theo and I had barely spoken beyond the bare minimum required to share living space. Meals had been prepared in advance of dinner, but he hadn’t graced the dinner table, citing work. He’d stayed gone, stayed away.
I was miserable. And when he was home, it was unbearable.
Neither of us had brought up us. We hadn’t been in the room together long enough to even try.
Amelia had come up almost the second that she and Tommy came home from their honeymoon, and she’d listened with wide eyes as I recounted the whole horrible happening to her.
“I…I can’t believe he just asked you like that,” she said. “Had you guys ever even talked about marriage?”
“Only on the day I told him I was pregnant. And we joked about it then. Seems neither of us knew the other was serious.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked gently.
“I don’t know,” I answered, casting my gaze to my hands in my lap. “I don’t know that there’s anything we can do. We want different things. For the first time, we’re out of alignment. Or maybe we were out of alignment the whole time and just didn’t know.”
“I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you found each other and want each other and aren’t together.”
“We’re fundamentally different in the one place it matters the most. His idea of relationships is founded in love and marriage. Mine is founded in partnership, not passi
on. I can’t say things I don’t mean or step into a construct I don’t believe in just because I want to be with him. And he can’t abandon the idea of love and marriage for me. He needs a promise I can’t give him. He’s given me this boundary, and I have to respect it. There’s nothing I can do.”
She pressed her palm to her chest, her eyes wide and shining. “That breaks my heart.”
I nodded, swallowing tears of my own. “It breaks mine, too.” With a deep breath, I said, “But that doesn’t change the fact that we’re having a baby. We have to find a way to be partners again, to put our feelings away so we can do what needs to be done. So, I have to talk to him. This is all my fault. I knew this would happen. I knew I’d hurt him. I knew I’d get hurt. This was everything I was afraid of.”
“Do you really think you could have stopped it? Do you think you could have stayed away?”
Another sigh, my ribs tight and aching. “No.”
“Well,” Amelia started, “I know you’ll figure it out. And I know you doubt the possibility, but I hope you find a middle ground. You found each other, and losing each other like this is just so unfair.”
I tried to smile, the gesture thin. “Thank you,” I answered without hope. “How was Tahiti?”
She brightened up. “Oh, it was beautiful and relaxing and perfect. All we did was lie around in the sun, eat, and nap for a week.”
“And bone.”
She laughed. “Yes, and bone.”
I found myself truly smiling for the first time in a week. “The wedding was beautiful. I’m so happy for you and Tommy.”
“Thank you. And…well, I have other news, too,” she said, her cheeks pink and eyes bright. “I’m pregnant.”
My lungs shot open in a gasp, my hand flying to my mouth. “Oh my God!” I flung myself at her, wrapping her in my arms in an uncharacteristically emotive gesture fueled by my ache for touch, my relief in not being alone in my pregnancy, my happiness for her and Tommy, my inability to contain my emotions.
She laughed, catching me. “We’ll have baby Banes just a few months apart.”