One Hundred Proposals

by Holly Martin

  *

  I was standing naked in my bedroom when the front door crashed open. After Harry’s departure hours before, I’d treated myself to a bit of retail therapy – buying a wildly inappropriate dress and ridiculously high heeled shoes. I’d just been trying them on, realised the underwear that I was wearing was not suitable and had just taken them off to replace them with something else when Harry’s feet thundered up the stairs.

  ‘Suzie!’ Harry roared.

  I launched myself across the bed and slammed the door just as he reached the top.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Bedroom. I’m naked. Hang on a sec.’

  To my great surprise, Harry burst in, with his hand clamped over his eyes.

  ‘Harry!’

  ‘This can’t wait.’

  ‘Yes it bloody well can.’

  Harry turned and grabbed my robe from the back of the door. With his eyes tightly closed he offered it out and I quickly pulled it on.

  ‘Ok, what the hell was so urgent?’

  Harry opened one eye and then, seeing I was safely covered up, he opened both. He reached out and grabbed my arms, his smile so big, his eyes so wide, I wasn’t sure if he’d taken some hallucinogenic drug.

  ‘Suzie, shit, I don’t know where to start.’

  Oh please don’t let this be another woman story. Seeing him with that redhead this morning was bad enough.

  ‘The beginning.’ I wrapped my hands around his arms as he didn’t seem likely to let me go any time soon.

  ‘The video of my cow proposal has over two million hits on Youtube.’

  I stared at him whilst the weight of those words sunk in.

  ‘Holy shit!’ I whispered.

  ‘That’s just the start. We now have close to thirty thousand followers on the blog.’

  That at least explained the increase in calls today.

  ‘You need to sit down for the next bit.’ He pushed me down gently onto the bed, with his hands on my shoulders. Then he changed his mind. ‘No, stand up. I think.’ He pulled me to my feet.

  ‘Just tell me.’

  ‘I had a chat with the magazine people today.’

  The bottom dropped out of my world. ‘You’re leaving, aren’t you? The magazine wants you to go and work for them instead.’

  He stopped with his excitement for a moment and kissed my forehead so sweetly that my heart leapt into my mouth.

  ‘No. It’s not that. They’ve offered us a deal. You won’t believe this. I can’t believe it myself. I can’t believe that I actually managed to talk them into it.’

  ‘Harry, for the love of God, what?’

  ‘They asked me where I foresaw this proposal thing going and I told them I wanted to show you the world – I wanted to take you to every tiny little pocket of it and propose to you in the most beautiful, most barren, most extreme places. They were keen, very keen, I could see that. Suddenly I found myself telling them that I had a meeting with The Daily Mail later this afternoon, that they were interested in making it a daily article. I don’t know why I said it, but it worked. The next thing they did was offer me this.’

  He pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and passed it to me. I read it, and read it again. The words danced in front of my eyes.

  I looked at Harry. ‘Is this what I think it is?’

  He swallowed. ‘Two round-the-world tickets. We leave on Friday.’

  I sat down heavily on the bed as I read the words again.

  ‘This is a joke.’

  ‘No joke. They want exclusivity. I’m allowed to blog one more time on our website to tell our followers where to catch me next, after that I’ll be writing for Silver Linings. They will feature my daily blog on their website and the best bits will be featured in their weekly magazine. We can post pictures and stuff as well. I made a deal too, that every blog will have links back to our website and our contact details et cetera, so you’ll gain good exposure for your company out of this too.’

  ‘Our company.’

  He waved it away.

  ‘Harry we can’t leave, our company is just starting to take off. We’ve worked so hard to get where we are. We need to be here to help our clients.’

  ‘You need a holiday, and it’s just three months – ninety days. We can handle emails on our mobiles, take our laptops with us. I’ve had a word with Jules and, as she’s at home with Bella, she was happy to take all our calls and then she can email over the main details to us. We can go through it with her before we go and Badger says he’d be happy to help too.’

  I stared at him and read the contract again.

  ‘Suzie, you have to say yes.’

  ‘Then yes.’

  Harry whooped like a big kid, yanked me to my feet and swung me round so fast I could barely breathe. I laughed and giggled against him. Around the world. Apart from a couple of family driving holidays to Spain and France, I’d never been out of Britain. I’d never even been on a plane.

  The phone rang in the office but for once I ignored it.

  ‘Harry, wait, wait, stop swinging me round, you’re making me dizzy.’

  Harry slowed and stopped, holding me steady as I wobbled a bit.

  ‘Where are we going first? Do you have a plan? What do I need to pack?’

  ‘I need to thrash a lot of this out with Sunlounger, the holiday company that the magazine are working with to run this feature. I have a meeting with them tomorrow. There will be a rough plan but also room for improvisation too. We’re going to Australia - ’

  My heart roared in my chest. ‘Harry I’ve always wanted to go there. It’s so beautiful.’

  He grinned. ‘I know. I was quite insistent that was on our list. We fly to The Galapagos Islands first.’

  ‘But this is all so expensive.’

  ‘I would love to take credit for that, but Silver Linings and Sunlounger are paying for everything. A lot of it will be freebies or heavily discounted from the hotels and flight companies, knowing that they will get good coverage in the magazine.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Two million reasons why. Two million people and counting have watched our cow proposal, that’s potentially two million people that will go and buy Silver Linings to follow our story.’

  None of this made any sense.

  ‘Harry, are we seriously doing this?’

  He nodded

  I squealed and launched myself at him, throwing my arms round his neck.

  ‘Now that was the reaction I was hoping for,’ he said, holding me tight against him.

  Chapter Eight

  Proposer’s Blog

  Day 7: The Blue Plaque Proposal. Location: Hyde Park.

  I love history – the interesting snippets, the gossip, the intrigue, the filth and the glamour. Who was sleeping with who. Delving into the past is like reading a copy of Hello, there was so much backstabbing, treason, murder and sordid affairs. Suzie loves it too – she insists she doesn’t, but with every little bit of history I tell her, her eyes light up like a kid in a sweet shop.

  London is filled with so much history. I love how you can be walking the streets alongside men and women in their power suits, amongst red buses, black cabs and high rise office buildings, and suddenly you round a corner and – beyond the vision of the office workers who walk past it every day – there’s this tiny corner of the city wall built nearly two thousand years before.

  The blue plaques are great for this, just wander around London and you might unexpectedly come across the place where Samuel Pepys lived, where he wrote those famous diaries hundreds of years before.

  I was with Suzie the other day when we stumbled across one for Ian Fleming. She’s a huge James Bond fan, read all the books many times. She got very excited to have found where he lived.

  This gave me an idea.

  So, after work, I gave her a map with some of the more interesting blue plaques marked on it. Suzie lapped it up. We strolled through the streets with Suzie almost yelling with excitem
ent as we found Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale and Winston Churchill. The funny ones are good too, Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street and my favourite, and now Suzie’s favourite too, simply reads: ‘Jacob von Hogflume 1864-1909 Inventor of time travel. Lived here in 2189.

  So after our little treasure hunt, we ‘found’ ourselves in Hyde Park, one of our favourite places. As we walked through the naked trees, amongst the snowdrops and crocuses that indicate the start of new life, we found a bench we regularly sit on and on it was a new blue plaque that Suzie had never noticed before. It read:

  ‘It was here, on this bench, on February 17th, that Harry proposed to Suzie.’

  I love seeing Suzie smile, it’s one of my all-time favourite things in the world.

  This is my last blog on this page. Next time you visit here, you’ll be automatically redirected to my new blog page at Silver Linings magazine. You will still be notified as normal of new updates. As most of you will be aware, from our news page, our One Hundred Proposals is about to go international. We fly to The Galapagos Islands in three days.

  Proposer’s Blog

  Day 9: The Underwear Proposal. Location: Suzie’s Bedroom

  We leave for The Galapagos Islands tomorrow, and then we’ll spend ninety days travelling around the world. There is so much to see and not enough time to see it in. But we have to pack for every eventuality too.

  We packed together as the amount Suzie wanted to take would fit in five suitcases rather than one – so I decided to help limit the intake.

  I came up with a strict rule. I said one of everything. I thought that was fair.

  One pair of jeans, one smart top, one pair of smart trousers, one pair of combats, one pair of hiking trainers, one pair of black flat sparkly sandals – they’ll go with everything – one dress, one pair of shorts, one vest, one T-shirt, one long sleeved T-shirt, one hoodie, one cardigan, one hat, one scarf, one pair of gloves, one swimming costume, one bikini – because apparently a bikini doesn’t count as a swimming costume, as it’s so tiny I let that one slide. Every time I turned my back, she sneaked things into the corners of the case, or hid them underneath already allowed clothes. She thought I didn’t know. I turned my back a lot.

  Suddenly she remembered her underwear. Finally, my big moment.

  I presented her with a box of little shorts with my face and the words ‘Marry Me’ printed on them. She didn’t stop laughing for ten minutes.

  Then she said that, as nice as they were, she would probably take her own underwear. When I asked her why, she laughed and said if she was with another man and if it ever came down to sex, seeing my face whilst undressing her would probably put the other man off. I told her that was all the more reason for taking them.

  Then we had a big row.

  She accused me of having double standards and asked why it was ok for me to screw around with a different woman every night but not for her. I did point out that she wasn’t gay so she probably wouldn’t be screwing around with a different woman every night anyway.

  She said I’d probably have a woman in every port and she’d be left sitting in the hotel like a Billy No Mates.

  I’m sure the topic of other men and women don’t come up with other would-be proposers.

  An excellent start to our holiday.

  *

  I stared across the aisle of the plane at Harry, sitting two rows in front of me, as he flirted with the air hostess. The cabin was busy with people getting ready for departure but she seemed to only have time for him.

  I had been so excited about this trip, but my excitement had quickly dwindled over the week. In between all our planning and preparations, Harry had been out with Kate, the redhead, three times. The sex, apparently, was amazing. Of course I was jealous, but I think the worry of what he would be like on our holiday was also starting to set in. I think the final straw had been when Harry had written into our round-the-world plan, arrangements to meet with an old girlfriend, Chloe, who he had remained friends with and now lived in New York.

  I suppose I couldn’t expect Harry to remain celibate over the three months around the world, he’d already done that for almost a year after Jack had died, but I didn’t want to be sitting in a foreign country alone. Hooking up with my own man was almost out of the question. I was hopeless when it came to flirting or approaching men. And on the rare occasions men approached me, I became a bumbling mess that quickly put them off.

  Maybe I would try a little practice flirting now. If Harry could do it, I could do it too. I turned to the bloke next to me and I was disappointed to see a short, bald man in his late fifties, sweating profusely from every orifice and mopping his brow with a pink satin handkerchief. I glanced down to see he was holding hands with the man next to him, a man dressed entirely in black with a dragon earring.

  I looked around for someone else who I could flirt with, but happy couples were everywhere. Honeymoon couples, middle-aged couples, even elderly couples who had probably spent their entire lives together.

  I was alone.

  The plane started to move and I gripped the arms of the chair so hard my knuckles turned white.

  That was another thing I was upset about. This was my first time on a plane and amongst the manic preparations over the last few days I had discovered I was a nervous flyer. Nervous was an understatement. My stomach was rolling, my heart racing. In my nightmares I had seen our plane explode, crash into the sea, crash into another plane, and even get abducted by aliens. I wanted Harry to hold my hand and distract me but instead he was over there staring at the air hostess like she was the only woman in the world.

  I hadn’t told Harry about my fear of flights. I didn’t want him to know that I was petrified. This flight was thirteen hours to Miami, then another two hours or so to Guayaquil airport in Ecuador, followed by a another two hour trip on a tiny little plane to Baltra Island. It was going to be a long day.

  I looked over at Harry again. The air hostess was showing him how to use the seatbelt, as if he didn’t know.

  The plane rocked a bit as it bumped over the runway, but it was enough to make all those nightmares come flooding back.

  Jules had recommended that I take sleeping tablets. Apparently I’d wake up the other side of the world, completely refreshed and none the wiser about the thirteen elapsed hours.

  I swallowed two tablets and closed my eyes as I waited for the effects. There were announcements, people chatting, the noise of the engines. It all became white noise.

  I heard the roar of the engines, the pitch of the plane as it took off, my ears popped and we levelled out. We were now approximately thirty thousand feet in the air. I’d researched it over the last few days. That was a long way to go when plummeting to the ground.

  But I was thankful that the sleeping tablets already seemed to be taking effect. My last thought as I drifted into oblivion was of burning fire balls of molten metal crashing into the sea like meteorites.

  *

  I woke as the plane jolted underneath me. My eyes shot open with panic but buildings whizzed past the small airplane windows outside and I realised we had landed. My head felt so heavy and my eyes were already drooping, taking me back into the dark abyss again. My next realisation was that I was lying on the chest of the bald man next to me, a small patch of dribble soaking his shirt. My hand was resting on his crotch.

  I quickly struggled to get up but the bald man stopped me with his arm round my shoulders.

  ‘Take it easy,’ said the bald man in a voice that sounded just like Harry. ‘Give yourself a chance to wake up.’

  I peered up at the bald man and to my surprise found Harry staring down at me.

  ‘You’re not the bald man.’

  I felt like I was drunk.

  ‘Not the last time I checked, no.’

  ‘But…’ I looked around me in confusion. The man with the dragon earring had also gone, replaced by another younger man in a suit.

  ‘We swapped seats,’ Harry explained.

&
nbsp; ‘Oh.’

  I relaxed into him before I remembered I was still angry at him, but with his hand in my hair, stroking me, it hardly seemed important any more.

  ‘Are we in Miami?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I tried to surreptitiously wipe away some of the dribble from Harry’s shirt when I noticed a huge skull and crossbones ring on my wedding finger. I looked up at him in confusion.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  I waggled my finger, as much as I could with the heavy weight of the ring on it.

  ‘Oh yes, that. We got engaged.’

  ‘Whilst I was asleep?’

  ‘Yes. It was quite a big proposal, very elaborate. I’m sorry you missed it.’

  ‘And I said yes?’

  ‘Well no, obviously. But the bald man next to you nodded your head for you which everyone in the plane took to be a yes.’

  ‘Everyone on the plane?’

  ‘Yes, it was quite the show. I did record it on my phone. I’ll show you later.’

  I looked down at the ring and smiled. I liked the idea of being engaged to Harry a lot, even though it was a fake engagement.

  ‘I know the ring isn’t exactly to your taste, it was donated to us.’ Harry indicated the seat where the man with the dragon earring had sat.

  ‘I love it.’ I said, honestly. Any symbol of our engagement, no matter how hideous, was fine by me.

  I returned my attention to the dribble and Harry watched me try to wipe it off. I blushed. ‘I dribbled on your shirt.’

  ‘I noticed. It’s ok.’

  I closed my eyes and leaned into him, sleepily.

  ‘I love you, Harry.’

  I felt him tense under me straight away. Crap, crap, crap.

  I looked up at him, his eyes were wide with horror or shock.

  ‘Not like that. Never like that,’ I said.

  He continued to stare at me.

  Thankfully then the seatbelt light went off and everyone around us scrabbled to their feet, reaching into overhead lockers and fighting their way down the aisle so they could be first off the plane. I lumbered to my feet as well, my legs not performing as I wanted them to.