by Susan Fox
“Doing?” He frowned, processing, then said, “You don’t mean . . . getting married?”
I nodded.
His eyes widened. “You’re kidding, right? I mean, I know you’ve been having some, uh, pre-wedding nerves, but that’s normal, isn’t it?”
“I guess.” Everyone said so, but what I felt seemed stronger. Maybe I was wrong, though. This was why we needed to talk. “I don’t know. Are you feeling any, you know, nerves? Doubts?”
He shrugged. “Not really. I mean, we’re young like everyone keeps telling us, but I want to marry you. We’ve always wanted that. Moving up the date from next year—”
“Should we have?” I broke in. Maybe the timing was wrong. “We always said we’d get married after we got our B.A.’s.” And right before starting the year-long program to get our Education degrees. Then I was going to teach middle grade kids, and he’d teach high school.
That was something else we’d been planning for years. We really were settled.
“But then you were diagnosed,” he said.
Matt had nagged me into asking a doctor about what my sisters and mom had for years blown off as being normal menstrual cramps. I’d had surgery for endometriosis a couple of months ago. The diagnosis had made Matt and I rethink things. We’d always wanted kids and never once imagined I might face infertility at the age of twenty-one.
“Yeah.” I nodded, mentally retracing the steps that had led us to move up the wedding. “Then you saw that last-minute deal on the cruise.” A Mexican Riviera cruise—a perfect honeymoon and pure R&R. After the surgery, recuperation, and being crazy busy catching up on missed coursework and exams, I was desperate to lie back and do nothing.
“It all came together,” he said, “as if it was meant to be.”
That was how it had felt. Yes, I remembered. But now . . . I squeezed my lips together, then parted them and heard myself say, “But maybe it wasn’t meant to be.”
He frowned. “What are you saying?”
Words poured out, giving voice to all the doubts and fears I’d been trying to ignore all week. “Maybe we shouldn’t do it. Get married. Not now.” Oh God, was I totally crazy? I’d loved Matt since grade two.
“Jeez, Merilee, you’re talking crazy. We’ve loved each other since we were seven.”
It was spooky how he so often read my mind, or our minds were on the same track. I didn’t even have the privacy of my own thoughts. “I know that!” I snapped. “Do you think I don’t know that? I still love you, M, but . . .”
His hands gripped my shoulders, hard. “Calm down, you’re not making any sense.”
“I can’t calm down. I don’t want to calm down. This is important.” He had to see that. Maybe once I explained, he’d make everything right. He’d say something, sweep me off my feet, show me he really, really, totally and utterly loved me, and that we could be just as exciting and passionate as my sisters and their guys. He’d do that thing—that grand romantic thing like Jenna’s man had just done—that would show me I was crazy to have second thoughts.
Fingers biting into me, pinning me down, he stared into my eyes. “How can you have cold feet about getting married Saturday, when we’ve been talking about getting married all our lives?”
“I don’t know!” I wriggled my shoulders until he dropped his hands, then I took a step back, away from him. “Maybe because we’ve been talking about it all our lives.” He was still talking, not doing anything. “Maybe because I’ve known you all my life.” And because of that, I should know better than to hope for a dramatic, romantic gesture.
He shook his head, looking frustrated and pissed off. “I don’t get it. You always said we’re soul mates. We’re M&M. A couple.”
“I’m not sure this is the right time.” The more he tried to persuade me, the more sense he made, the less right the whole thing felt. Instincts counted just as much as logic, and what my instincts craved was not a bunch of rational discussion.
“Everything’s booked.” He snapped out the words. “Theresa made that project plan and you and your sisters have put everything together in under two weeks. Location, minister, reception, food, music. We’ve had the damned stag and stagette.”
He was right, and at first I’d been thrilled to bits about the wedding, but now I felt trapped. “Stop being so logical.” Even that silly stagette had given me doubts, as I’d been showered with sexy, kinky gifts I couldn’t imagine us ever using.
He strode a couple of paces away from me. I heard him take a deep breath, then he turned around and faced me, his expression one of strained patience. “What do you want, Merilee?”
I blinked. What did I want? What had I been hoping for when I came here? Did I want him to fight for me? To sweep me up in his arms and . . . do what? To find that perfect romantic thing, the way Damien had when he asked Theresa to stay over in Honolulu with him. The way Nav had, playing stranger on the train with Kat. The way Mark had, flying down to California to bring Jenna’s car to her.
I didn’t want settled. I didn’t want comfortable. I wanted what my sisters had: a grand, romantic, larger than life love. Was there any hope Matt could give it to me?
Stunned, Matt Townsend stared at the girl he knew better than anyone else in the world, and felt as if he didn’t know her at all. Had she lost her freaking mind?
He struggled to hold onto his patience. After all the initial excitement about announcing the wedding, she’d grown increasingly moody. He’d figured it was the sister effect as her older sisters—the three-pack, as the family called them—had returned to Vancouver one by one. The Fallon girls pushed each other’s buttons, and it was especially bad for Merilee, the unplanned baby who’d come along eight years after Jenna. Rebecca and James Fallon and the three-pack hadn’t rearranged their lives to make room for the newcomer.
That had always annoyed Matt. Merilee was such a sweet person, but her family was so self-absorbed they barely noticed her. He did, though. He noticed, he valued, he loved her. He looked after her.
And now he was pissed off with her. She was talking crazy, and couldn’t even say what she wanted. “Merilee?” he prompted, struggling to keep his voice even, “you don’t want to call off the wedding, right?” When he put it that bluntly, she’d come to her senses. She wasn’t going to dump him flat on his ass two days before their wedding.
“I think”—she sniffled and swiped a hand across eyes the blue of a spring morning—“that maybe I do.” Tears began to roll.
Her tears usually made him want to cradle her in his arms and make everything better. This time he just gaped at her. She hadn’t really said that, had she? “Are you nuts?”
“Oh, Matt,” she wailed, “try to understand.”
“Understand?” Anger and hurt rose in him, and his voice along with them. “Shit, Merilee, what the hell’s going on?” Trying to regain control—he was not, would never be, a guy like his dad who lost his temper—he paced jerkily across the alley, then turned to stare at her. He’d done everything for this girl, focused his life on her for fourteen years. She was not betraying and abandoning him. “Two weeks ago, you said getting married was your dream come true.”
“It was.” She stared back at him, eyes huge and drenched with tears. Her shoulders were rounded inside one of his old T-shirts and she looked small and forlorn. Her dark honey-blond hair lay in gleaming curls on her shoulders, incongruously bouncy, as if it hadn’t gotten the message that she was miserable.
He had, and he was feeling pretty damned crappy. Except he still couldn’t really believe it. “It was,” he said harshly, “and now it isn’t. What’s changed?”
“My sisters came home,” she said, so softly he could barely hear.
“Your family’s trying to talk you out of getting married?” Shit. He’d always thought the Fallons liked him. He’d been at family dinners for the past week, and everyone had been friendly. They’d even been getting along better with each other, too. And now they’d stabbed him in the back.
“No.” She shook her head. “No, it’s not that. Oh, M, I don’t know how to say this.”
Insulted, he said, “You can tell me anything. You know that.”
She took a deep breath, then words flew out on the exhale. “I feel middle-aged.”
Relief sent him rushing over to grip her shoulders comfortingly. Now it all made sense. “Sweetheart, you’re worn out.” When her surgery was scheduled, they’d discussed her skipping a semester at university, but she’d wanted to catch up her courses and exams so they’d graduate together next year. Besides, once they were on their honeymoon, she’d have a week of total rest.
She closed her eyes for a long moment, then opened them and gazed up at him. “I am tired, but that’s not what I meant. We’re so, you know, settled and comfortable as a couple.”
“Settled and comfortable?” Those didn’t sound like bad things except for the tone of her voice.
“I mean, we’re all stable and b-boring”—she ducked her head, again not meeting his eyes—“and there’s no spark or excitement or p-passion.”
His hands jerked off her shoulders as if she’d scalded him. She thought he was boring? That their love life sucked? Well, just shit! His hands clenched, unclenched, clenched again. Yeah, he wasn’t the most exciting guy in the world. How could he be when his mom had told him, at the age of six, that he had to be the man of the house—then at age seven he’d begun protecting Merilee as well?
Through an effort of will, he straightened his clenched fingers. A good man didn’t give in to anger. He didn’t beat up on women, he protected them. Matt was not a temperamental, irresponsible, violent man like his father, the man who had finally—thank God—abandoned him and his mom when he was six.
Matt had thought his maturity and consideration were qualities Merilee loved. Jesus, she’d said so. He’d never had a clue she was unhappy. He wanted to yell at her, to shake her, but he fought to keep his temper in check.
She gazed up, cheeks flushing. “I didn’t tell you all the things I got at the stagette.”
“What?” Startled out of his anger, he gaped at her. She’d gone from dropping that bomb to talking about the stagette? Who was this girl?
“I was so totally embarrassed. Like, there were Ben Wa balls.”
Balls? To play some kind of game? He scrubbed his hands roughly over his face, hoping this was all some horrible dream. “What are you talking about?”
“V-vaginal balls.”
Vaginal balls? He gaped at her, his anger and frustration momentarily forgotten. “Seriously?”
“I mean, can you just imagine? That’s not, I mean, we wouldn’t . . .” She buried her face against his chest.
Oh yeah, he could imagine. Sometimes he’d wanted to try something a little kinky in bed, but he never said anything, afraid she’d think he was a perv. Afraid, too, of where it might take him. Of turning into a man like his dad.
Like that one time, after a night at the pub with their friends, she’d been giggling about being a naughty girl for drinking so much. He was horny and he’d had too much to drink too, and, joking around, he’d said naughty girls should be punished. She’d teased, “I dare you.” Then he’d pulled the long scarf off her neck, tied her hands above her head, forced her on her stomach, and spanked her. He’d hit Merilee. Yeah, he’d only been fooling around, but he’d actually hit her.
Only when she’d cried out in pain had he come to his senses and stopped. Horrified, he’d sobered up immediately and untied her. The shock in her eyes was more than he could bear. He’d apologized profusely and she’d forgiven him, even promised to forget it ever happened, and after that he’d taken care to always be gentle with her.
Merilee was sweet and wholesome, not kinky or skanky. Some of his guy friends boasted about their girlfriends, and sometimes—yeah, he was a red-blooded male—he was envious. But often he just thought the behavior was slutty. Like sexting a crotch shot, or giving a bunch of dudes blow jobs at a party? No, thanks. Merilee had morals and he respected that.
He wasn’t surprised those vaginal balls had embarrassed her. Yet she said she wanted more spark, excitement, passion. Things she didn’t find with him. Yeah, that cut deep. There were different kinds of passion. Their love was like a steady golden candle, not sparks and fireworks.
They’d grown up together. Never even dated anyone else. Best friends who, yeah, were comfortable together. What the hell was wrong with that? Loving security was the most important thing in the world, as he well knew after having a dad like his.
As for sparks, how could he and M have ignited sparks? From the bits of girl talk he’d overheard with their friends, it seemed like sparks happened when you first met someone and fell for them.
And what was Merilee’s idea of excitement anyhow? Going out dancing? A picnic on the beach? They did those things occasionally and he liked them too, but money and time were in short supply.
They’d always been so practical. She had too; it wasn’t just him. If she’d wanted something different, why the hell hadn’t she said so? She had no trouble deciding what movie to see, what kind of pizza to order. What kind of careers they should both have. Mostly, he went along because it all sounded fine to him.
But this, this business about calling off the wedding—no, it didn’t sound fucking fine at all.
“Matt, are you furious? Hurt?” Warm breath brushed his neck. “Say something. Tell me how you feel.”
“I feel . . .” Betrayed. Mad. Frustrated. Shocked. “Shitty.”
She wound her arms around his waist and held him tightly. “I’m sorry, so sorry. I do love you, but over the past few days, it’s just been feeling wrong.”
It felt wrong to marry the guy she loved?
Her arms felt like a vice, so he shoved free of them. Those blue eyes welling with tears didn’t match up with what she was saying. “Then if it feels wrong,” he said bitterly, “we’ll call it off. We’ll call the whole damned thing off.” The words flew out of his mouth, surprising him.
Surprising her, too, from her expression. “The whole thing?”
“Us,” he spat the word out. And now, all those crappy feelings taking over, he was on a roll. “We’re settled, we don’t have passion, we’re wrong. Call it quits.”
“I didn’t . . . You aren’t saying you want to break up?”
Break up. Break up with Merilee? Those words brought him back to reality. The idea was unthinkable. But so was her calling off the wedding. He shook his head, not knowing anything anymore. “I . . . I don’t know.” He hadn’t felt so shitty in his entire life. “What are you saying?”
“Just that we shouldn’t be getting married Saturday.”
“But . . .” He tried to think it through. “Then what? We’re the same two people. Settled, comfortable, all those things you don’t like. We’re not suddenly going to get exciting, whatever the hell you mean by that word.”
Expression stunned, she said, “I didn’t think that far ahead.”
When he tried to, he felt only a bleak chill in his heart. Pissed and hurt though he might be, he told her the truth. “I can’t imagine life without you.”
“Me either.”
They stared at each other for a long moment. He felt like screaming, crying, punching his fist through a wall. The same shit his dad had done, except sometimes that fist hit his mom instead. When Matt was a boy, every time he’d acted out his mom had said he was behaving like his dad, he was breaking her heart.
Yeah, he could hold it together. “We’re in no shape to decide the big stuff right now. We’re both in shock. Let’s take it one step at a time. First step’s cancelling the wedding.”
She blinked back tears and nodded. “Okay, yes, I can think about that. Though my family will be furious. The money they’ve laid out, all the planning. Oh Matt, I got Theresa and Kat and Jenna to come all the way here for nothing.”
Nothing. Their beautiful wedding, the happiest day of their lives, had turned into nothing. In fact, maybe their wh
ole fourteen year relationship was turning into nothing. Tears burned behind his eyes and he clenched his fists, hot tension vibrating up his arms and tightening his shoulders.
“I’ll tell Mom,” he said, his voice raw. For years, his mother had thought of Merilee as her daughter. “And I’ll call the cruise lines.”
“Theresa will draw up one of her project plans,” she said bleakly. “To cancel everything else.” She stepped away from him. “I need to go, so I can tell everyone and get things started.”
“You shouldn’t drive.” Nor should he, and the last thing he wanted was to be confined in a car with her, but he’d always looked after her. “I’ll give you a ride home.”
She held up her hands. “No. Please. I’ll go slow, but I need a few minutes alone.”
Torn, he said, “Promise you’ll be careful?”
“Promise.” Her blue eyes were huge, wet, and swollen.
They stared at each other for long seconds, then she said in a plaintive voice, “Love you, M.”
It was what they always said when they said goodbye. The only time he’d ever heard her say it so sadly was when the doctor had diagnosed her endometriosis and they’d realized they might never have the children they both wanted so badly. Yeah, they could adopt, but they’d had that soul mate thing going on and wanted to create their own babies. Maybe it had been a sign. A sign that they weren’t soul mates after all.
But now, as he’d always done, he gave her what she wanted. “Love you, M.” And it was true. She’d betrayed him, angered him, shattered him, but love didn’t die in the space of minutes. Would it, though? For fourteen years, his future had been certain. Now . . . He couldn’t think about it.
In the past, they’d always kissed goodbye. Today, he folded his arms across his chest.
Merilee turned and walked toward her car.
When she had driven away, Matt dragged his hands across his face. Then, because he couldn’t help worrying, couldn’t help caring, he called her house. He had ambivalent feelings about her family. They were good people, interesting ones, yet they rarely gave Merilee what she needed.