“I love you too.”
“I never thought when I came back to Baton Rouge that it would end up being one of the best experiences of my life, especially not after the disaster it was ten years ago.”
“Things change. Cities. People.”
“I’ve definitely changed. I think that’s why we work, you and I. You’ve always been awesome. I had to grow up enough to meet you at your level. I’m so lucky you gave me a second chance.”
“I’m lucky you came back and took a shot at one.”
He leaned forward to press a soft kiss against my lips, then settled back again. “I’ve set and achieved a lot of goals in my life. Every one I’ve gone after, to be honest. Some of them were hard, but none of them has scared me like coming after you. But we’re here. You’re here. And this thing we have, it’s the best thing in my life, and in a way that’s crazy. Maybe you’ve figured out that I thrive on being the best at things, like my job.”
I smiled. “I’ve noticed.”
“It sounds corny, but I feel powerful when I smash a goal and move to the next one. With you, it’s different. I feel peace. And that sounds boring, but it’s not, I swear. It’s more like this feeling of being whole.” He groaned and broke eye contact, staring up at the ceiling like he wanted to climb into it, but we were still holding hands, so I squeezed his.
“I get it,” I said, my voice softer than the murmuring diners around us, so he had to lean forward to hear me. “I understand. Completely. I didn’t feel empty before, but now I feel more than I was.”
“Yes,” he said on a sigh. “That.” He lifted one of my hands to press a kiss into my palm this time. I felt the touch of his lips all the way down through my toes. “In a life I was living not too long ago, bringing you here to tell you about my promotion would have been all about celebrating the new job, but now it’s about celebrating it with you.”
I froze. This was about a promotion, not a proposal? I tried to keep the shock off my face, but he stopped smiling. “Whoa, what’s wrong?”
I shook my head and withdrew my hands from his so I could drink some water and dab at my mouth with my napkin, stalling for time to pull myself together. “I’m fine,” I said, and my voice held steady. “Tell me about this promotion.”
Max didn’t answer. He sat back, but he didn’t relax. His eyebrows wrinkled, which meant he was problem-solving, and before I could think of another change of subject, his eyebrows straightened at the same time, and he couldn’t have looked more horrified than if he’d knocked his water into my lap. “I’m an idiot,” he said in barely more than a whisper. “I’m such an idiot.”
I stifled the impulse to crawl under the table. “I don’t really want to talk about this, but I’d love to talk about dessert. I think we were saying bread pudding?”
Max didn’t answer for so long that I had to force my eyes up from the menu to meet his. He wasn’t looking at me though. He was staring at the tablecloth and chewing on a corner of his lip. “Bread pudding?” I tried again.
“I need to run out to my car for second.” It was like I hadn’t even spoken. “I’ll be right back. Excuse me.”
He pushed back from the table and bolted for the door. I stared at the dessert menu for another five minutes, but that was practically a Jurassic era as the words turned into nonsense squiggles in front of my eyes. I couldn’t set it down though, because I would never be able to figure out what to do with myself if I let it go.
By the time Max walked back up to the table, I had aged fifty years, but when I forced myself to look at him as he slid into his seat, he looked exactly the same as he had when he’d walked out. How was that possible?
“Hey,” he said, and it came out as a bark of sound. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Hey, you. I’m about to make the biggest jerk of myself ever, but promise me you’ll let me explain?”
He was saying it was going to get worse. How could this get worse? I had no control over the direction things were taking either way, so I nodded.
His forehead cleared slightly, and he reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket to pull out—
Oh, dear Daddy and all his angel friends . . .
A ring box.
A RING BOX.
Chapter 26
He set it on the table between us. “This isn’t how I planned to ask you. I want us to have a talk about all of that, to make sure it’s what you want too—”
“It is.” I couldn’t help myself.
A grin broke over his face. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He laid a hand on the tablecloth, palm up, inviting me to take it. I slid my hand into his without hesitating.
“I’m only showing you this box because I wanted you to know I’ve been thinking about this for a while. And you can be sure I’ll be asking you soon, but until I do, can you pretend I didn’t show this to you? And forget that I was a total idiot not to realize how it would look when I brought you here? And promise to be surprised when you see that box again?”
I eyed it. “Can I look at it?”
He snatched it off the table and tucked it back into his jacket pocket. “No way.”
It was hard not to pout, which I knew I should be embarrassed about, but I didn’t even bother hiding my disappointed sigh.
Max smiled. “I’m feeling better about how it’s all going to go when I pull that ring out next time.”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Rings? Weren’t we talking about your promotion?”
His grin stretched wider. “That’s exactly what we were talking about.”
Oh my heart. Would there ever be a time when that smile didn’t turn me into goo? The waiter stopped at our table again and inquired whether we had decided on dessert. “Bread pudding,” Max said, and I managed a teasing smile back even though Fourth of July and New Year’s collided in my chest and stomach as I considered that at some point soon, this beautiful man was going to ask me to marry him.
The waiter left, and I nudged Max’s foot beneath the table. “Your promotion?”
“Man, Lila. It came faster than I expected. I’m so stoked. I start in two weeks, and it’s going to be awesome. I’ll be a senior manager over manufacturing. It’s going to mean some trips to China.” He leaned forward, his expression anxious again. “Just to be clear, I don’t want to travel away from you for work. If anything, I’ll be spending a lot of time finding reasons not to.”
That set off more flutters in my stomach. He was planning his future around us. I was an us, an us that was going to become permanent. “That’s the great thing about teaching. I almost never have to travel unless I’m chaperoning a field trip, but at worst, that will be for a week once a year when the kids take their Washington, DC, trip.”
“Do you think it’s going to be hard to transfer your credential?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know how credentials work between states. Will Texas take your Louisiana credential? It seems like they would since you’re neighbors.”
Everything inside of me froze again. “Why are you talking about Texas?”
“Because the promotion is in Houston?” The bewilderment in his voice was no match for the confusion trying to claw its way through my insides.
“You didn’t say that.”
“I didn’t?”
It was definitely not a detail I would have missed. “You’re saying you’re moving to Houston in two weeks?”
“Yes. They’re putting me up in a corporate housing complex until I can find a place of my own. I was going to see how soon you could come out and apartment hunt with me. I’m not in a rush. I know you need to finish the school year, but that’s over in a month, so I thought we could do it then.”
All my supper threatened to make a grand reentrance, and I fought the nausea with a deep breath, then another. “I can’t move to Houston.”
“I know not right away, but if we did an August wedding, that’s three months.” Color reddene
d the skin over his cheekbones. “Is that enough time? I can wait longer, however long you need.”
“This . . . It’s not about time. It’s about distance. I can’t move to Houston. I thought you’d gotten the promotion at the office here. My whole life is here. I can’t leave.”
The waiter showed up right then to set a gorgeous plate of bread pudding in front of us and drizzle it with crème fraiche.
“Thank you,” Max said, his voice subdued. The waiter smiled and left. I didn’t touch my spoon.
“You can’t, or you won’t, leave Baton Rouge?” Max’s words were quiet but clear enough to hear the hurt lacing them.
“Both. I’ve told you that from the very beginning.”
“I know. I guess I thought things might have changed.”
“And I thought you had changed your mind about staying here now that you’ve seen a different side of Baton Rouge!”
“And I thought that if you felt for me like I feel for you that you would have changed your mind about leaving, about being with me even with all the crazy demands my career is going to make on me.”
Tears pricked at my eyes. How was it possible for us to get to this point when we’d both been so clear about what we wanted in our futures? “This is what I was afraid of from the beginning.”
He’d been picking at the dessert, not eating it, but I jumped when his spoon clattered to the table loudly enough to turn heads around us. “Are you going to turn this into ‘I told you so’ right now? You said you got the same feeling I did, that we were supposed to see where this relationship ended up.”
It took a supreme effort not to jerk back like I’d been slapped, but that’s what the anger in his voice and eyes felt like to me. “I’m not saying I told you so. I’m saying if I’d listened to my instincts, we wouldn’t be in this mess right now.” The press of tears clogged the back of my throat. An ugly cry wanted to come out in a wracking sob that I couldn’t start in this restaurant. I steeled myself to shut down every emotion and focus on the immediate goal of getting out of the room; it was a skill I’d honed in the classroom, the ability to keep a tight lock on my feelings so I didn’t lose it with the kids. “I’m going to the ladies’ room. I’ll meet you up front?”
Max’s hand was in the air to signal for the check before I finished the sentence.
I collected my purse and bolted at the fastest walk I could manage and still look dignified. Every time the conversation tried to replay itself in my head while I touched up my lip gloss, I forced myself to think of test questions about the Clinton era instead.
When I walked back out, Max offered me an uncertain smile and slid his fingers through mine, twining our hands together as he pushed open the restaurant door. Every slight friction between our palms and fingers triggered pangs in my stomach.
My friend Anna taught a creative-writing elective across the hall from me. She always said “somehow” is a story killer. If a story ever says something happened “somehow,” like a hero is caught in a deadly trap but in the next scene he has somehow escaped, that author flat-out didn’t know what they were doing so they couldn’t explain it. And if they couldn’t explain it, it was because they were trying to force impossible events into the plot. I’d been trying to force impossible events into my life. “Somehow” was my story killer too. Somehow this was all supposed to work out.
Not really, as it turned out.
We drove in silence. No, not silence. His tires were loud against the asphalt. Why had I never noticed that his tires were so loud on asphalt? My fingers twitched to turn on the radio and fill in the quiet, but we’d always turned it down so we could talk. Turning it up would be another admission that there was nothing else to say.
Max drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “I hate this.”
I jumped at his machine-gun burst of frustration. His jaw set in a hard line, his hands now tight against the wheel, his knuckles glowing white in the streetlight filtering in. I turned back to stare out of my window, tall oaks flying past, marking the time until I could climb into my bed and let out the wall of feeling pressing against the back of my throat and eyes. Except Mom would be home, waiting, happy. Expectant.
A tear slipped out. What was I supposed to say? I almost got engaged. Then we realized neither of us had listened to each other about the most important things, and that’s no way to start a life. So now I guess we’re not going to do that.
I wiped the tear away, glad it had fallen on the cheek facing away from Max, but he sensed it anyway.
“Hey, hey, no,” he said, reaching over for the hand I’d folded across my stomach, as if that would calm me. He signaled a turn into the empty parking lot of an elementary school and stopped the car, turning in his seat and hauling me toward him. I melted into him, the smell of his neck and the slight whiff of starch in his collar so familiar that it ached. Nothing would hold back the tears now.
“Don’t,” he whispered. “You’re killing me. We’re going to fix this. I know it looks bad now, but we’ll figure this out.”
I leaned into him, loving the way his arms tightened around me but hating that I couldn’t ignore the hollow feeling growing in my chest. I pushed against him and settled back into my own seat. “How, Max? How do we fix this? Neither of us is willing to give up the one thing that’s more important to each of us than we are to each other.”
He sucked in a sharp breath, but he didn’t argue. “I can’t derail everything I’ve ever planned for. I thought your mom would be happy if we got married.”
“She would be. If we got married and I stayed here. All her pieces aren’t put back together. If I were the kind of person who could leave her here on her own, I wouldn’t be the kind of person worth marrying. And it’s not just that. Moving away would be pulling a huge part of my heart out and leaving it behind forever, only coming back to visit a piece of myself.”
“But staying here means undoing my life, unraveling it totally, settling for less than my dream.”
Now that was a slap. “No one’s asking you to settle.”
“That’s not what I meant! Believe me, I know I would be the luckiest man on earth if you married me. But at the same time, I’ve had a clear sense of purpose for as long as I can remember, a total certainty of what I’m meant to do. And it’s not just a career goal—it’s the path God has been pushing me down for years. I can see it. Staying here as a middle manager for Taggart isn’t going to get me there. It feels wrong to throw away this opportunity. I’m torn between two things that I’m equally sure I’m supposed to do. I don’t know how to solve that.”
I pressed my hands into my eyes and kept my palms there for a couple of minutes until I was sure the tears had stopped. “I would never, ever ask you to make that choice. I love my career as much as you love yours. I understand, and I’m not mad. I’m just so, so sad this isn’t going to work.” The tears welled out again anyway, and Max leaned over to press his lips against my forehead.
“No, please don’t. Please don’t. We need to sleep on this. It feels impossible now, but we’ll figure this out.”
I nodded. I didn’t agree, but I didn’t want to be trapped inside this bubble of pain with him anymore. “Okay. We’ll talk again tomorrow, but right now, I’m wrung out. I better get home.”
He started the car, relief easing the stress lines that had appeared around his eyes for the last few minutes. I wished I could believe my own words, but I knew a lost cause when I saw one. I couldn’t even think about the misery this was going to translate to in the weeks and months ahead. I had to focus on the incredibly difficult conversation waiting for me when I got home. That felt impossible enough.
Chapter 27
Mom flew out of the kitchen. “Tell me!” she demanded, grabbing my arms to stop her momentum. When she straightened, she froze. “No.”
“No what?”
“No to whatever or whoever put that look on your face. No to Max. No to everything.”
I burst into tears, and she had h
er arms around me faster than a bass could snap up a worm.
She pulled me over to the sofa and tucked herself into the corner of it. I don’t know how long she sat there patting my back, but by the time I tapered down to the full-body shudders I hadn’t experienced after crying since I was a kid, I felt like I’d been gouging my eyes with pinecones. She squeezed me and let go. “I’m going to get you a glass of water and a box of tissue. I’ll be right back.”
She disappeared into the kitchen and returned with Kleenex, and she was wearing a clean shirt from the dryer, switched out for the damp silk blouse I’d sobbed all over.
“He didn’t propose?” she asked, handing me the water and sitting back down.
“He almost did. He showed me the ring box. But that’s not what he’d meant to do tonight.” And between exhausted shudders, I explained how it had all gone down, omitting the huge detail that she was my biggest reason for staying.
She rubbed my back. “It’s hard for someone who didn’t have a problem leaving his home behind to understand why that’s too hard for you. There’s nothing wrong with folks settling down in places different from where they grew up, but for some people, their roots run so deep that pulling them up will kill them. They’ll never survive the transplant. I think you would eventually,” she said, brushing my hair back from my forehead. “You’re a strong girl, Lila Mae. So strong. And I’m proud of you. But there’s no question that you couldn’t uproot without some massive trauma. I can understand why you would hesitate.”
“There’s no hesitation. I didn’t consider it for a second.” I gathered my hair up, claustrophobic from its weight. I looked around for a pencil, but Mom had a knitting needle in my hand before I could grow too frustrated. I wove it through the bun and breathed a sigh of relief at the cool air on my neck.
“Are we mad at him?” she asked.
“Yes. But also at me. And the situation.” I flopped back against the sofa and closed my eyes, willing everything away. “I’m maddest at myself. I saw this coming and walked into it anyway. Why did I do that?”
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