Fuck. I’d waited too long. I’d wanted it to be the right moment and now I’d waited too long and everything was all kinds of fucked up. “I love you, Felicia. I do. Trust me.”
“I don’t want you to say it now because I asked you to!” She stood up and took her tea and left the living room.
“That is not why I said it. Where are you going?”
“To England!”
“Seriously? When?” That infuriated me. “You’re just going to walk out before we even discuss this any further?”
“There is nothing to discuss. I’m going to get a flight for as soon as possible.”
She couldn’t be serious. Just like that? It was so abrupt and wrong. “There are a million things to discuss.” That she would just dismiss me and our relationship was not cool. “If you book a flight today, it’s over, Felicia. I’m not kidding. You don’t get to walk out like that.”
She stopped in the hallway and turned slowly. “You don’t get to throw out ultimatums. I feel like you need to retract that statement.”
She sounded icy cold, which annoyed me even further. I was the one getting done dirty. Hadn’t she thrown out an ultimatum?
“No,” I said and it wasn’t even totally out of stubbornness. “You can’t make life-altering decisions without me and expect I’m just going to be cool with it. By the way, you accused me of poking holes in a fucking condom and I’m supposed to just be fine with that but I can’t be upset with you moving across the ocean?”
Her answer was to walk into our bedroom and slam the door shut.
I sipped my coffee and stewed, staring at the unlit Christmas tree. My life had gone from bland to amazing to shit all in less than forty days. That had to be a record.
My anger was preventing me from being heartbroken at the moment, but I knew that was going to show up later like a punch in the eye.
Wandering through the mess of high-top tables and chairs, I found the bar station.
Uncapping the whiskey, I splashed some in my coffee.
I looked at the Christmas gift I’d wrapped and put under the tree for Felicia and added more whiskey.
* * *
I begged off Christmas Eve dinner out with my parents by saying Felicia and I were exhausted from the engagement party. They bought it. Sean didn’t.
He showed up and found me sitting alone in a dark apartment, surrounded by the catering crap. I was eating leftover crab puffs and getting filthy, stinking drunk.
“Dude,” he said when he opened the door to my apartment and came in. “You’re actually breaking my heart. This is pathetic.”
I didn’t really care. “Want a drink?”
“Yes.” He walked into the living room. “Now explain to me why you’re drinking alone in the dark twenty-four hours after your engagement party?”
“We had a fight and Felicia’s going back to England.” Then I frowned. “You know what? It wasn’t even a fight. She just decided she’s going back.”
“So the ‘immersion dating while living together’ experiment didn’t work out?”
I shrugged. My chest hurt. It was like someone had reached into my ribcage and pulled my heart out with their bare hands. “I thought it did. I thought she wanted to be with me but she wanted to go back to England and wait for the official fiancée visa to go through before coming back. Because she doesn’t have a permanent visa.”
“Ah, now it all makes sense.” Sean sat down with a heavy sigh and looked around at the cluttered coffee table. “Jesus, look at this place. Well, that doesn’t sound like a breakup to me. She just wanted to make sure nothing went wrong with the application process. I can’t fault her for that.”
“She’s pregnant.” I tossed back the rest of my bourbon in one hot, burning swallow.
“Oh, shit.”
“I put an offer on a townhouse two days ago. Yesterday she finds out she’s pregnant. Today she says she’s going to England. It’s a big fucking mess.”
“That visa will come through in a couple of months. She’ll be back here way before the baby is born. Don’t stress out. It will work out.”
“Except that she accused me of getting her pregnant on purpose and said I should have made a speech at the party saying I love her. No, not a speech. A declaration of love. Then I said if she left against my wishes I was done with our relationship.” I rubbed my forehead. “It fucking went off the rails, man.”
“Do you love her?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said without hesitation. “I know you thinks it’s crazy, but I love her, Sean. I look at her and I can’t even imagine a future without her in it. She makes me feel… fierce.”
“Fierce, like Beyoncé?” Sean asked. “I don’t get it.”
I shot him a glare. “No, you asshole. Fierce like fiercely protective and fiercely in love and fiercely passionate.” I gave a snort and stood up to get more booze. “Like Beyoncé. Go fuck yourself.”
“What? I don’t know. But okay, I get it now.” Sean joined me at the bar station. “These glasses are all dirty. You’re drinking out of a dirty glass. That’s disgusting.”
“No, I’m not that drunk. I got it out of the kitchen.”
He went into the kitchen and retrieved one for himself off of the open shelving. He also came back with a garbage bag.
“What’s that for?”
“All these napkins lying around. It’s nasty, I can’t stand it.” He poured himself a drink and snapped open the garbage bag.
I sat back down heavily and watched him collecting linen napkins from all over the room and tossing them in the bag.
“Leave that by the door,” I said. “The caterer is picking up all that shit on the twenty-sixth.”
“Sure. Okay, let’s start at the beginning. Did you get her pregnant on purpose?”
“No, what the fuck? I would never do something like that.” My own brother thought I was capable of knocking up someone on purpose? That was just messed up.
“I’m just checking. You were planning to hire a surrogate. I mean, you wanted a baby, bad. It might have been tempting to put the condom on after a little tip action.”
“You’re an asshole. No, I didn’t do that. I’m not seventeen. And never say ‘tip action’ in front of me again.” I ate another crab puff. “There’s a bunch of leftovers in the fridge if you’re hungry.”
“No offense, but that wasn’t the best catering.”
“Okay, Chef Dickhead. You try to book a caterer on ten days’ notice at the holidays.” They tasted fine to me but I was drunk.
“Did she harp on the condom thing or did she believe you after you told her you did not do that.”
“I don’t know if she believed me but she let it go.”
“I don’t think you should end your relationship because she had what is frankly a legitimate question considering the length of time you’ve known each other.”
“That is not technically why we broke up.”
“Then why did you break up?” Sean dumped the bag by the door and washed his hands vigorously in the kitchen sink. “That was fucking disgusting.”
“I’m not really exactly sure why we broke up,” I said. “Maybe because she’s taking my baby to England against my wishes. Or maybe because I never told her I love her. I’m not exactly sure at this point.”
“You’re fucking loaded.”
I nodded. “Yes, I am. I’ve been drinking since ten this morning.”
“I can tell. When is she going to England?”
“Tomorrow. She texted me her flight information earlier.”
“She’s flying on Christmas Day? Damn. She really wants away from you.”
I kicked his leg. Hard. “What did you do to Isla, by the way? You made a very negative impression on her.”
He gave a snort. “The feeling was mutual. She’s one of those man-haters. I couldn’t say anything without her getting offended.”
“Huh,” I said, because I didn’t really care. “I’m going to drunk text Felicia later and make
it worse, aren’t I?” I asked.
“No. Because I’m taking you back to my apartment and taking your phone away from you.”
“Good. Thanks, bro. I love you.”
“Eat another lousy crab puff and drink some water.”
Eighteen
“I think you need to just stop and think this through for a minute,” Isla said to me on the phone, while I paced in the gate area, pulling my rolling bag behind me.
I was flying back to England on Christmas Day because the airfare had been substantially cheaper. It was depressing as hell, but at the same time, I had wanted to escape. Put an ocean between me and my heartache and confusion. “Think what through? I have one week before my visa expires.”
“That’s seven days from now. Hang out for a few days, make sure you’ve approached this from every angle, let your emotions even out. Talk to Michael…”
That made my stomach tighten. “He broke up with me. I’m not sure what there is to talk about. He said if I walked out, we were done.”
“There is always something to talk about after a fight. That’s what this was. A fight. You can’t just end it without at least having a rational conversation.”
I blew my air out of my eyes and stopped pacing. “You of all people should be supporting me right now. He gave me an ultimatum. No one should do that to someone else.”
“I totally agree. But he just found out you’re pregnant and then you said you’re going back to England, which if we’re being honest here is a bit of an ultimatum in its own right. Maybe you both overreacted. Your relationship has been going at warp speed since day one. Slow it down and talk.”
“He’s never once said he loved me,” I told her. “Well. Once. After I told him to tell me and he did. God, worst proclamation of love ever.”
“Is he supposed to love you?” she asked. “Can he just care about you a lot and be falling in love with you? Again, it hasn’t been that long.”
“I love him.” She was starting to irritate me.
“Yeah, but, and don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t exactly wear your heart on your sleeve. You’re very hard to read.”
I wrinkled my nose. “How exactly am I not supposed to take that the wrong way? Look, I told myself not to fall in love with him until I knew he was in love with me, so I wouldn’t get hurt. But what did I do? Oh, I fell in love with him. Like, instantly. Probably within days if I’m being honest with myself. I’m hopeless.”
“I feel like you’re bringing your past relationship trust issues into this. You don’t trust his feelings.”
I plopped down on a hard plastic chair and pulled my suitcase between my legs. She was right. I knew she was right. How annoying was that? “I don’t know if it’s me he wants or the baby. I wish we’d talked before I took the test.”
“That ship has sailed, babe. You can’t go back. You have to decide if you want to fight for this relationship or not.”
“I don’t know what to do.” I rubbed my temple. “I’m trying to not get in trouble with American immigration and do the right thing for both me and my baby. I’m trying to be mature.”
“The mature thing to do is to call your fiancé. He is your legit fiancé, by the way. It was written all over his face at the party. He’s into you. Also, given what a prick his brother is, Michael seems to be a really nice guy.”
I groaned. “This is such a mess. How did this happen?”
“It happened because of a million weird little things. Like you talking to him as Savannah. Like him having clothes he needed you to sell. You leaving your tablet and group texting you wanted to shag him. You failing to mail your application.”
“That was the mailman’s fault.” It wasn’t really, because ultimately the buck stopped with me, but I was feeling a little bruised at the moment.
The overhead speaker announced boarding for my flight to Heathrow.
“That’s not my point. My point is that maybe your relationship was meant to be. You got pregnant basically your first night together. Maybe this is all the way it’s supposed to be.”
That made me wonder who had kidnapped and brainwashed Isla. That was not her approach to love or hell, life. “Who are you? Where is my friend Isla?”
She laughed. “Screw you.”
“You sound like Savannah.” It was unnerving. I relied on Isla to be the cynic in any given situation. I always used them both as outliers so that I could land somewhere in the middle.
“I just think sometimes you have to stop fighting against what is happening. Look, if I had to predict what was going to happen thirty-five days ago, I would have said it wouldn’t have lasted two days. That you’d both walk away hating each other, but that is clearly not the case.”
I chewed my lip. I didn’t know what to do. “My plane is boarding, I have to go.”
“Okay. Be safe. Text me when you land.”
“I will. And… thanks, Isla.”
“I’ll send you my bill.”
That made me laugh, despite wanting to cry. We ended the call and I got in line to board.
* * *
“Can you go any faster?” I asked the cab driver.
He just rolled his eyes at me in the rearview mirror.
We were pulling into JFK but I was eyeing the time on my phone with serious impatience.
When I’d woken up with a massive hangover and a text from Felicia asking me to call her when I was up, I’d decided this had to happen in person. Not over the phone. Not in a text. But face-to-face. I needed to tell her that I loved her in a way that she believed me.
So I’d bought a seat on her flight to London.
I didn’t want five rushed minutes at the airport.
I had two weeks.
It was the most time off work I could manage on such short notice and a week of that was because of the holidays, thank God. But it was a start.
If I actually made my flight.
As the cab pulled up in front of the airline I threw money at the driver and hopped out. My head was still throbbing and I had no idea what I had actually packed. I’d just opened drawers and thrown shit in there. None of that mattered. What mattered was getting to the woman I loved.
Using the kiosk, I checked in and then went to the security line. It wasn’t horrible, given it was Christmas Day, but it was long enough to make me bounce back and forth on the balls of my feet.
“Would you mind if I went ahead of you?” I asked the woman in front of me. “I’m late for my flight.”
“That’s not my problem,” she said, with a frown. “You should have left on time.”
The Christmas spirit apparently didn’t apply to the security line at JFK.
I waited, repeatedly checking the time on my phone, the line moving with zero sense of urgency. Finally, I got to the front. I kicked my shoes off, threw my bag on the belt, and went through the body scan.
“Someone’s in a hurry,” the TSA officer said.
She gave me a smile though, which was reassuring I wasn’t about to get pulled aside and frisked. “If I miss this flight, my relationship is over.”
“Ah, I see.” She jerked her thumb. “Go get your stuff. You’re clear.”
“Thank you and Merry Christmas.” I grabbed my bag and scanned the signs, trying to figure out which way to go, breaking out into a jog.
“You need a ride?” A guy who looked in his fifties pulled up alongside me in a cart. “You look like you’re in a hurry.”
“I am.” I jumped up onto the cart and gave him my gate number. “I need to get on this flight and convince the woman I love, the mother of my child, that we should get married.”
He eyed me, curious. “No shit? Well, hold on to your butt, let’s go get her.”
The cart leaped forward and I grabbed on to the rail. We were flying through the airport, dodging and weaving in and out of travelers. “That’s some fine driving, sir, I’m impressed.”
“I drove a Humvee in Iraq in the service. This isn’t as fun.”
“Thank you for your service,” I said to him, grateful for his efforts then and now. We were eating up the gates. I glanced at the time. I had a text that said boarding had started. That gave me twenty minutes. I felt confident I was going to make it. “What’s your name? I owe you big-time, man. Thank you, seriously.”
“Name’s Willie, and no problem,” he said over his shoulder. “Who doesn’t love a good love story? Especially on Christmas.”
“I’m Michael. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
We got to my gate and Willie just about popped a wheelie. I jumped off the cart. I handed him a hundred bucks and offered my hand for a shake. “Merry Christmas, Willie. Thanks again.”
His eyes sparkled as he tucked the money in his shirt pocket. “You’ve got this, Mike.”
I waved, turned, and realized my phone was ringing. Felicia. I scanned the boarding area as I put the phone to my ear. She wasn’t there. Most of the waiting area was already empty.
“Hello?”
* * *
I sat in my seat, foot bouncing, silently begging Michael to answer his phone. If he didn’t, I wasn’t sure I could stay on the plane. Isla was right. I had to talk to him.
“Hello?”
I closed my eyes in relief when he answered. “Michael, I’m sorry.” My throat tightened. I didn’t know what else to say, I had so many emotions overwhelming me. Where did I start?
“I’m sorry too. I didn’t realize that I wasn’t being clear in how I feel. I was trying not to pressure you and obviously, that was a huge mistake. I love you, Felicia, so damn much. I think you’re amazing and I would want to marry you, baby or not.”
Tears pricked at the back of my eyes. He sounded raw, sincere, urgent. “I’m such an idiot. I’m sitting on this plane and all I can think is that our fake engagement was the most real thing to ever happen to me. I love you too.” I sighed, foot bouncing even more frantically. I glanced around. The plane was mostly full. It was now or never. “I’m getting off the plane.”
I stood up and said, “Excuse me,” to the woman next to me.
She barely moved her legs. I climbed over her, grateful I was wearing joggers and trainers.
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