Declan’s eyes are wide and open, soft and accepting, when he turns around. He bends on one knee to be at eye level with me. The gesture reminds me of his proposal at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
That moment feels like lifetimes ago.
“Isn’t this what you want?” Stillness lingers in the air between us, a welcome change from the chaos that has driven me forward through a life I didn’t choose, the Boston Wedding of the Year a tidal wave I never decided to ride. It was thrust on me. In the questioning quiet between us, right now, I can really take him in. He’s so handsome, the skin around his eyes full of expression, the green irises reflecting back a querulous me. His body heat warms the chill that invades as I navigate new territory.
“Dec, I don’t—I don’t know.” Salty regret fills my mouth, making it nearly impossible to untangle all the feelings and thoughts inside me. I don’t want to hurt him. I don’t want to say the wrong words, but it feels like every part of my life involving expressing myself is a gear with teeth that don’t fit in with the other gears that keep the machine working.
“You don’t know...whether you want to marry me?” His eyes dart to the three-carat ring on my hand, to the half-crumpled Nevada marriage license application in my hand, and then to my lap.
I drop the paper and cup his jaw in my hands. “No, no, I do. I do. I want to say those words more than anything in the world, Dec.” His mouth tightens, eyes going blurry, and I realize we both have too much emotion stored inside us to be able to handle it all.
There’s a point where your emotional resilience can be stretched so thin that even an overabundance of love isn’t enough.
And that is when you know that the outside world needs to be put in check.
I take a deep breath. He joins me. His arms slide around my neck as he comes up and in, holding me in an awkward embrace, a movement of impulse that lacks his usual grace. We’re all arms and elbows, knees and breasts, the grating sensation of a pen in his shirt pocket scratching my neck, his cufflink catching in a lock of my hair, but as my own palms spread across the fine cashmere of his suit jacket and my hitched sob dissolves into the little sanctuary our bodies create, I know it’ll be fine.
Better than fine.
“Thank God,” he says. “I was worried you were calling it all off.”
“I want to call off the bloodhounds. Not the marriage.”
He laughs through his nose, then sniffs. I pull back and look at him. He’s not quite crying, but emotion has overwhelmed him, his fiercely blank poker face completely disassembled by love.
Love for me.
“What do we do?” I ask, my fingers tender along his jaw, worrying a tiny scar.
“That’s up to you.”
“No, Dec. It’s up to us. What would you do? If I weren’t a factor.”
His full-throated laugh is contagious as I realize how ridiculous that sounds. “Considering I can’t marry myself, honey, I don’t think I can even begin to give you an answer to that question.”
“You know what I mean.”
Scratching his face, then rubbing his chin like he does when he’s sorting through a complex issue, he finally seems to give up and make a half shrug. “I’d run off and get married at a little wedding chapel here in the hotel. Alone. Just the two of us.”
“No Mom and Dad? No James?”
“You asked what I’d do. That’s the answer.”
“It wouldn’t bother you? In the future, when you look back on our anniversary, to remember the day without your loved ones there?”
“My loved one would be there. The only one who will be there with me through the end of my life.”
“Oh!”
“I do love my dad.” That’s the first time I’ve ever heard Declan say that. We’re in very vulnerable places now. “And I love Andrew and Terry, but I love you so, so much more, Shannon. You’re my real life.” He grips my arms harder, as if increasing the pressure will make me understand him better. Will make his words truer.
Will make his declaration more real.
“I have these circles. They’re concentric. I’m at the center, but you’re right next to me. Then there’s Dad, Andrew and Terry. Grace is right on the edge there, too. After that, there’s your family. Beyond that, a handful of friends. Then there’s everyone else. Business colleagues, old classmates, people on the street, employees....and they’re not quite real.”
“You sound like a sociopath.” I smile when I say it.
“No...not quite.” He frowns. “Maybe when it comes to business, but I can compartmentalize. I can’t do that with you, though. I can’t just put you in a box where I pull you out and deal with you and then tuck you back away. You are at the core of my life with me. You bleed into every part of who I am and you are going to shape the man I become for the rest of my life.”
Now he actually does have tears.
“We have spent the better part of a year letting all those outer circles drive us away from our inner core. You and me. When we marry, I view it like a fusion. We’re fusing our lives together. For nearly a year our families have worked on fusing themselves together through the wedding planning, but we let them take off with the pageantry of the wedding itself and forgot that at the heart of this big celebration, there’s a couple. Us. A couple who are going to have a marriage that lasts five or six decades. We let one little day become more important than the rest of our lives.”
He’s right. Oh, how my heart lifts at his words, his emotional unraveling like being caught in a maze and having someone give you an aerial map so you can find your way through to freedom.