He pulls the strawberry blanket over himself and doesn’t say anything else.
I stomp over to my bed, switching off one of the lamps. Before I turn off the other, I glance back at him. His eyes are closed, brows lowered as he wills himself into unconsciousness. I almost take pity on him, but then I think about his parting words before he peeled off in his truck.
I march back over, grab the pillow from beneath his head, and bring it down over his back. His eyes fly open. “How dare you say that I dumped you,” I snap. “How fucking dare you, Alexander King.”
He straightens, twin spots of red flaring on his cheekbones.“Me,”he returns, low and deadly. Stabs a finger into his chest. “Me? How dareyou.”
I’m so mad that my mental functions begin to shut down, feet carrying me in a rote pattern back to bed. He stands up, brutally outraged, as if I’m the one with the audacity here, and he’s standing over me in an instant, peeling the blanket back.
“Get away from me,” I seethe. “How dare you make me love you like that, then act like the breakup was all my doing.”
“You were the one so scared we’d break up that you said we should get married, and then at the first sign it would be a challenge you left me anyway.”
“Me?You’rethe one who ended it.”
“The fuck I did!” he yells. “Do you have any idea how badly it destroyed me to see how fast you moved on? It had never. I never. I still...” He lifts his hands to his head as if to fist his hair in clumps, then drops them because there’s nothing to yank.
“Your texts,” I throw back at him.
“I apologized for those texts. I was spiraling when I sent them.”
“So was I!”
We’re both breathing heavily.
“Here is what happened, and correct me if I’m wrong. Which I’m not,” he begins, endeavoring to keep his tone measured. “We weren’t final on where we’d go to school. You suggested we get married because you thought it would make it harder for us to break up if we found the distance difficult. Then you changed your mind. Left town after a half-assed explanation. Is that right?”
“You weren’t excited about getting married. I was doing you a favor.”
“We were eighteen years old!”
“I know, I know.” I cross my arms, irate with myself. “I don’t know what I was thinking. It felt like I... I freaked out because I thought I was going to lose you, so I suggested we get married, and I thought you’d react differently. With more excitement.”
“I don’t think my reaction was all that bad?” He’s moving around the room, dazed. “I wasn’t jumping up and down with euphoria, but, Romina, the logistics of that—I was thinking about the cost, where we would live, whether I could give you a nice enough wedding, whether you really meant it. It would’ve been one thing if you’d told me you wanted to marry me when we were older, more stable, when everything was fine, but that’s not where we were. You were speaking from a position of fear.”
“I meant it.”
“Ifyouwere allowed to mean it, how could you accusemeof not meaning it when I said I’d make it happen? If you meant it, how could you turn around and take it back?”
“Because I realized I’d pushed you into getting engaged!”
“You did not.” He bends forward, digging his hands into his eyes. I think he’d like to hit a wall. “I knew why you asked to get married. I knew you were disappointed when I wasn’t immediately ecstatic. But I didn’t have to be talked into it. I’d already known that I was going to end up marrying you someday. I didn’t plan on it being so soon, but I loved you, I would’ve done anything you wanted—”
“Exactly,” I interrupt, getting heated. “That right there. You would’ve done it because I wanted it.”
He makes an animalistic noise. “You’re not hearing me.”
“Yes, I am. You were right to have been hesitant at first. I was offended, I was hurt, but then I realized that was my pride talking. I needed to be more pragmatic like you. Getting married wasn’t the solution.”
“There were better ways to deliver that revelation other than ‘I’m calling off the engagement,’ ” he throws back.
“Your mom was right. We were too young, and you would’ve ended up dropping out of school. You were considering it. Kept mentioning maybe you’d like to go into construction instead—”
“I had been thinking about doing that, anyway.”
“No, you weren’t.” The tension in here is so tight that I open the door to release some of it. Before I can storm out into the garden, he blocks the doorway with an arm across the frame.
“Oh,please,” he spits sarcastically. “Romina, I would’ve picked up the sun with my bare hands and moved it if you didn’t like the position of your shadow, but consider that not everything is about you. I was genuinely torn between devoting so much of my life to school, to a career that frankly was starting to scare me, or going down a different road, one that required fewer years of school, that allowed me to work with my hands in a more personally satisfying, less life-and-death way, that could support usfaster, and if you don’t believe that, you’re being purposefully obtuse. Am I a doctor? Am I a doctor right now?Hm?”
