She doesn’t say either of those.
Instead, she makes a noncommittal noise, lets her eyes sparkle more, and sips her tea again.
My stomach drops like a brick tossed out of a plane without a parachute.
“No,” I whisper.
Fuck me.
No.
This isn’t happening.
But her growing smile says yes, yes it is.
“You wanna be my backup plan?” I asked her six years ago. “Like, if we both turn thirty and haven’t met anyone else to marry and have kids with, you wanna just go for it?”
She said yes.
We started sleeping together.
“As friends,” we agreed. “If someone we just hit it off with comes along, we call off the benefits, no harm, no foul.”
We were on again, off again for those years we slept together, sometimes dating other people but not often.
Less and less frequently as the years went by, matter of fact.
Neither of us had slept with or dated anyone else for nearly two years when she met Andrew three days before my thirtieth birthday.
I had a ring picked out.
I had a speech prepared.
It wasn’t thebestspeech—heavy on thewe’ve been friends forever and we’re good in bedand more or less nonexistent on theand I care about you—but that date was looming, and it seemed like the thing to do.
Not that she ever heard my speech.
She and Andrew started dating, and I pretended to be happy for her in public while licking my wounds in private and asking myself if it was my pride that was wounded or if it was something more.
And the first day she came over to my house, crying because they’d had a fight about which car she should buy, I realized I wasthatidiot.
I was that idiot who had willfully ignored all the signs that I was madly, completely, fully in love with her. I wasted years taking her for granted from my safe little cocoon where we got to be friends without me having to risk my heart. I was a damn fool who should’ve told her how special she was when she was mine, and who didn’t.
Why? No idea. Maybe I still never felt like I deserved her.
Or maybe telling a womanI love youfelt empty and meaningless after all the men my mother loved but who never loved her back.
What if I was that guy who wasn’t any more capable of love than my stepfathers were?
The day after Hannah’s fight with Andrew, it was all just a “misunderstanding,” and they’d kissed and made up.
Six months later they got engaged.
She moved into his house in Deer Drop.
They eloped to a tropical island over the holidays and got married.
And now—
