Julia pulls her clutch bag into her lap, keeping it beneath the edge of the table as she digs through its small space.
“We wanted to give this to you on your actual birthday and make it a whole big thing, but…” she explains with a smile tugging at her lips. “Calling you a boyfriend or a ‘person we’re seeing’ just…”
“It’s not enough,” Tripp says as Jules shakes her head. “You’re more than that.”
On the table, Julia carefully rests a small wooden box, pulling open its lid. Inside, nestled into a cushion, sits a black metal band, identical to the one wrapped around Tripp’s finger.
“You’re our equal, and you matter,” Julia tells me. “We want you to have a symbol of that.”
Sliding the box toward myself as my chest tightens, I pull the ring from its place and run the pad of my thumb against the smooth metal.
“If this is some kind of joke…”
“It’s not,” Julia insists.
My eyes snap to Tripp, whose body is moving just enough to let me know that his leg is bouncing beneath the table. He’s locked onto me; waiting for an answer that seems like it has the potential to either fill his heart or break it.
“If I put this on, will you tell your brother?” I ask him.
“You put that ring on, I’ll stand up on the table and shout about it to everyone in this restaurant,” he tells me, using his head to gesture toward the box. “You’re our family, Schepp. We love you. I’ll tell B. I’ll even call Edie if you want me to.”
Jules bunches the napkin from her lap, looking up toward the evening sky as she dabs the corners of her eyes with a sniff. Her brows stitch together as I turn the box over in my hand, a laugh bellowing out of my chest as my head drops into my free hand. Tripp joins in her visible confusion, but all I can do is laugh.
“All day, I’ve been waiting for you two to drop the axe,” I explain through what seem like unstoppable chuckles. “I’m the axe-dropper; I know how nice it can look before it hurts.”
I’ve done it so many times that I feel like I may have actually invented the ‘feed them and leave them’ method. A good meal helps to soften the blow, especially a meal the other person hasbeen looking forward to, like at an Italian restaurant they’ve had their eye on for the past year.
Devastation wrapped in a pretty package.
There have only been a few times that I haven’t used it; usually opting for another tried-and-true method, with one exception. An exception which was an exception in and of itself, because while past partners and hookups had deserved the respect of a nice night on me, those two did not. I refused to give them that respect.
“In all that overthinking you were doing, you didn’t stop to think that maybe it was supposed to be dinnerand thenpresents?” Tripp teases.
“It’s an imperfect process,” I counter, the corner of my mouth ticking upward.
Julia’s eyes are soft as she bites down a brilliant smile watching the cool metal slide onto my finger. It’s a perfect fit, which I can only assume was her doing. Pushing myself to a standing position, I take her chin in my hand and press my lips to hers before doing the same with Tripp.
Eyes are on us as I take my seat again, but none of us care about them. We don’t need their opinions or their judgments or questions. We don’t need anything more than what we have right here, at this table.
Through everything that we’ve lost and over the surface of the bumpiest roads that life has chosen to offer to us, we took the debris left behind and rebuilt something of our own, and I’m proud of us for that.
As we lift our glasses to clink them against each other, Tripp’s tongue wets his lower lip and he shakes his head with a laugh.
“Think Irina will give us a group discount when she’s licensed?” He teases, earning a playful smack with the back of Julia’s hand against his chest.
As we settle back into our meal – and as I finally allow myself the space to breathe – my focus is continually pulled to the band now secured around my finger.
My dad would probably squeeze in some raunchy joke right now that would have my mom slapping him for it, but she’d kiss him right afterward. Their relationship was one of the good ones. One where, like their love for me, I never questioned how they felt about each other. It was pure and it was good.
A lot of people swear off commitments because they’ve been hurt too much in the past, but I think a part of me swore it off long before anyone had ever hurt me. That part of me looked at the way my parents loved each other and it said that they had it as good as it gets. No one gets it like that, so what would be the point in trying?
When they died, I guess I figured that they took it all with them.
Irina got a piece of it, and if anyone in the world deserves that piece, it’s her.
I just hope she’ll stay okay withmypiece.
Between a full belly and the relief of every fired nerve, by the time that we make it back to the house and in the door, I am exhausted. I’m not the only one. Tripp toes off his shoes at the door, loosening his tie as he treks up the stairs to change into something less restrictive.
