Looking sly as hell, he says, “Oh, we’re celebrating something all right.”
He stands up and wedges himself between our table and our neighbor’s, his butt knocking over a beer stein, which he doesn’t notice because it’s deafening in here, and then he’s in front of me, kneeling down. And oh my God, he pulls out a dark blue box, and my blood is rushing in my ears. I’m gripping the seat of my chair like it’s the only thing keeping me from slipping to the floor. He opens the box, and the woman at the table next to us gasps because the diamond is fucking huge—no other way to say it—and I know he’s done something stupid, like taken the three months’ salary rule too literally, because he makes a lot pre-tax, but he owes a wild amount of student debt, and that makes me think of my dad and the secret second mortgage he left us with when he died, and I don’t want to be thinking about that right now.
Trevor is beaming. “Nareh Bedrossian.” He spits out my last name like it’s been through a wood chipper. “Will you be my wife? Will you be Nareh Milken?”
Half the restaurant is staring at me, and the other half is still partying and scream-laughing and shoving each other. Milken. Oh God, there are going to be even more jokes about my boobs for the rest of my life. Or I can get a breast-reduction surgery. No, Mom would kill me.
“Does—did you tell my mom already?”
His smile falters a bit, but he keeps it up. “No, I didn’t want your mom to get in the way of this beautiful thing. Our union.”
Then he swivels around and makes some kind of “come here” arm gesture, and now the heat is definitely making me hallucinate because I swear I see Mark H. Shephard, my number one work nemesis, shoving patrons out of the way with his KTVA mic and a cameraman with the massive camera setup they usually reserve for the big stories, and he’s charging toward me and smears the mic across my face so that I get my berry lipstick all over it. Trevor and Mark high-five each other, which makes my stomach roil, and Trevor presses his forehead to mine and asks, “What do you say, schatzie?”
The antlered dead deer face stares at me, and I wish I were suspended above everything like him. No more decisions, no more failures, no more disappointing people, no more...
I’m slipping down, down, and the last thing I feel is a dead weight against the back of my skull.
•••
Trevor’s face isin front of mine, and he is wide-eyed and panicking and spitting as he talks, and oh God, it’s all coming back to me when I see Mark hovering in the background. He’s actually laughing while strangers press against one another to get a look at the girl who fainted.
“We have to go,” I whisper to Trevor.
Trevor lifts me off the ground and my vision momentarily blurs. People I’ve never met are asking if I’m okay, and I give them a TV smile and tell them I’m fine, thank you. My head clears, and I squeeze my way out of the restaurant, making sure to slamspecifically into Mark and not say a word to him when he shouts, “Hey!” Because really? I’m pissed. And not just at Mark for laughing at me, but at Trevor and his idea of a romantic proposal—at this restaurant, with all its drunk patrons—and partly at myself for... for... I don’t know what for! But I did something wrong, and I’ll figure it out, and there will be punishment.
I’m outside and it’s instantly cold. The fog washes over everything, layer after layer engulfing us like waves. Somewhere in the Marina a horn blows long and deep. It may be an idyllic warm June in the rest of the United States, but this is San Francisco, where summer means unrelenting fog and misty winds. Trevor is behind me, the front door of the restaurant jingling behind him. I have to get to one of our cars before the humidity ruins my blowout. On the way in I brought a scarf to wrap around my hair, but there’s no way in hell I’m going back into that restaurant right now. It’ll be in the lost and found tomorrow.
Trevor is tracking me. I hear thepound-poundof his feet, but I don’t look back, not yet. “Schatzie! Talk to me.”
I reach my car, swing open my door, and turn to him. “Get in.” The fog and streetlights have colored everything a grayish yellow.
As he shifts inside, I see he’s holding the champagne bottle. Priorities.
This is Trevor, my boyfriend of five years—four and a half, more precisely—who has been a source of such kindness in my life, who I’m about to hurt so badly. But inside, I’m screaming. I have to.
“You’re leaving tomorrow for almost a month and you spring this on me?”
He seems relieved. “I couldn’t wait until I got back,” he says, grasping my hand. It’s warm and sweaty. “I’m too excited aboutus, our future. And it’s a little romantic—your fiancé’s abroad, you’re back home, awaiting his return.”
While I am totally into romance, something about that seems gross. He has this idea that I’m going to be pining for him while he’s gallivanting around. God, the whole thing. The way he proposed, bringing Mark into it, the cameras, that awful restaurant. And now, him thinking this was romantic. Before I can think, my mouth spits out, plainly, also terrifyingly without emotion, “Maybe it’s good you’re going to be gone for a month.”
His index finger runs up and down the neck of the bottle. I realize the year he chose, 2010, is when we first started dating. His voice is uncertain. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder. You get it.”
That’s the problem: I don’t get it. And he doesn’t get me. There have been moments of connection, though, right? Like that time I caught an eye disease from TechCrunch Disrupt and he sent me a bouquet of irises so I could feel better about not being able to work until my eye stopped resembling a bloody murder scene. That was nice. But what else? His disaster of a proposal is making me rethink everything. I have been happy with him. I have. I mean, it’s true, I recently started watching reruns ofBig Love, the Mormon polygamist show, because the wives’ obsession with their husband inspired me to be a better girlfriend. I never stopped to think that was probably a cry for help. I need to tell him no. Everything in me is shouting no, one giant chorus of no.
But I’m scared to voice it. I can’t bear to look at his face, his cute ski slope nose, his eyes tired from casework. His beautiful features always pull me back in. His face has this innocence about it that always makes me trust that he’s acting from a genuine place of care.
Then I open my mouth. “No.” I glance down at my fingernails, my just-chipping manicure. I’m going to have to touch it up before the bridal shower tomorrow. “No, I mean—I need that time to think. About this, and us.”
I’m actually doing this. Part of me is like,What the hell is wrong with you? He’s sweet and smart and loyal and adores you.But there’s abutthat I can’t quite articulate, and it has something to do with him not telling my mom, about hergetting in the way, as he said.
He’s frozen. “Are you serious?”
I nod, then he covers his eyes, and he might be crying or trying not to cry, but I’m not going to say anything about it. The night is reverent in this momentary silence, only the streetlamps and blurry red taillights in the distance. I hold my breath, waiting for him.
At once he uncovers his face, sniffs loudly like he snuffed out his crying. “This is all my fault. I should have talked to you about it. I wanted to make it this huge thing. Katie told me I should take you out to a restaurant that means something to us, do a grand gesture, something unforgettable that would make a great story.” He pauses. “I guess we got the story part down.”
Of course Katie had something to do with this. Katie is the law librarian at his firm and happens to be his work bestie, and I’ve been to enough firm-sponsored baseball games with them to know she’s completely in love with Trevor (but he brushes me off whenever I mention it, saying she’s just friendly). I sort of hate her but also don’t at all. She’s super smart, snide, and unabashedly dorky, and I trust Trevor. That trust, it should be enough for a marriage. But thinking the wordmarriageturns my stomach.
