She also liked that if she cooked, he washed the dishes. She liked cooking, but shehateddoing dishes. He insisted that he didn’t mind, that he actually kind of liked the meditative part of it, as long as she stayed and kept him company. She was more than happy to do so, and she’d come to treat those fifteen minutes or so while he washed and dried and she sipped the end of her glass of wine to be one of the most enjoyable parts of her day.
Her lips twitched a little as she passed the aisle where she had once accidentally knocked a bag of flour onto poor Garrett’s head, back when they were faintly hostile acquaintances rather than boyfriend and girlfriend, but instead of commenting, she just slipped her fingers into his and thought happily about how far they had come from those inauspicious first interactions.
“Maybe it’s silly,” she said as she put a bag of couscous into the cart, “but I love doing these little things with you. It makes the everyday stuff feel special.”
At first, when Garrett didn’t respond, Eleanor didn’t think anything of it. He was not a chatty man by nature, and he didn’t generally speak unless he had something to say. They communicated well enough, but it would be perfectly normal for him to just soak in her words without comment.
But then she saw the hesitant look on his face and unease went through her.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Garrett said, his voice tense. “I just… do you think you’d like doing this kind of everyday stuff with me for a while? Like, uh, forever, maybe?”
And Eleanorpanicked. Not because she wasn’t thinking that she would like those things, but because this waseerilyclose to what she had been thinking. And she could not tell what Garrett was thinking. Normally she liked that beard of his, but right now she hated that the hair hid his expression.
“I—um—what?” she stammered.
“Listen,” he said, taking her elbow gently and guiding her to the side of the aisle so they weren’t impeding foot traffic. “Don’t get mad at your brother, but he… might have accidentally let it slip that you were starting to think about us…” He waved a hand between them. “You know, in the long term.”
When they were kids, Eleanor had been able to get revenge on Shane for whatever petty kid squabbles they’d been embroiled in by hiding his video game controllers. She was going to figure out whatever the adult version of that was and do it immediately. Maybe she’d hide his wallet in the freezer. See how long it took him to lookthere.
Even as she thought it, though, she knew it wasn’t really her brother’s fault. If he let something slip, as Garrett had framed it, it would certainly have been an accident.
This realization didn’t help much in the moment, not in the face of her mortification. And not a little bit of fear. She didn’t want Garrett to think that she was rushing things between them. She knew that he had a complicated past when it came to marriage. She understood it. Which was exactly why she had wanted to keep the thoughts about their future inside of her own brain where they belonged!
And yet, no denial sprang to her lips. Because shewasthinking that she’d like to do this kind of stuff with him forever. And she couldn’t lie to him. But she also couldn’t tell him the truth.
She took the extremely inglorious option three.
“I have to go,” she blurted.
Garrett blinked at her, clearly taken aback. “You what?”
She nodded so vigorously that she threatened to injure her neck. She wasn’t in her twenties anymore. Her spine could only take so much.
“Yup,” she said, perfectly aware that she sounded completely bonkers. “Gotta go. Bookstore stuff. Urgent. You know. Anyway. Uh. Bye!”
“El!” Garrett called after her as she turned around andfledthe store. There was no other, more flattering way to put it. She ran away like a startled deer.
“Eleanor! Can you—sheesh, can you come back here?”
The rational, calm part of Eleanor’s mind knew that she should go back. She knew that what she was doing was ridiculous! But that part of her wasnotin the driver’s seat at the moment. Her feet kept going. They had driven Garrett’s truck to the store, but that didn’t matter, not in her panicked state. She just turned in the direction of home, pulling her jacket tight around her, even though it was a relatively balmy day. The chill felt like it was coming from inside her, however.
She was afraid. That was the long and the short of it. She was afraid that she would scare Garrett off by going too far, too fast. They’d never even talked about marriage, not even in that abstract, way off in the future kind of way that couples talked about it for the first time, the way they did when they were still pretending that the question “Do you think you’ll ever get married?” didn’t mean anything resembling “Do you think you’ll ever want to get married to me?”
Before they had started dating, Garrett hadn’t even been certain that he ever wanted anotherrelationship, let alone one that ended in wedding bells and a walk down the aisle. They hadn’t even been together a year yet either. He was going to think she was nuts. He was going to think she was foolish and hasty. Why, oh why, had she gone and run her big mouth?
And she was really, really afraid that this was going to be the thing that scared him off.
So, she was running. Running away from a conversation, like a yellow-bellied, big old chicken. Running, like she was a total baby when it came to emotional honesty, instead of a mature, sensible adult.
And not only that, she realized with a jolt of guilt when she had made it halfway down the block, she was a big old chicken who hadalsosaddled poor Garrett with buying her groceries, since he had been the one holding the basket.
Well. This had all gone… very, very badly.
Eleanor tried to keep it together as best she could, tried to keep her head down and her spirits up. But the closer she got to the bookstore, the more she felt the prickling in her eyes turn into tears that threatened to spill down her cheeks.
Oh gosh,she thought miserably over and over.What have I done?
