‘But—’
She’d sighed. ‘Which one of us knows more about romantic comedies, Fisher?’
29 I would put the odds of Eliasactuallyhaving plans at about fifteen per cent: possible, sure, but terribly convenient.
30 You know the ones.
31 Despite the fact that pairing pizza and coffee was objectively disgusting. That wehadfought over.
32 If we couldn’t go to the Ritz-Carlton, then…
Chapter TenSadie
The morning after our wedding, Jonah made me breakfast.
His fingers were dextrous around the handle of the frying pan. His wrists flexed as he flipped the pancakes expertly, sleeves pushed up to his elbows. His attention to detail as he poured syrup and fanned out carefully-cut strawberries was mesmerising. The plate he slid in front of me looked like a magazine cover.
In another, better world, where Jonah set this plate in front of another, better wife, this would be a perfect epilogue. Obstacles overcome. The promise of the marriage plot fulfilled. The first day of a happily ever after.
‘This looks beautiful,’ I said, throat scratchy. ‘Thanks, Fisher.’
He didn’t blush, but his cheeks went a little pink above his beard. ‘I was going to make you eat cold pizza, but Elias ate it all when he got in last night, the arsehole.’
He slid into a chair opposite me. ‘Besides, you know my opinions on combining pizza and coffee, and starting the day off with a fight seemed like a terrible idea.’
Sun was streaming in through the kitchen window. It winked off the gold finish on his wedding ring. Even though I’d just about cried myself hoarse, a tell-tale lump started to grow in my throat again.
This was not that other, better world.
I’d done it. I’d gone through with it.
I was Mrs Jonah Fisher. He was Mr Sadie Shaw.
The rings might be fakes, but their significance was not. No matter how many of our collection of spare wedding bands we went through – no matter if every piece of cubic zirconia fell out of my engagement ring – we were still bound together now, in a very real way.
And Chess hadn’t been there.
Hardly anyone had. We’d asked Van and Annie to be there as our witnesses, but we’d invited the rest of our housemates as well, current and past. None of them had been able to make it.
We’d invited some colleagues from the various universities we’d worked at too. None of them could make it either.That’s academic culture for you,Jonah had said to me, shrugging, when we realised just how small our small wedding would be.Everyone’s always working. Tuesday afternoon isn’t exactly the most convenient time.
But Jonah’s brother had come. The brother who lived and worked in Germany, the brother who he’d been raised to fight instead of fight for, the brother he had freely admitted he didn’t know particularly well – Elias had come.
And Chess hadn’t.
There was a theorist called Zygmunt Bauman who wrote about ‘liquid love’, the idea that late capitalism had ‘liquified’ a lot of connections between people. When the world is a marketplace, he argued, we don’t want to tie ourselves tightly and permanently to people. Instead, we always have one eye on the market, always on some level considering trading people in for a better, newer, shinier version.
Mostly, when I used Bauman in my work, it was to critique him. The enormous ongoing popularity of the marriage plot andthe happily-ever-after, I’d contended in an article in theJournal of Popular Romance Studies,signified a strong attachment to the idea that we could find someone we would never want to trade in, and who would never want to trade us in.
But maybe I’d been a bit unfair to old mate Zyg, because, when I looked at my life, he clearly had a point.
I was thirty-one years old, and Chess was the only constant in my life. Everyone else was impermanent. Whether I untied the ties that bound us together or they did, the threads always came undone in the end, unravelling and drifting free.
It had never been something I’d minded. I’d been laser-focused on my career, not my interpersonal connections, and no one had ever made me care enough to mind. When my first boyfriend had tried to talk me into being in love with him– Don’t you love me, Sadie? You love hanging out with me and going out with me and having sex with me. I think youarein love with me, and you’re just too scared to say it– I’d cut the thread right there without a moment’s regret.
Did you love those things?my therapist had asked me.
