Page 49 of Trial and Error

Bridget looks up at me and her relaxed posture is gone. She looks almost nervous as she says, “My family isn’t like yours, Elias. My mom isn’t always the nicest person to people and my dad, well…” She sighs. “He enables that behaviour.”

I hear the wariness in her voice as she talks about them, and I don’t like it. I reach across and place my hand on her thigh and give it a squeeze. “It’s okay,” I assure her. “We’re in this together, remember?”

Bridget sits up straight and looks at me with a determined smile. “We’ve got this.” Her eyes crinkle at the sides as she looks over at me, and I nod in agreement.

We’ve got this.

elias

I’ve only seen Bridget nervous once before.

That was when I asked her to meet my parents and she was nervous, but not like this. She didn’t shake like she is currently in the passenger seat. Her right knee is bouncing so hard I’m worried she might drill a hole into the floor. Bridger drums her fingers against her legs as we pull into her parents’ drive.

She’s a ball of anxious energy, and as soon as I switch of the engine, I turn to face her and watch as she twists her engagement ring around her finger, her gaze locked on the dashboard.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, grimacing.

I reach across and take her hand in mine and smooth my thumb over her palm. She looks at me with bright eyes that are usually calm but are now wild like an ocean during a storm. “We don’t have to do this today.”

“Yeah, we do.”

“Bridget, you don’t ever have to do something you don’t want to. Personally, I don’t want to go in there if it’s causing you this much stress.”

She smiles at that, resting her head against the headrest. “My mom wouldn’t be happy if we bailed last minute.”

“Well, she didn’t really give much notice,” I argue, my eyes dropping to where my thumb catches against the ring.

“We’ll be late.”

“I’ll stay in this damn car for the next five hours if that’s how long it takes for you to relax.”

Her eyes meet my own and she frowns. “I don’t want to go inside.”

“Then we won’t.”

“I was five when Tom and his family moved in next door. Mom became friends with his mom and the two of them spent all their time together, which resulted in Tom and I being together a lot. As we got older, my mom would make comments that we would be the perfect couple—boy next door, and all that. We spent our summers together in Nova Scotia with my grandparents, and we were sixteen when I started to see him as something more than my best friend.”

I sit in silence, letting her get all of this off her chest and notice how she relaxes the more she speaks.

“By the time we were eighteen, we were in a relationship and spent almost every waking hour together. He was…perfect—at the time. I think it was hard when I realized that we just fell into our parents’ ideas for us and that neither one of us really had a say in what we wanted. So when I turned twenty-four, I knew I wanted to get married to him and wanted to settle down, but he didn’t. Told me we were too young and he didn’t see that our future and it was then that I realized, without the pressure from our parents, that we would never have been together. Sure, we might’ve hooked up, you know, with us being neighbours and all, but when it came down to our fundamentals, we were on two completely different planets.”

She moves her hand and threads our fingers together. “Now that I’m older, I see that toward the end we weren’t really happy and we only stayed together for our parents’ sake. It wasn’t until after we broke up that I realized it wasn’t a case of him not wanting those things, it’s just he didn’t want them with me, and looking back, I don’t think I wanted them with him either.”

“You still want kids?”

Bridget looks over and nods. “Two minimum. Do you?”

“Yeah.”

“How many?”

“As many as my wife wants.”

She smiles. “She’ll be lucky to have you, Elias.”

I squeeze her hand in response because I’m not sure what to say back to her.

“She’s going to try and interfere.”