“I want to know all of you,” Bernardo says. He touches my cheek, my hair, my eyebrow. “I wanted to see the secret parts, and I did, and I love them too, and I think we should do this.” Bernardo grabs my ring finger, the one on my right hand, and I love that he doesn’t know that’s the wrong one. It’s a mistake my dad could never make, and I love the idea of being the First, the Only, the One.
Yes, yes, yes, my brain says, even though it’s confused about absolutely everything else in the whole wide world. Bernardo sounds so sure, and I get lost and happy in the sureness.
We are not Roxanne and her coked-out boyfriend. We are not couples from school who have sex in someone’s parents’ bed and call it love. We are not some adult’s idea of a cute couple. We are not my dad and the way he falls in love without really knowing someone or caring to know them. Bernardo knows me, wants to know more. We are something new.
We’re more. We have to be. I’ve only ever wanted more.
“Yes,” I say. “Let’s do it.”
thirty-seven
It turns out my father keeps all the rings in his office, in one of his desk drawers, like they’re business contracts, which I guess they sort of are. I almost don’t go in, even though we’ve searched everywhere else. I don’t want to be anywhere near that photo of me and Arizona ever again, but I can’t stop myself from looking for it.
I look in the folder again and it’s gone.
Arizona must have taken it and destroyed it. I have a surge of love for her, and sadness that what I’m about to do with Bernardo will take me further away from her still.
“A drawer of diamonds,” Bernardo says, all poetic in his disbelief.
“A drawer of empty promises,” I say. The wine says it, not me.
There are eight rings in the drawer, but only four ex-wives, so I have to assume he intended to propose to some of the girlfriends and never got around to it, or he’s planning ahead for three more wives after Karissa. It’s a small fortune sitting in my dad’s office. I fantasize that he’s saving them for my college education or something, but the sad reality is that he probably got half of them back after the divorces and promptly forgot they existed.
I swear if I said the name Natasha to him, he wouldn’t even know who I was talking about.
They are perfectly lined up in the drawer, a row of boxes where pencils and spare staples and unpaid bills should be. My stomach turns.
“Let’s try this again,” Bernardo says. He holds one of the rings to his face, then another, and settles on a simple one I’ve never seen before. “He won’t miss this for a few weeks until I can buy you one myself, right?” I laugh and kiss his shoulder, but he has a serious look on his face and he’s lowering himself down to one knee and we are doing this in the real way now.
“I can’t . . . we can’t . . . those things are probably bad luck . . . and I hate diamonds . . . and there’s no way you’re actually . . .” I’m finding it impossible to finish a sentence. Bernardo is on the floor of my father’s office, on one knee, holding a blue Tiffany’s box up to me.
“Will you marry me?” he says.
I grin. It’s hard to say yes in a normal way, because the moment is so ridiculous and the ring is so shiny and my body is still rocking back and forth a little from the wine. I cover my face and laugh into my hands.
“Let’s not be like everyone else. Will you not be like everyone else with me?” I like this question better, and that Bernardo’s shoulders stay squarely back and his knees aren’t buckling or anything. The ring in the box in Bernardo’s hands gives my heart this unexpected leap, a feeling I wasn’t prepared for, and my knees are the ones that buckle.
I don’t want to be like everyone else.
I don’t want to be like my father or my sad mother or the creature that Karissa is becoming or any of the other women who used to be my family but are now scattered all over the city in new lives. I want to be like Karissa was in acting class, and like Natasha told me to be in my journals. I want to write this down tomorrow. I want to be grateful for a stolen diamond ring and an hour-long kissing session on the floor.
“Yes,” I say, and go for the kiss, which is long and overpowering and adult.
The ring goes on my finger. Only for the afternoon. “I’m not actually keeping this,” I say.
“But we’re actually engaged? I can get you a ring of your own?”
“We’re engaged,” I say. I can’t stop laughing. Or kissing. Then we are tangled on the floor, the drawer of rings still open and the contents probably watching us.
We’re naked and then we’re more than naked. We’re doing it, or trying to. It’s quick and fun and the whole thing is not as big a deal as I thought it would be, but maybe nothing is too big anymore when you have a massive diamond on your ring finger.
“That’s what engaged people do?” I say when we’ve held each other and made eye contact and done all the things it feels right to do afterward. I mean it as a sexy joke, but Bernardo stiffens at the implication.