“That’s not why I proposed,” he says. It’s not that I forget about his seriousness, but I sometimes think it’s a transitory state, not an actual long-term condition. I assume if he loves me, he has to have a deep laugh and a lighter spirit somewhere in there.
“Of course! Oh my God, of course. I’m kidding, babe,” I say. Babe, as a word, doesn’t come naturally to me. But he likes it. It softens him.
“I’m so bad at your jokes,” he says. He plays with the ring on my finger, and I think he wants me to keep it on, wants me to show my family, wants to make this even more real somehow. But I like it as dress-up.
“You really are,” I say. I smile big so he knows it’s teasing, but he’s too busy kissing the very top of my forehead, along the hairline, to notice.
“Who are we telling first?” he says.
“Oh God, no one for a while,” I say. I start getting dressed. I’m still getting used to all the nakedness.
“What do you mean no one?” he says.
“Well, it’s not like we’re getting married tomorrow or anything, and we can wait until people don’t think we’re insane.” With my clothes on and my hair up and no longer sweaty on my back, I feel more in control.
“Since when is this about other people?” Bernardo says. He puts some clothes on too but doesn’t look happy about it.
“Exactly,” I say.
It’s quiet between us for a while.
“I want it to be real,” Bernardo says.
“I do too. It is real.”
His face is cracking open with a sort of sorrow, and I know that even if he’s over Casey, the echoes of heartbreak are still there. Ready to light up and take over at any moment. I’ve said something that reminds him of that hurt.
He doesn’t have to tell me. It’s an energy shift so distinct he might as well be changing colors, like a mood ring.
Bernardo is a person who is scared he’s not real enough.
Bernardo is a person who wants me to help make him real.
“I want to tell my family. And your family. We don’t hold back. That’s not us,” he says. It’s strange, that there’s such a strong sense of us already. But there is. And we do things big and strange and together. We don’t hold back. We don’t try to fit someone else’s idea of what’s right.
And I love that about us.
Muscles I didn’t know I had are aching a little. A beautiful kind of soreness in mysterious parts of my body. It’s possible I like after-sex even more than actual sex.
“I don’t want to be engaged the way my dad is engaged. I don’t want it to remind me of that.” I think Bernardo understands me the same way I do him. The sensitive bits, the little zones that grip up with feeling, are different but equally strong.
He nods.
“I forget sometimes,” he says. “I don’t know anyone else who’s been married more than once. I’ve never even been to a wedding.”
“I was so little at Janie’s wedding. She was so . . . into it. I was a flower girl. She was a princess. Her little boys had seersucker suits. They did this whole ritual. With sand. And, like, pouring sand into a bowl together? I thought that meant it would work.”
I spin the ring around a few more times. I can’t keep it on. But I do like how it looks on me. That we can both look at it as a symbol of Something Big.
“I don’t know whose ring this was,” I whisper.
“Maybe it’s one of the spares?”
I take it off and hand it over. I can’t go downstairs with that thing on.
“It’s cool,” Bernardo says. “We can do unexpected, big things.” He’s flushed and dimpled and his glasses are hooked around one ear still, but not the other.
I’m sure I look the same: disheveled and happy and off-kilter. I think of when Dad proposed to Tess in broken German in our flower-filled living room. Tess had on a navy suit and had gotten a blow-out earlier that day, and her makeup was understated and pretty.
She’d kept touching her new nose.
That’s how I know this is good and real. We are the opposite of put-together and perfect and planned. We are spontaneous and romantic and falling apart at the seams. I’m certain that’s how it should be.
I take the ring off and look for clues of who it might have belonged to.
And there, on the inside, engraved and a little rubbed off: My Always Janie.
July 13
The List of Things to Be Grateful For 1 Talking to Roxanne about sex, now that I know what it actually is. The speed at which the words come.
2 Natasha listing terrible things that make you realize how much you love someone on her latest List of Things to Be Grateful For.
3 The picture Bernardo’s littlest sister drew for me. Me and Bernardo. I’m in a wedding gown, like she knows even though she doesn’t. She simply happens to think we’d look good getting married.
thirty-eight