(Yep, I’ve officially lost it.)
All right, all right, focus. You got this. Charlotte’s not expecting Ryan Gosling. She’d expect it to be you. It doesn’t need to be a show-stopper performance, just you. Honest. Real. Authentic. Yeah, she loves authentic stuff. What else does she love?
She loves classic books. I could do that thing where I cut a hole out of the pages in a book I know she likes, to hide a ring in there.
But she’d probably be madder at me for wasting a good book, and I don’t even have a ring yet.
An hour-long Google search later, I discover that I know nothing at all about rings, and even if I did, I don’t know what she’d like more: a classic diamond, one with emeralds to match her eyes? A princess cut, whatever that is? Am I supposed to get silver, or white gold, and what’s even the difference, and is she going to be offended if I pick the wrong one?
Sure, I could just pick one and go ahead and order a ring. I could find her jewelry box and try to measure one of her rings and use that as a guide to figure out which size to buy, sure, but none of the websites I look at can guarantee when they’ll deliver, and if it doesn’t show up until after she gets back and Charlotte sees the delivery box she’ll only ask what it is and I am the worst at keeping secrets, so it’d ruin the whole thing.
Okay, so no ring for the grand proposal.
Which is maybe a good thing, because I bet she’d have a great time picking out the perfect ring for herself, and she’ll probably do a better job of it than I would. I bookmark a couple of rings I think she’d like, trying not to look for too long at the price on any of them in case it gives me a literal heart attack, and step away from my computer to go back to pacing around the room.
I give up on that soon enough, and go to make myself a coffee.
Maybe that’ll help.
My phone rings while I’m in the kitchen, and I prop it against the toaster once I swipe to answer.
Charlotte’s face fills the screen, and my heart lurches.
Such a sap, Maddox.
“Hey, sweetie!” she says, beaming. “Whatcha doing?”
“Just makin’ coffee.” I grin back at her, lifting the French press to the camera before I pour it. “How about you?”
“Just sittin’ in the garden.”
She flips the camera, showing off a lush green garden, the grass recently mown but already sprinkled with daisies. The red-brown fence at the back of it matches the planks of wood that make up the deck, where she’s sitting on a sun lounger. I can see her pale legs stretched out in front of her on it, as she swings the camera around the garden.
She flips it back on herself and I notice she’s wearing the blue earrings I bought her on holiday in Tenerife last year.
“I’m starting to think we should’ve just said screw it and quit our jobs and moved out to the country and bought some little cottage in the middle of nowhere just to have a garden. I miss having a garden.”
She sighs.
I laugh. “It’s your job we stayed near the city for, remember?”
“All right, Mr. Self-Employed. We can’t all make a living selling ad space on our vlogs about video games.”
“I talk about Reddit threads too.”
“Yeah, and Pokémon, I know. You think I’m not fully aware of that giant stuffed Charmander in our living room?”
“It’s a Charizard,” I correct her, like she doesn’t already know, and Charlotte giggles. “What’re you reading?”
“I found my old copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover from when I was, like, seventeen.” She waves a slightly faded–looking book with a non-descript green cover at the camera. “It’s not as good as I remember, but it’s okay. What are you doing?”
“You mean in the last hour since I text you?”
Charlotte laughs again, lips curving up in a bright smile and God, I wish she was here. I can’t believe it’s been almost a week since I kissed her. She waits for me to answer, apparently oblivious to the fact I’m distracted thinking about the next time I’ll get to kiss her.
“Uh . . . ”
Shit. Shit, I can’t tell her what I’ve actually been doing this morning, since we last messaged. Oh, nothing much, Charlotte, just planning the perfect thing to say to you to ask you to marry me, because I realized I want to spend the rest of my life with you.
Never mind a ring showing up in the post; I think saying that would ruin the surprise, just a little.
“Not much. I’ve got a vlog to film for Saturday. Some stuff to plan for my Twitch stream tomorrow night.”
“Eight o’clock,” she declares. “I’ve got my reminders all set to tune in.”
I laugh, rolling my eyes at her and picking up the phone in one hand, my coffee in the other, taking her back into the living room.
“Why? You hate my livestreams.”
“I don’t hate them.”
“All right,” I concede, “but they’re not your kind of thing.”
I was still working when I met Charlotte. I was a paralegal.
I hated it.
I hated the hours, I hated the office, I hated the work. I’d only taken the job because I didn’t know what else to do with my life, and it seemed as good as any, and what the hell else did I plan to do with my law degree?
She thought my “little hobby” of a YouTube channel I’d been running for a few years at that point was really cute. A few dates in, she told me she’d watched some of my videos but didn’t really get it. “Do people really like watching someone else play a video game?” she’d asked, genuinely baffled by the concept.
We’d only been dating a few months when the channel started to take off. It was exhausting to keep it up alongside my job; but I loved it too much to stop. Charlotte didn’t get it, sure, but she was supportive. She was the one who encouraged me to ask to cut my hours to part time and invest more in my channel.
I quit my job completely about a year after that.
She never understood it, and she didn’t really enjoy watching it, but she always said she liked how enthusiastic I was about it, and she was never scornful of it.
“I don’t have to like video games to want to just watch you for a couple of hours. It’s like hanging out with you.”
“You’re cute.”
Her nose wrinkles and her shoulders shrug a little. “I know.”
She doesn’t know the half of it.