“Right now, to you, fifteen years seems like a terribly long time. But you’ll get to a point where a year passes so much faster than it did before. And that feeling of accelerating time only gets worse the older you get.” He dug his fork into his food, then added, “I think it starts in your thirties, and it’s really all downhill from there.”
“Yikes.” I slid a bite of curry into my mouth and chewed.
I was incredibly glad that I’d swallowed by the time Neil said, suddenly, “I was actually thinking of proposing tonight, but I didn’t know how you would take it.”
I lunged for my water glass and drained it in six huge gulps. I’m sure I looked the picture of sophistication at that moment; judging from the expression on the face of the man at the table next to ours, I could have only been more disgusting if I’d birthed an alien baby at the table.
A faint smile crossed Neil’s lips. “Not well, then, I see.”
“You can’t do that,” I gasped, shaking my head. “You can’t just casually drop marriage into the conversation.”
“Why not?” he asked pleasantly, as though we were discussing the concept of marriage in the abstract and not as it pertained to the two of us. “If I were going to get married again, it would be to you. I carried a torch for you for six years without any guarantee we’d ever see each other again. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m certain about my feelings for you.”
“That’s true,” I said cautiously, a little out of breath from the water. “I just had no idea marriage would ever be an option.”
“Only if you wanted to get married,” he clarified. “I could just as happily go on living in sin with you.”
Neil was talking about this like there was really a chance for the future. He hadn’t done that in ages. It had to be because of the good news he’d gotten today. He saw light at the end of the tunnel.
I wasn’t going to point out that between him and the tunnel-light was a big, scary monster of a transplant that could still kill him. He wasn’t stupid. The fact that he’d been considering proposing to me was proof that he felt this happiness could be fleeting.
I just needed to know that he knew that. “So, you were going to propose tonight. Why did you change your mind?”
He gave me a shrewd smile. He knew I’d picked up on his mental state. “You’re in the wrong business. You shouldn’t be a journalist, you should be a psychologist.”
“You should answer the question,” I said with prim sweetness as I put another bite into my mouth.
He sighed and sat back in his chair. He regarded me for a long moment before he answered. “Because it’s not the right time. It’s not fair to ask you to marry me now, when you might feel you had to say yes because of my health. That, and I already have what I suspect will be an atrociously expensive wedding to pay for.”
“Emma is going to bankrupt you,” I laughed.
“When I do ask you to marry me... I don’t want it to be out of desperation. That’s what it would have been, tonight. That’s how it was when I proposed to Elizabeth. I made a mistake there.”
“Proposing to me would be a mistake?” I was only half teasing. I wanted to know that Neil found the idea of living without me just as impossible as I found the idea of living without him.
“When I do ask you to marry me— or you ask me to marry you— I’d like it to happen in a happier time, so there isn’t any doubt. I don’t want it to be because I’m so relieved to have a few weeks of normalcy that I’m in a rush to make them count.”
“Ah. I see.” Thinking of it that way, it was quite romantic. And there was certainty there. Not “If I ask you to marry me.” He’d said, “When.” And even though I was terrified beyond reason of the idea of a legal commitment based entirely on emotion, I could see myself married to Neil. For the right reasons, as he said. Not because I was knocked up or he was dying. “For what it’s worth, if you had proposed tonight, I would have said no.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Would you have?”
I dabbed the corners of my mouth with my napkin, careful not to smudge my lipstick. I couldn’t lie to him. “No.”
After dinner, we rode back to the house in the back of the Maybach. In the comfortable silence, Neil reached his foot out and brushed his ankle against mine. I reached across the center console and took his hand. The casual touching hit me as a welcome shock; somewhere, in the past few months, we’d lost that. All the touching I’d done had been to fuss over him, adjusting blankets or lines or to feel for a fever. Everything that hadn’t been expressly sexual had been about the sickness. I should write that down.