We put on our best faces for our families, circling the same area like two magnetic norths, never drifting too close to one another. I busied myself offering his family beverages, smiling at their stories. Lucas had taken up karate, and I laughed too loudly as he showed me the roundhouse kick he had learned to make, certain nobody in the room noticed the tension.
Our families had met a couple of times over the years, but this was the first holiday we were all spending together, and everybody else seemed to be enjoying one another’s company. It wasn’t surprising—we both came from northeastern suburban households that valued academic achievement. I used to take comfort in the similarities in our backgrounds, but sitting around that table on that Thanksgiving, it struck me that choosing someone so similar to me somehow indicated the narrowness of my worldview. I’d become friends with the son of a diplomat, a woman who’d grown up in Singapore, and some of the highest-powered attorneys in Manhattan. I couldn’t help but imagine their Thanksgiving conversations to be far more interesting and enlightened.
I was snapped out of my thoughts by Sari, Sam’s eight-year-old niece, asking if all twenty-two of us would go around the table and say what we were thankful for and what we wished for the coming year. The request was so sweet that my brain stopped spinning for a moment. I listened to my father say that he was thankful for my mother’s cooking and he wished she’d stop making him diet. My mother was grateful that my father had finally lost ten pounds and had stopped snoring as a result; she wished that meant she’d sleep more in the coming year.
Sam was next. “I’m thankful for Alex, and for how hard she works every day to let me pursue my dream of starting a company.” He put his hand on my knee under the table, and I looked up to see somehow expectant expressions on every face around the table. What were they waiting for? Oh god. Please don’t propose. Please don’t propose. I suddenly felt like I was in a cage, trapped hopelessly and perpetually in the world of chipped paint and crocheted pillows and spotty internet connections. Oh god. Please don’t do this to me.
“That’s it,” Sam said cheerily. “Let’s eat!”
I felt the blood draining from the vein above my right temple and releasing a bit of the pressure. I exhaled slowly, my heart still thudding at warp speed but the tension in my neck dissipating nonetheless.
Everybody continued to stare at Sam, but my father finally broke the silence. “Okay!” he announced, sounding almost reluctant. “I’ll get the bird.” Anxious chatter commenced around the room, and I met Sam’s eyes and forced a smile onto my face. My turn was skipped entirely. I never got my chance to say what I was grateful for or what I wished, which was a good thing because I truly had no idea what I would have said.
When we got back to the city Sunday evening, I waited until Sam was in the bathroom and riffled through his bag. I easily found what I was looking for: a small black velvet box. My stomach churned as I held it up to my face and snapped it open.
The ring was stunning—emerald-cut with tapered baguettes—and I realized that my mother must have helped pick it out. It was huge—and it occurred to me that my father must have helped him buy it.
All the qualities I’d once loved about Sam came to the forefront of my mind. I focused on his kindness, his morality, his honesty. When I didn’t think about the future, I didn’t mind that he had no money and that he very well might never have any. I could care less that he wouldn’t fit in with my Klasko friends and that he hadn’t ever planned a fun dinner out for us. I attempted to steady my racing mind. I closed my eyes as the events from the Thanksgiving meal rushed back in on me, wincing at the memory of those expectant faces.
Why didn’t I want Sam to propose? He was kind. And smart. And we still had great sex. Don’t most girls want to get married?
I didn’t need to analyze my feelings any longer. He hadn’t proposed, and so I didn’t need to think about it right now. I reached for my work phone as though it were a stiff drink and read through my new emails quickly, until I noticed a warm liquid underneath my fingers. I stared down, horrified, at the red streaks on my forearm, just beginning to leak drops of blood, and the bits of skin beneath my fingernails. I considered my arm in detached disbelief for a moment before I made my way to the kitchen to wash up. The sting of the soap was delicious.
* * *
“Holy shit.” Carmen put her hand to her forehead as I finished my story, which I’d rushed through before our morning emails began to pour in on the Monday after Thanksgiving. “This is big.”
“Literally. The ring was huge,” I agreed.
She got up from her chair and began to pace the length of my office, though she was only able to take a few steps before having to double back.
“So, the real question is, do you think you’ll ever want to marry him?”
“Is that really the question? Isn’t the question why I don’t want to marry him right now?”
Carmen stopped and looked at me. “Because you don’t think he’s the one for you. Not now, at least,” she said, a hint of apology for her honesty in her tone. I slumped down in my chair, realizing she was correct. “And the question isn’t whether you love him, because we both know the answer is yes,” she said softly.
She was right, of course. I leaned my head back and stared at the ceiling. “I just don’t know. We used to be so good. I used to want to marry him so badly. Or maybe I liked the comfort of knowing that was the plan. But since I started working here—” I pressed my palms together and then pushed them out from my chest in opposite directions. “But maybe it’s just an adjustment period.”
“Maybe.”
“Sometimes I don’t feel like he fits in this world,” I said, gesturing around my office. “And I think I like this world.”
A metallic ding from my computer reminded me I was due in Peter’s office in five minutes.
“To be continued,” Carmen assured me.
A few days later, I made my way back into my office at five o’clock, seeing it for the first time since I had left to go to back-to-back meetings on the forty-fifth floor that morning. “Jordan called. Three times,” Anna announced from her cubicle. I nodded as I ducked into my office and closed the door behind me.
I dialed his number before even sitting down at my desk.
“How’s your deal with Peter going?” Jordan asked in place of a greeting.
“Good.” I called my computer to life and entered my password, smirking at how territorial he and Matt had become over me. I hoped it meant they’d rank me at the top of their list come Match Day. “What’s up?”
“We’re having a party in my mother’s basement tonight,” Jordan announced.
“What?”
“On the fifty-sixth floor. ‘Mom’s basement’ is the theme of the party. A keg, beer pong, and nineties hip-hop. It’s our last hurrah before they install security cameras tomorrow.”
I thought for a moment about the blasting of the soundtrack to my middle school years in a space that was about to be reserved for corporate lunches and high-stakes conference calls. “Genius. I love this idea.”
“I’m heading up there now! Come.”