To my relief, his shoulders dropped from around his ears, the tight lines around his mouth eased, and he laughed. Then he hugged me. “I suppose I should be used to it by now.”
Well, yeah, you should, I thought. After all, my tardiness was one of the many reasons we’d divorced. Wisely, I did not say this out loud. Instead, I checked my coat and then curled my hand around his elbow while we followed the hostess to our table.
She led us through the rows, to a table tucked beside a tall window. To my surprise, it was strewn with pink rose petals, and a bottle of champagne was in a bucket with two glasses already poured and waiting for us. I gave Jeremy a side-eye.
“You went all out this year,” I said.
He shrugged. “It seems like a special un-anniversary, doesn’t it?”
His pale green eyes met mine, and I felt a prickle of alarm. Had I missed a memo? What did he mean by “special”? My heart started to pound in my chest like warning shots being fired. I could feel my flight-or-fight response, okay, mostly flight, kick in.
Jeremy and I had celebrated our un-anniversary ever since he moved to Boston three years ago. It was always low-key and fun right up until last year, when, in a bout of deep loneliness, I invited him to spend the night. He’d been “spending the night,” if you get my drift, a couple of times a month ever since.
I knew Sophie was right that the relationship wasn’t doing either one of us any good, rather like glazed doughnuts, the occasional cigarette, or a three-day-long video-game-playing binge, but I didn’t want to give it up because then I’d have to go out there and find a real relationship, which felt like entirely too much work.
He pulled out my chair, and I slid onto my seat. I felt out of step, like I was clapping on the down beat, and couldn’t quite get the rhythm of the room. I noticed that people at surrounding tables were covertly watching us. This was bad.
The hostess put our menus on the corner of the table and stepped back. She was younger than me by a couple of years. She had that fresh-faced enthusiasm that could only be found on a person who hadn’t been paying their own rent for very long.
She glanced between us, and then with a soft squeak, she stepped back, turned on her heel, and hurried away. The early warning system inside of me grew insistently louder.
Jeremy picked up the two champagne glasses and handed me one. I debated downing it, sensing that liquid courage was going to be required. He lifted his in a toast. I wished he’d sit down. It felt as if he was looming over me.
“Annabelle, you’re my best friend,” he said. Oh dear, this sounded like the opening of a speech. That couldn’t be good. Usually we just said, “Look at us,” clinked glasses, and down the hatch the beverage went. We didn’t do speeches.
“And you’re mine,” I said. I lifted my glass, indicating the toast was over. But he didn’t get the message. In fact, he looked as if he was just warming up.
“I know,” he said. “Despite the fact that we got married too young and you had that episode with what’s his name, we’re still each other’s plus one.”
I stared at Jeremy. That “episode” was my second marriage. Jeremy knew the BD’s name, but even now, three years after my divorce, he still refused to say it. I knew he’d been in denial about the whole thing, but it seemed significant at the moment that he couldn’t say his name or mention my marriage.
“You mean my marriage to Greg?” I asked. I blinked innocently.
He made a face as if a fly had just flown into his mouth. He waved his hand dismissively and continued on.
“Yeah, even then I always felt like we were meant to be together, you know.”
I didn’t know. I had thought we were done except for the friendship and fringe benefits. The cold feeling in the pit of my stomach began to harden into a block of ice. If he was headed where I feared, we were not going to come out of this as friends, never mind friends with benefits.
“I always believed we’d grow old together and end up on a porch somewhere in matching rocking chairs,” he said. His smile was adoring when he tilted his head and stared into my eyes. He was going to propose. I could see it coming as if it had the bright blaze of a meteor breaking through the atmosphere.
I had to stop him. I didn’t want to marry him again, and I didn’t really believe he wanted to marry me. It would ruin everything if he asked because I’d have to say no and he’d be so terribly hurt. He did bruise easily just as Sophie said. I jumped to my feet. I clinked my glass with his and said, “Are you about to congratulate me?”
He paused. He looked confused. I forged ahead, taking advantage of his surprise.
“Sophie told you, didn’t she?” I asked.
“Sophie?” He shook his head. “Told me what?”
“She offered me a job as creative director for her company, and I accepted,” I said. “Isn’t it amazing? I’m moving to Phoenix. Promise you’ll come and visit.”
His mouth hung open for a moment, then he cleared his throat and said, “Actually, I didn’t know. This was—”
“So incredibly thoughtful of you,” I said. My voice was high pitched, a little manic, and my smile brittle. I felt as if I were throwing a drowning man a life preserver and he was refusing to take it. “Here’s to new beginnings!” I cried, hoping he’d get with the program and let go of his misguided plan to propose. “Bottoms up.”
His eyes went wide as I put my glass to my lips and upended the champagne into my mouth. The stress of the moment had me chugging the fizzy beverage, hoping to ease the tension. Instead something hard hit the back of my throat and got lodged in my windpipe. Just like that, I couldn’t breathe. I dropped my glass and clutched the front of my neck, trying to get some air. I made horrible gasping noises and staggered. Everything went gray and I started to see spots.
“Annabelle!” Jeremy cried. “Oh my god, you’re choking on the ring!”
Ring? I would have asked for more details but instead, I blacked out.
2
“This, too, as they say, shall pass,” Dr. Curtis said. He glanced from the clipboard in his hands to me.
I was lying in a bed in the emergency ward of Boston Medical Center. My hospital johnnie was bunched up beneath my back and my throat was raw. This is what happens when you choke on a one-carat cushion cut solitaire in a platinum setting and then instead of spitting it up, you swallow it.
“What does that mean?” Jeremy asked. “Is she going to be all right? No permanent harm?”
To his credit, he seemed more concerned about me than he was the engagement ring.
Dr. Curtis was a tall man, very thin, with a shiny dome for a head and glasses that perpetually slipped down his nose. He pushed them back up and smiled at me. He had a gentle smile that made me feel cared for, which helped exponentially, given the current ambiance of the woman in the bed on the other side of the curtain who kept moaning and the random profane shouts of some guy down the hall who sounded like he was being waterboarded.