I catch myself, remembering we’re supposed to be fighting, and clear my throat, muttering something about having to get back to work. He coughs, straightens his hoodie and glasses, and shuffles back into the bedroom.
God, he’s such a dork.
I don’t know how to feel about the idea of him not being my dork anymore. So I decide it’s better to not think about it at all.
Thursday
apartment #6 – ethan
Chapter Nineteen
It’s automatic, when I tap my pen erratically against the table, a page full of useless scribbles staring up at me, the anxiety creeping up from the pit of my stomach, squeezing around my heart and crawling into my lungs.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
I can do this. I can do this, I have nothing to be so worked up about. It’s not like anybody even knows about this, if it does go wrong, or I don’t think I can go through with it for some reason.
This is not a big deal, I tell myself. I am just taking a break from work for a little while.
God, how can I post so much utter crap throughout the day on social media that people engage with, but I can barely string a sentence together right now?
I can totally do this.
I’ve had days to think about all the things I love about her and all the things I miss so much now she’s not around; I’ve had days to mope around like a soppy, pathetic, romantic bastard. I can do this.
It should not be this difficult.
Dear Charlotte—I . . .
Dear Charlotte. You’re not perfect, but you’re perfect for me, and . . .
Dear Charlotte, this week has been hell, and I don’t . . .
Okay, it’s impossible, and I absolutely cannot do this, and I have very, very good reason to be breaking out in a cold sweat.
I scribble out the latest stupid line I just tried to write out, sighing and burying my head in my hands. Eight pages in, and I can’t come up with a single entire sentence that doesn’t sound completely cringeworthy or even comes close to telling her how I feel about her.
You’d think, after two and a half years, I’d know what to say to her.
This is useless.
I’m never going to figure it out.
She deserves better than this paltry attempt. I should be singing
“Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” with a marching band as I dance down the bleachers in front of a crowd of all her friends. I should be kissing her in the rain after writing her a whole bunch of letters.
I should be climbing up a fire escape with a bouquet of roses after pulling up in a white limousine. I should march through a field in the pouring rain to tell her I love her, after bailing her sister out of a shotgun wedding to a soldier and in spite of my prejudice and her pride.
God, all the romantic movies we’ve watched together and I can’t even come up with a single damn line to express how much I love her, never mind some outlandish, unforgettable display of showboating.
Who am I kidding?
The good news, I guess, is that Charlotte knows I’m not that guy.
I’m awkward and shy and introverted and I look like the nerd I am.
Something tells me a dorky, gangly guy with wire-rimmed glasses and puffy, mousy hair singing tunelessly along to “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” won’t have quite the same effect as when Heath Ledger did it, and that if I walked through the rain to meet her in a gazebo, I’d look less Mr. Darcy and more drowned rat.
“Come on, Ethan, get it together,” I mutter, dragging my head up out of my hands and shaking myself. I stand up, pacing around the room, and it’s official: the cabin fever is bad enough that I’m now talking to myself.
Seriously, you’d think, considering I’m an introvert who likes to spend most of his time indoors playing video games and recording vlogs, that a few days of staying in my apartment wouldn’t be any kind of hardship. It should be a totally average week.
And yet.
Motivation feels harder to come by than usual and I find myself getting distracted by literally anything. I’ve never wanted to just go out for a walk so much in my whole life.
I’d love to look at something that’s not the wall of floating book-shelves piled with Charlotte’s fiction paperbacks, or the IKEA unit in the corner with photographs we’ve framed, or my limited-edition Stormtrooper helmet.
I close my eyes and wonder, if I pretended hard enough, if I might be able to imagine that the shag rug under my feet is grass.
(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.