“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.
She starts updating me on a situation apparently happening upstairs: Maisie’s friend, a girl called Isla who lives in our building, has overhead some really crazy arguments from one of her neighbors. Apparently this neighbor has been having screaming matches with her boyfriend the last couple of days (which now she mentions it, might explain some of the noise I’ve been hearing from upstairs this week), and it’s escalated to yelling about how they feel about kids and marriage and stuff. Charlotte sighs, telling me she hopes it works out for them, but she imagines what a big, scary conversation that must be. My stomach twists the whole time she talks, and I have to work hard not to give too much away. I’m sweating through my T-shirt.
She notices something is up, because her mouth twists and her forehead puckers in a frown. “I’m boring you, aren’t I? Sorry. I know you don’t really care about some stranger’s drama.”
“No!” I say, maybe a little too quickly. “No, that’s not it, I just—just feel bad for them, is all. I promise, I want to hear all about it.”
Charlotte and I never really talked about getting married, or kids, or our futures, or anything like that, but I guess we never really needed to. We were serious and committed to each other so early on.
I guess she’s always expected me to propose at some point, but it’s not something we discussed so much.
We’ve been to a couple of friends’ weddings over the last year or so.
Once one got engaged, it seemed everyone was doing it. We’ve had five weddings in the last year. Charlotte would say something at each one, like how she didn’t want lilies at her wedding, or she thought it was tacky to have such a big group of bridesmaids and groomsmen, or that she could never get married abroad because she’d never expect her friends to pay that kind of money just to see her tie the knot.
It wasn’t like I didn’t have my share of opinions. When her friend from university had a kid and we went to visit, we both laughed over the name (they’d called their kid Leia, after the Star Wars character) and I’d joked to her that if we had a son, I’d definitely name him something appropriately dorky too.
Everything had always been such a throwaway comment, though, or part of a joke.
Hearing her tell me this gossip I don’t actually care about, though, I wonder if we should’ve talked about it more, before I go ahead and propose to her.
As if she can read my mind, Charlotte turns suddenly serious and says to me, “Ethan?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I ask you something?”
My stomach lurches and my heart is somewhere in my throat, but I nod and say in the most breezy voice I can manage, “Sure, anything.”
And she asks me, “How do you feel about pineapple on pizza?”
apartment #15 – isla
Chapter Twenty
Nope, sorry, Danny, I tried and I can’t do it.
Even with the door shut, the noise from the kitchen is so distracting it’s making it impossible to focus. It doesn’t help that my head’s not really in it because this late in the afternoon isn’t when I’d usually be working out, so as much as I grit my teeth and try to push on, I only end up frustrated and fed up.
Like, seriously? I’m here with my whole routine in disarray, even wearing mascara and some BB cream to exercise so I don’t look totally hideous for Danny, while he’s barely stepped away from his computer for more than two minutes at a time today to speak to me, and now he’s making a total racket while cooking dinner—and probably making an absolute mess of the kitchen I only just cleaned this morning.