“We’ll make our own family,” he says earnestly.
I shake my head and muse, “You’ve lost it.” I take an invitation from the box, smash it into a ball, and shoot it at the dumpster. It misses.
“If I’ve lost it, then good riddance to whatever it was that I had.”
Scrunching up our wedding invitations and vaulting them in the general vicinity of a garbage can is strangely cathartic. Once we get started, we can’t stop. We pile them up like snowballs on the hood and take turns trying to make it in the dumpster. He scores eleven and I score nine.
“This one’s my grandmother’s,” I tell him as I hurl a snowball of paper and ribbons. “For pressuring me to wear her veil even though she could tell I didn’t like it, and for suggesting I might be too old to bear children.” I land my shot and Nicholas cheers. “Suck it, Edith! You’re officially uninvited!”
“This one’s your brother’s,” he replies, swinging an arm around like a baseball pitcher and letting it fly. It misses its mark by a mile and ends up in the road. “I know you stole my sunglasses, Aaron!”
“I can’t wait to throw your mom’s.”
“Oh, please, let me. I’ve earned it.”
He’s right, this honor belongs to Nicholas. I hand him a fresh invitation just so he has the satisfaction of crumpling it with Deborah’s name in mind. He grinds it with precise ferocity and it arcs over the dumpster, pinging off a stop sign.
“If I make this one,” I say, tossing an invitation snowball from one hand to the other, “you have to pick up this mess by yourself while I watch and eat fries. I’m not getting fined for littering.” I squint and aim carefully, but miss. Of course.
“Ha!” he crows. “Sucker. If I make this, you have to go back inside and buy me a chocolate shake.”
Nicholas misses, too. “Damn.”
I snort. “Your aim’s even worse than mine.”
“Your face is worse,” he mutters, to which I have to laugh.
There’s one last invitation in the box. I wad it up with purposeful slowness. “If I make this shot …” I think of the craziest outcome to all this I can come up with. It makes perfect sense. “You have to marry me. Not someday, and not maybe. We do this now.”
I swing my arm back and am about to let it go when Nicholas catches my wrist. He plucks the invitation from my fingers, slips down off the car, and walks over to the dumpster. He very deliberately drops it inside.
I raise an eyebrow at him when he walks back to me.
He stops a foot away, hands sliding into his pockets. His eyes are no longer teasing. “I’m not leaving you and me up to chance.”
I stare at him. He’s dead serious. “Really? You want to get married?”
“Really. There’s no one else I want to torture but you.”
I can’t stop staring at him. The way he’s talking, it sounds like he’s offering me everything I want. I’m dying to take it on trust, but there’s a crucial part of myself I’ve given him, which he hasn’t yet given in return. “But you still haven’t said you love me.”
“That’s not true.”
“You haven’t.”
“I say it all the time, I just say it very, very quietly. I tell you when you’re in another room, or right after we hang up the phone. I tell you when you’ve got headphones on. I say it after you shut the door behind you. I say it in my head every time you look at me.”
He steps closer, until we’re breathing each other’s air. I don’t know what the right thing to say is, but luckily Nicholas does. He’s got me.
He cups my face in his hands and brushes his lips over mine, his gaze so soft, a smile curving the edges of his mouth. “Of course I love you, Naomi. I never stopped.”
It takes six days for the marriage license to be granted after we apply, and for now we’re just holding on to it until the right moment.
Nicholas and I are driving back from an afternoon of laser tag, thanks to him taking a sick day at work. His hand rests on the gearshift, and he’s facing straight ahead at snow gusting across the road. It’s not snowing right now but it has been all day, white drifts rising twelve inches on either side of us. I cover his hand with mine and feel that barely discernible flex, an automatic response that feels like reassurance and unity.
“I vote we invite your parents next time,” I say, imagining Deborah and her fresh manicure holding a laser gun like a dead spider. Harold huffing and puffing, trying to shoot her.
He cackles. This fits perfectly into our plan of changing up how we spend time with his parents—finding a way to make it entertaining for us so that family togetherness doesn’t feel like a draining obligation for the rest of our lives. We have a long list of weird experiences we’re going to subject them to, and last night we drank too much wine and fell off the bed (okay, maybe I’m the only one who fell off the bed) laughing at each other’s suggestions while trading the notepad back and forth.
We haven’t breathed a word about the marriage license to them. We’ll break the news after we’re already married and throw a reception at a bowling alley in Eau Claire. Or maybe we’ll write a letter to Dear Deborah at the Beaufort Gazette and tell them that way. If she doesn’t have a meltdown about our imperfect ceremony, she definitely will when she hears we’re combining our surnames to create a brand-new one unique to us. Rosefield.
I shiver and crank up the heat. The paperwork that says Nicholas and I are legally allowed to marry within the next thirty days glows from the glove box, and I pick up the conversation where we left it off before laser tag. “Plane tickets this time of year are going to be expensive.”
“True. I’m not sure I want to fly in this weather, anyway. I’m already such a bad flyer, and if it’s snowing I’ll be freaking out up there.”
“That rules out Bridal Cave in Missouri and that glacier in Alaska.” We’d been considering courthouse nuptials, but then I typed interesting wedding destinations into a search engine and the results inspired us to be more imaginative when it comes to eloping. Eloping is fantastic, by the way. I highly recommend doing it if you ever get the chance. All the fun of getting married, none of the stress of planning a traditional wedding.
“Do you have a favorite day of the week?” I ask. “For example, I would not want to get married on a Monday.”
“Oh?” He slides me a brief glance. “Why is that?”
“I think it would increase the chances of anniversaries falling on a Monday. Which are never good days.”
“I don’t have a preference for the day of the week,” he replies, “but I’d rather not get married in the morning. My hair looks best when it’s had a few hours to breathe.” I nudge him, and he makes a show out of combing his fingers through his brown waves. He’s only half joking; his hair is indisputably peak-glorious in the latter half of the day.
I love talking about wedding details. I love hearing Nicholas casually discuss spending the rest of his life with me. I don’t bother to hide my happy dance, and while I don’t look over at him I know my elation is contagious and he’s smiling.