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She thins her lips and gives me a flat look.
“Just do it,” I grunt, losing patience because I feel like I might be losing even more than that. Like every second she refuses to put on the ring I chose it’s like she’s getting further and further away from me. Even though I’m sitting up in bed, I’m suddenly thrown wildly off-balance. My left hand shakily reaches for her left wrist and I latch on like she’s a lifeboat.
I guess I must look just pathetic enough, because her face softens and she gives a little sigh.
“I’ll try it on,” she says, emphasizing the temporariness of the act. But I don’t care. It’s something. I release her wrist and watch her as she carefully takes the ring out of the box. She handles it so delicately, barely touching it, like she’s afraid it’s going to sting her or stab her or something.
“It’s just a ring,” I tell her. “It won’t bite.”
“Oh! No,” she says, looking at the ring then back at me. “It’s just… It’s so nice. I don’t want to damage it somehow.”
“Because you think we’re sending it back?” I probe sharply. What, she wants to keep it in pristine condition because she thinks I’m going to try to get a goddamn refund on it?
“I actually hadn’t thought that far ahead,” she says, tossing me a frown. “It’s just… I don’t know. I didn’t want to break it.” Her eyes look big and deep and dark. “It really is beautiful, Elio.”
And suddenly I remember what she told me the night I took her virginity. The story she’d never told anyone else. About how when she was ten years old and all broken up inside from the loss of her mamma, she tried to make a pot of tea in her mamma’s beautiful old pot. Seeking comfort in one of the last places left to her. And she broke it. Dropped the teapot and smashed it into pieces. When I picture it, a sad little Deirdre staring at the broken pot, it feels like one of those jagged hunks of ceramic is lodged in my throat.
She’s not worried about sending the ring back to Bruno in perfect condition so she can get out of the engagement. She just doesn’t want to break something beautiful. Something special. Even if that something came from me.
My chest feels like its cracking, and I don’t think it’s from the broken ribs.
“You’re not going to break it, Deirdre,” I tell her softly. “And even if you somehow manage to seriously damage a platinum and diamond ring, I will get it fucking fixed for you. Alright?”
I need her to hear me on this. I need her to understand.
There is nothing in her life that I cannot control, reshape, repair. Nothing I can’t fix for her. Protect her from.
That’s what a husband’s fucking for.
“Alright,” she says, and there’s a tremulous quality to her voice, a liquid-shimmer sheen in her eyes that makes me think she might be about to cry. And I don’t want her to cry, not now, but then again maybe it’s a good sign. Don’t some girls cry when they’re proposed to? But I didn’t actually propose. So what the fuck do I know?
I don’t get time to dwell on any of those questions because Deirdre is sliding the ring onto her finger and, like a lick of lightning in my head, she burns away all other thought. As I stare at her, I wonder if this is how other people feel when they step into a church. And not just any church. One of those big, old ones with a saint’s bones inside. The kind of place where miracles happen.
Never believed in miracles before.
Not until I had one standing in my bedroom with tears in her eyes and my ring on her finger.
“Fits,” she says tightly. Just one word, choked from her throat. Like she can’t manage saying anything else without bursting into tears. Her throat works, the muscles constricting, and she suddenly draws her hands together, like she’s going to rip the ring off, but once again I capture her wrist in my fingers.
Apparently, I too am only capable of a single fucking word in that moment.
“Don’t.”
“Elio-”
“Don’t.”
She opens her mouth, ready to argue with me, but instead she just breathes out and nods.
“Just for a bit,” she finally says.
Just for a bit? Try just for-fucking-ever.
But I know when to take my victories when I get them. She’s no longer itching to take the ring off, and that’s a win in my books.
It’s as if all of the energy goes out of her at once. Her knees bend, and she sits down heavily on the edge of the bed beside me. A flickering expression, like the shadow of a smile, is briefly visible on her face before it fades. She leans towards me, brushing hair away from my forehead. She lays her knuckles against my skin, so silken and cool that I groan without meaning to.
“You feel a little warm,” she says, her brows drawing together. This time she’s close enough to easily reach, and I do poke the little wrinkle that appears between them with the tip of my index finger.
