“I want to see Lucy,” she repeated, as if she’d forgotten the entire conversation that had just taken place.
“Yes, let’s go and see her. Come on, this way.”
I turned and watched as she walked away from us and that’s when I saw Max standing there. His face was pale and I knew he’d heard everything.
We stood and looked at each other in total silence. He looked different. Nothing like the man I’d gotten to know these last few days. He looked more like the boy I used to know. Vulnerable. Soft. I started walking up to him. He didn’t move, though. And I only stopped when I was standing right in front of him.
“You were going to ask me to marry you that night?”
He nodded.
“You had a ring?”
“In my pocket the entire night.”
“You had a ring,” I stated thoughtfully. And now that I thought about it, he’d had his hand buried in his pocket a lot that night, and I’d asked him what he was doing several times.
“But despite all the saving, I don’t even think they were real diamonds,” he said, trying to force a smile, trying to make light of a situation that was just not light at all. Max suddenly looked very uncomfortable and unsure of himself. He looked like the boy I used to know all over again. He had a different name now, he looked different, but he was the exact same person that I’d loved so much.
“Do you still have it?” I asked.
“I threw it into the woods behind my house the next day.”
“Wow!” I shook my head. This was all so much to take in.
“I think that’s partly why I was so nervous and why it all just fell apart. I kept waiting for the perfect moment to ask you, and it never came. In my head I’d imagined that we’d make love and we’d lie in bed together and then I would ask you. But that, you know . . .”
I finally knew it all. The full story. It had been more than just sex. It had been a proposal, a yes, a happy-ever-after. The sex had been wrapped up in the biggest question you could probably ask anyone in your life.
“You look totally shocked, like you had no idea at all,” he said.
“We’d spoken about it, a lot. I knew I wanted to, and I knew that we probably would, but I had no idea that you’d already planned it for that night.”
“What would you have said if I’d asked you that night?”
“I would have said yes.” The words rushed out of my mouth without having to think about them. I didn’t need to think about them. I knew the answer now, and I had definitely known the answer then too.
“Funny how things turned out. Our lives could have been totally different,” he said softly.
I thought about the house and the cozy fires and the al fresco dining with the kids.
I nodded and felt a tear escape my eye. I hated crying. I hated people seeing me cry and I quickly wiped it away. As soon as I had, though, the other eye betrayed me with a massive tear too.
“Fuck it!” I put my head back to try and stop the tears.
“Ash, I don’t want to make you cry, not now, not ever.” He put his hands on my shoulders.
“Too late for that,” I said through the start of little breathy sobs, which I hated. “You’ve made me cry.”
“Please don’t cry, baby.”
“How can I not cry when I hear that you were going to ask me to marry you? And that if things had gone differently we could possibly be—” I cut myself off, but I’d said enough.
“Together? That we might be together.”
I nodded, the tears spilling from my eyes.
“We can still be together.” He lifted his hands to my face and gently started wiping my tears away. I closed my eyes and wanted to fall into this feeling and fall into him.
