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I choked, my tongue suddenly too big and my mouth too dry to co-exist. I coughed a few times, my head whirling. “What did you say?”
“Marry me, Cecelia.” He held me tightly against him, my belly pressing against the smooth muscles of his body.
“Brady, this is a bit surprising. We haven’t talked about this at all.” I pressed farther away, the low buzz of a red flag waving in my mind.
Brady suddenly relaxed his arms, but didn’t let go of my hands, towing me over to my couch, where he sat us down together. “I know we haven’t. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot. This baby may not have been planned, but I’m crazy about you. I can’t imagine something happening to you or the baby and me not being able to do anything for you.” His voice grew ragged. “I need to keep you close.”
That low alarm in the back of my mind buzzed louder. I swallowed, which was hard because as I did, my heart squeezed tightly. His wording was all wrong. His timing was all wrong.
How could he not see that?
“Brady, I’m…flattered by your proposal. But we should table this for a while. We’ve only been together a few months, and this is all very new.” Brady’s face grew more and more clenched as I spoke. “Did something happen?”
“No, Cecelia, I asked my girlfriend to marry me, and she’s turning me down.”
His temper instantly provoked mine. “You asked your girlfriend by listing off all the reasons that Ishouldmarry you. All things that would makeyoufeel better. Have you thought about that?”
“I’m offering you me. Since when is that not enough?”
“Since you can’t even say I love you.”
Brady’s lips parted to snap back with another comment, but then he stopped, his chest rising and falling quickly. My heart and I both braced ourselves. Because whatever this was, it felt like a storm brewing.
“I need to be able to protect you. To take care of you both.”
“That doesn’t equate to marriage. Definitely not to love.” I reached out for his arm, my hand pressing into the warmth of his skin. “I’m not in a rush. I think we are great together.”
“You’re getting this all wrong. My whole life, I’ve been told it’s my job to protect the people I care about. That I should do absolutely anything to keep them safe.”
“I’m not sure who told you that. But that’s not love. That’s obligation.”
Brady laughed, but the sound was dry and humorless. “Then this is probably all for the best anyway.” Brady stood and began to pace the small room, his steps jilted. “When my younger sister was twenty-one, she, Katie, and I went out partying. She said she could drive home, told me she was fine.”
“But she wasn’t.”
“Fuck no. And I should’ve known. I should’ve been sober enough to know. She hit a parked car, with people in it. She didn’t hurt anyone, but she was arrested then and there. Adriana was the best of us. The youngest, sitting on a full ride to MIT for graduate school the next year. Katie was too far out of it to do much. But I knew what was happening. I was older, had my life together. It was my job to protect her future. She begged me to take the fall for her. Begged, Cici, on her knees with all that glass on the street. We could’ve switched positions.”
“Oh God, Brady.”
“I should’ve done it. I should’ve switched places. I knew no one would ever know, other than Katie. It was too dark to tell, and the cops still hadn’t shown up. Then she would’ve gone to Boston for school. She wouldn’t have been here, drinking, driving my father away and my mother into depression. I should’ve protected her. It was my job.”
“No one expected that of you.”
“She did. My dad did.” Brady’s wide brown eyes were filled with unshed tears, but his lips were twisted in hate. “Sometimes the best protection you can give somebody is sacrificing yourself. I knew that then.”
I held up a hand, halting his words. “Is that what you think you are doing? Avoiding relationships. Hyper-focusing on keeping me and this baby away from the bad things in your life. Do you think I didn’t notice your issues with your family? I did. But that’s okay. Because that’s normal life. And if you want to be my partner, my real partner, then you would be able to face that with me.”
“I can’t let you do that.”
“Well, I can’t let you think of us as some kind of sacrificial moment for your life. We need you, not your sacrifice or your misguided sense of protection. And that should be enough.” I stood, my legs wobbling. “And when my future husband asks me to marry him, I want it to be because he’s so head over heels in love with me that he cannot imagine spending another day without me.”
“Cecelia,” Brady ground out, the vein above his forehead throbbing.
“I think I deserve that. We both do. So, please, Brady, I need you to leave.”
“What?”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to see each other anymore. You have things you need to work on. And I have to think about what’s best for our son.”
