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“What are you giggling about?” Ares asked, bringing me back to the present.
I smiled at him. “Lucky’s proposal.”
He nodded and smiled tightly back.
“It was beautiful,” I sighed.
“I don’t really see the point in it,” I admitted.
Her face opened in surprise. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t think marriage is all it’s cracked up to be. So many of them break. So many are toxic.”
“I don’t know,” I mused. “When you’re in love, you want to belong to one another. Tell the world you’re taken.” I laughed. “Facebook official, you know?” I shrugged. It was early days yet. “It’s setting that person apart. Telling the whole world they are your special person. That they are so important to you that you want to devote yourself to loving them for the rest of your life.”
He wasn’t wrong about marriages falling apart. Even my parents went through a rough patch.
But they loved each other and loved each other through it.
That kind of love, the love that fights through, it’s timeless. It’s eternal.
I’d witnessed it my whole life. I had it in me to give.
“Hope,” he began, his voice deeper than usual. “I will never get married.”
He glanced at me before I could wipe the shock and dismay from my face, and he winced.
I stared down into my lap, swallowing the hurt that bloomed jaggedly in my throat.
The shame of being passed over.
“Hope,” he called, his voice pained.
“I’m okay. It’s okay,” I said hurriedly, throwing him a trembly smile. “Marriage isn’t for everyone. I get it. I do. I mean,” I laughed harshly, “I’ve been trying to convince my mother of that fact for years. You don’t have to convince me.”
“Hope,” he clipped shortly. “Stop talking. It’s not you.”
I closed my eyes.
It’s not you.
“Of course not,” I whispered. It’s never me.
“Hope, listen to me for a minute.”
“No.” I cut him off. “This is not a discussion I want to have. Ever. You don’t want to get married. That’s fine.”
“It doesn’t mean I don’t want to be with you,” he offered, his voice thick.
“Please,” I whispered. “Can we please not talk about this?”
After a moment, he said, “Okay.”
And in the silence between us, I ripped that fucking Pandora’s box to pieces and set that bitch on fire.
Stories
Ares
