Slightly Engaged. Wendy Markham

again.

      I look around the table and see that nobody is listening to our conversation. They’re all caught up in the bridal debacle, oblivious to the antibridal one that’s brewing between me and Jack right under their noses.

      “If you and I were married, I’d hope you’d come after me if we had a fight and I left,” I say unreasonably.

      Jack feigns confusion. Or maybe, in his pickled stupor, he really is confused. He says, “Huh? What does this have to do with us?”

      “It has everything to do with us. I’m talking about marriage, here, Jack. And the future of our relationship.”

      I am?

      Hell, yes, I am. And it’s high time I brought it up.

      “I’m talking about why you don’t want to get married,” I go on.

      “Who says I don’t want to get married?”

      “You do.”

      “No, I don’t.”

      Hope springs eternal. “So you want to get married?”

      “Now?”

      “No, of course not now. Just…someday.”

      “Sure,” he says noncommittally. “Someday.”

      “When?”

      “I don’t know. In a few years, maybe.”

      Hope takes a hike.

      “A few years?” I echo, supremely pissed. “Maybe?”

      “What’s the rush?”

      I’m silent, glaring into the tossed salad that materialized on my place mat while I was gone. I can’t believe we’re having this conversation here. I can’t believe we’re having this conversation at all. But now that it’s under way, there’s no going back. I struggle to think of what I want to say next.

      I assume Jack’s doing the same thing.

      Until he asks, “Do you want your tomato?”

      I watch him poke his fork into it without waiting for a reply.

      He has some nerve! Aside from the fact that he just sidestepped the issue at hand, everybody knows the tomato is the best part of a salad, and that restaurants and caterers are for some reason notoriously skimpy with them.

      Then again, maybe everybody doesn’t know. Or care.

      But I do, and I do. It’s like tomatoes are some rare, expensive delicacy not to be squandered. When I make a salad, I cut up a couple of them so I can have some in every bite. But perhaps I’m alone in my passion. Maybe most people don’t like tomatoes, and they’re only in a salad for a splash of color to liven up the aesthetic.

      Who knows?

      Who cares?

      Me. I care. Because the fact that Jack would blatantly help himself to my lone tomato just shows what kind of human being he is.

      “I thought you had no appetite,” I manage to spit out between clenched jaws.

      “It came back. Can I have your cucumber?”

      It, too, is already on his fork, en route to his mouth.

      “Take the whole thing.” I shove the salad bowl in his direction.

      “Don’t you want it?”

      “I lost my appetite.”

      He laughs, with nary a care in the world, damn him.

      “Really, Trace? Did you kiss the bride, too?”

      No. I just realized I’ll never become one if I stay with you.

      But I don’t say it.

      What’s the use?

      It’s all out there on the table. Now all I can think is that if you love something, you’re supposed to set it free. If it comes back to you, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never will…or never was. Or whatever.

      Goodbye, Jack, I think sadly, watching him gobble the rest of my salad as though he hasn’t a care in the world.

      Chapter 3

      Call me a hypocrite, but in the broad light of Sunday morning, the major confrontation Jack and I had at Mike’s wedding doesn’t seem quite so dramatic.

      For one thing, Jack was apparently too drunk to even realize we’d had a major confrontation, which goes a long way toward diffusing any post-fight tension. Thus, it was particularly hard for me to stay angry at him, especially when he requested that the band play “Brown Eyed Girl” and dedicate it to me.

      I guess he was oblivious to the fact that he’d been set free, because he asked me to dance. What could I do but say yes?

      I guess I could have said no. But when “Brown Eyed Girl” is playing and it’s been dedicated to you and you happen to be a brown-eyed girl, well, you get your ass out on the floor and you boogie.

      At least, I fully intended to boogie. But for some reason, Jack seemed to think that particular song called for a slow dance.

      If you’ve ever tried to stay angry at somebody while slow dancing with them to “Brown Eyed Girl” at a wedding—and really, who hasn’t?—then you’ll know why I wound up more or less forgiving the poor lug. At least, for the duration of the night—which, in the end, actually turned out to be kind of fun.

      The band was great, the food, when I recovered my appetite, was decent, and Mike and Dianne eventually made a reappearance. They had apparently reconciled, although she did seem to take perverse satisfaction in smushing the cake in his face when she fed it to him.

      I found myself thinking that I would never smush the cake in my groom’s face when I got married; then remembered that I probably wasn’t going to be getting married.

      Not to Jack, anyway. Not unless I was willing to wait for years. Which I wasn’t.

      But I couldn’t dwell on that all night, could I?

      Sure I could. And I guess, in the end, I did.

      Jack slept the entire drive home while I listened to the day’s news over and over again on 1010 WINS, the only radio station I could get on the car’s crappy stereo without static, and tried not to hate him.

      Now, here it is, Sunday morning, and Sleeping Beauty is still blissfully snoring in the next room.

      Normally, I love our cozy apartment, especially on mornings when the sun is streaming in the window and we don’t have to be back at our desks for forty-eight more hours.

      But today, the place seems a little too…Ikea. Probably because that’s where all our furniture comes from. Jack really likes that Scandinavian, boxy, functional style. My taste is more cottage chic.

      Since the apartment is strictly boxy/functional without a hint of cottage, let alone chic, his taste won. I was so grateful to be jointly buying anything more significant than dinner that I didn’t put up much of a fight. Now here I am, over a year later, feeling like I should change my name to Helga and learn to make pepperkaker so I won’t clash with the decor.

      Back when we moved in, the apartment seemed spacious compared to my old studio…at least for the first five minutes. Today, it seems positively claustrophobic. Probably because one can cross the living room in three giant steps, the bedroom in two, and touch all three kitchen walls with one’s fingertips by standing on the center parquet tile.

      Plus, the place is cluttered.

      Everywhere I look, there are piles of stuff. Not just his; it’s my stuff, too. But his is more annoying.

      Like the twelve novels he’s in the middle of reading, and the stacks of freebie magazines he gets as a media supervisor and is definitely going to read