Love and Other Words

Dad materialized at my side, holding a flute of champagne for him and a flute of what smelled suspiciously like ginger ale for me.

“Not even one glass of hooch?” I asked, pretending to scowl. “This party sucks.”

Dad took this in stride with an impressed sweep of his attention around the room, because this party, quite obviously, did not suck. It was in the Garden Court at the Palace Hotel and was packed with beautiful people who were dripping jewelry and were—thankfully—surprisingly lively. The entire room had been decorated with thousands—maybe even a million tiny white lights. We were spending New Year’s in the heart of a constellation. Even though I was away from Elliot, I couldn’t exactly complain.

It was only a few minutes away from midnight, and the crowd was growing thick around us, pressing in closer to the bar so everyone could get a drink in hand before the New Year was rung in.

Tucked beneath my arm, my clutch began to vibrate. I looked up at Dad, who gave me the single nod of permission, and stepped out into the hall.

I glanced down at my phone. Eleven fifty-five. Elliot was calling me.

“Hey,” I said, breathless.

“Hey, Mace.” His voice was thick and happy.

I bit my lip to keep from laughing. “Have we had a couple of cocktails, Mr. Petropoulos?”

“One or two.” He laughed. “Apparently I’m a lightweight.”

“Because you’re not a drinker.” Moving deeper into the quiet hallway, I leaned against the wall there. The clamor from the party faded into an array of background noise: voices, glasses clinking, music. “Where are you?”

“Party.” He fell quiet, and I heard shuffling in the background, the sound of a doorbell in the distance. “At, um . . . someone’s house.”

“ ‘Someone’?”

He hesitated, and with the intake of air I could hear on the other line, the way he held it, I knew what was coming. “Christian’s.”

I was quiet for a beat. I knew only enough about Christian to feel faintly uneasy about his influence. Things always turned too wild when Christian was around, at least that’s how Elliot spun it. “Ah.”

“Don’t ‘Ah’ me, missy,” he said, voice low and slow. “It’s a house party. It’s a party with lots of people in a big house.”

“I know,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Just be careful. Are you having fun?”

“No.”

Grinning at this, I asked, “Who else is there?”

“People,” he mumbled. “Brandon. Christian.” A pause. “Emma.” My stomach clenched. “Other people from school,” he quickly added.

I heard something fall and crash in the background, Elliot’s quiet “Ow, stop,” and a girl laughing his name before he seemed to move somewhere quieter. “And, I don’t know, Mace. You’re not here. So I don’t really give a shit who is.”

I laughed tightly. This call felt like a shove forward, into a life where we had beers together, and dorm rooms, and hours upon hours alone. I felt our future looming, teasing.

Tempting.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I’m at the glitzy soiree.”

“Right, right. Black tie. Society.”

I looked back over my shoulder into the wide ballroom. “Everyone around me is hammered.”

“Sounds awful.”

“Sounds like your party,” I shot back, watching Dad across the room, talking with a pretty blonde. “Dad seems to be having a decent time.”

“Are you wearing something fancy?”

I looked down at my shimmering green dress. “Yeah. A green sequined dress. I look like a mermaid.”

“Like, Disney princess?”

I laughed. “No.” Running my hand down my stomach, I added, “But I think you’d like it.”

“Is it short?”

“Not really. Knee length?”

“Tight?”

Biting my lip, I lowered my voice. Unnecessarily, for sure: the party was roaring. “Not skin-tight. Fitted . . . ish.”

“Eh,” he grunted. “Wouldn’t you rather be wearing jeans and a sweatshirt with me? On my lap?”

I giggled at his missing filter. “Definitely.”

“I love you.”

I froze, closing my eyes at the sound of these words.

Say it again, I thought, and then immediately wondered if this was really how I wanted to hear him confess this: while he was drunk—for the first time, as far as I knew—and many miles away.

“I do,” he growled. “I love you so fucking much. I love you, and I lust you and want you. I love you as the person I want to be with forever. I just . . . Macy? Will you marry me?”

Time stopped. Planets aligned and then shifted apart. Years passed. The voices and music and clinking of glasses all around me faded to nothing and all I could hear was the echo of his blurted proposal.

I stuttered through several sounds before I was able to speak.

Unfortunately, “What?” was the first thing to come out coherently.

“Shit,” he groaned. “Shit, I just totally messed that up.”

“Elliot . . . ?”

His voice came out muffled when he said, “Will you come see me? I want to ask you to marry me. In person.”

I looked around the room, my heart a blazing thunderbolt in my chest. “I . . . Ell . . . I’m not sure I can come up tonight. This is huge.”

“It is huge. But it’s real.”

“Okay. I hear you,” I said, pinching my eyes closed. He told me he loved me and asked me to marry him in one conversation. Over the phone. “It’s just . . . there is no way Dad would let me get on the road with all the drunk people.”

He was silent for so long that I looked down at my phone to make sure I hadn’t lost the call.

“Elliot?”

“Do you love me?”

I exhaled, blinked away tears. This wasn’t how I wanted this conversation—how I wanted to discuss our future—but here it was, in my face, demanding to happen like this. “You know I do. I don’t want to do this over the phone.”

“I know you don’t, but do you know what I mean? Do you want to marry me? Do you want to make this forever? At Goat Rock, and the library, and walking everywhere, and traveling. Do you want to touch me and be with me and wake up with my mouth on you and do you want me to be the one to give you orgasms or . . . fuck, watch you have them or whatever? Do you think about a life with me or marrying me?”

“Ell—”

“I do,” he said in a breathless rush. “All the time I do, Macy.”

I almost couldn’t speak, my pulse was firing so heavily. “You know I do, too.”

“Come to me tonight, please, Macy, please.”

Noisemakers started blowing and confetti fell from invisible containers somewhere high above my head, but all I heard was the crackle of the line.

“I’ll come next weekend, okay?”

He sighed: a universe of weight buried in the sound. “Do you promise?”

“Of course I promise.” I looked across the room and saw Dad walking toward me, a rare wide smile lighting up his face. Noise filled the other end of the phone and I could hardly hear Elliot anymore.

“Macy? I can’t hear you! It’s super loud here.”

“Ell, go have fun, but be careful, okay? You can give me my New Year’s kiss next Saturday.”

“ ’Kay.” He paused and I knew what he was waiting for me to say, but I wasn’t going to say it on the phone. Especially not when I would have to yell it and I wasn’t even sure if he would remember it.

“Good night,” I said. He went quiet, and I looked at the phone briefly before bringing it back to my ear. “Ell?”

“Night, Mace.”

The line clicked dead.

I don’t think I could have described a single thing about the party after that phone call. After a hug and a dance with my dad, I paced around the hall outside the event room for about a half hour.

I hated not being with Elliot for that conversation.

I hated that we’d crossed this enormous line, that we’d acknowledged a future for us—outside the closet, in the real world, with a real relationship—and he’d been miles and miles away from me, and drunk.

I hated how he’d sounded when he said good night.

“Macy, why are you out here?” Dad asked. His shoes clicked on the marble as he made his way to me, and the roar of the party felt like cold water spilling across my skin. “You want to leave?”

I looked up at him, nodded, and burst into tears.

“I don’t understand the problem,” Dad said, maneuvering into a sharp turn. I eyed him to make sure he was really sober. I hadn’t seen him drinking, but he seemed about as mentally collected as I felt. “You had a good conversation with Elliot, and you’re upset about it?”

“I just don’t like how the call ended,” I admitted. “I felt like he really wanted me there.”

“I realize you’re home more than you’re up there, but that’s how you two have always done it. What’s the stress?” Dad asked, always logical. To be fair, he didn’t have all the details. I didn’t tell him that Elliot said he loved me. I certainly didn’t tell him that Elliot had proposed.

“It just felt . . . weird.”

Unlike Elliot, my Dad rarely pressed.

After twenty minutes of silence, Dad pulled into our driveway and slowly shut off the car. Turning to me, he said quietly, “Help me understand.”

“He’s my best friend,” I began, feeling the tightening of tears in my throat. “I think we’re both nervous about what happens when we figure out what we’re doing for college, and what we do after this—after our lives aren’t just punctuated by weekend trips. It felt bad tonight, the way the call ended, and I don’t know what I’d do if something bad happened between us.” I sat, staring at the dashboard in the quietly ticking car. “Sometimes I wonder if we should just be friends, so that I don’t have to worry about ever losing him.”

Dad pursed his lips, thinking. “So he’s your Laís.”

My eyes filled with tears again at the sound of my mother’s name. I hadn’t heard him say it in years.

“You’re both young, but . . . if he is that person for you,” Dad continued, “you won’t be able to just be friends. You’ll want to give him everything, to show him every way you love him.”

Tears spilled, running down my cheeks.

“I’d take any amount of time with her,” he whispered, turning to look at me. “I would have taken anything I could get. I don’t regret one moment of loving her, even though it still hurts that she’s gone.”

I nodded, throat tight. “I already feel like I’m wasting so much time away from him.”

“It won’t always be that way.”

“Can I drive up tonight?” I asked him.

He stared at me for a long, quiet beat. “You’re serious?”

“Yeah.”

Closing his eyes, he took a few deep breaths. “You’ll be careful?”

Relief flooded my limbs. “I promise.”

Dad looked forward, out the windshield at our driveway, to his old car parked just beside this new one. “I filled up the Volvo this morning. You can take it.”

I leaned over the console, wrapping my arms around him.

“You’ll call me as soon as you get there?”

Nodding into his neck, I promised.