Page 100 of Demo
“I never loved before you, I will never love after you,” I said, as I slid the simple white gold band with a cushion cut diamond on her trembling finger, looking up to make eye contact with her, pausing, waiting for her to nod, to give consent.
She did, and I slipped it all the way up and secured it in place.
“I will love you until the day I die. Marry me.” It wasn’t a question, this time. It was a statement.
“Yes,” she choked out. But before she could reach for me, I grabbed her shoulders in my hands and bent so I was looking directly into her eyes. “But, Lizzie, no more shit, you got me? For real, this time. You can’t gut me again. I won’t survive it. You understand? We’re in this together, 100 percent. No going back. Yeah?”
Nodding through my whole speech, Lizzie answered, “Yes. Yes. Yes, Knox, I promise.”
We hugged. We kissed. We went to the courthouse the next day and obtained our marriage license and were at city hall saying our “I dos” by the end of the week, because we didn’t want any more wasted time.
And then we lived happily ever after.
Until we didn’t.
Chapter 27
LYZBETH
“Isitactuallypossiblethat in a city this large there is absolutely nothing going on?” Zack is slouched all the way back in his desk chair, his neck craned at an unhealthy angle as his head dangles off the back of the chair, his arms and legs splayed out to the sides. He uses his pointer finger to push his black-rimmed glasses back in place and then twirls himself around in circles.
We’ve been in a news dead zone for two days now. This happens every once in a while, where nothing … and I meannothingnewsworthy occurs. Of course, we have feature stories tucked away and topics that aren’t timely that we pull out for when we have slow news days. But when it’s quiet on all fronts—nothing coming over the police scanner, no political hubbub, the schools are quiet, government is operating as it should—it just gets … weird.
And boring as all hell.
Monty is using the down time to organize photos on his computer, and George appears to be napping, with one elbow resting on his desk and a fist holding up his head, with his eyes closed. From the smell wafting back here from the front of the office, I assume Dee is painting her nails.
Even EJ is bored, because he came out to shoot the shit with me. He’s got one ass cheek resting on my desk as he tosses a stress ball back and forth from one hand to the other. “Seriously, though,” he says, “how is nothing going on?”
“It’s just one of life’s great mysteries that we will never understand,” I answer, now that I’ve assumed the same position as Zack, but without the spinning.
“Don’t jinx it,” Monty says quietly from his corner. EJ furrows his brows in question and Zack pops his head up with a “Huh?”
“He said, ‘Don’t jinx it,’” I answer, my head still dangling over the back of my chair. “Once Cherice realizes there is nothing going on, she’s gonna come out here and assign one of us some boring piece about something stupid and irrelevant just to take up space in the newspaper. Like the local impact of global warming, or how gardening lowers blood pressure, or a dreaded weather story.”
A “shhhhh” comes from Monty who, without turning around, mumbles under his breath, “The first snowfall is coming. Let’s hope she’s too preoccupied with literally anything else to think about that.”
“What’s so bad about a weather story?” EJ whisper-shouts.
I turn my head toward George when I hear a light snore escape his mouth, or nose, then turn back toward EJ. “It’s the same goddamn story every time. I mean, we live in western New York. We get snow. We’ve gotten snow since the establishment of the city back in 1790-something, or whenever the hell us white people stole it from the Iroquois. But every year we do a story before the first pending snowfall about driving precautions, shoveling safety, how the stores are selling out of shovels-”
“Seriously?” Zack asks.
“Seriously.”
Dee chimes in as she makes her way toward us. “Even I have gone with Monty to take pictures of ice melt on the shelves at the hardware store.Bor-ing.”
“Come to think of it, I do recall laying out a package last year with photos of shovels and rock-salt,” EJ adds.
Monty finally turns and looks at EJ this time. “Do you ever actuallyreadany of the stuff we submit, as you’re designing the pages?”
“No,” his answer is immediate.
“Really?”
“Yep.”
“You’re not at all curious about, oh, I don’t know, any of the news going on in the city in which you live?”
