Page 129 of Fifty First Times (Sharing You 0.40)
“You did? What is it?”
“It’s a surprise, nerd. I’ll see you in a few days.”
“Okay. I—” The words “I love you” try to climb from my chest and onto my tongue, but I swallow them back.
Fear fills my veins with sludge and ice water, those unspoken words glued to the inside of my mouth like the film left behind by over-hopped German beer. It ties my tongue into knots, stuffs my ears with cotton, and I hang up without saying good-bye.
My summer plans do not include falling in love—in fact, none of my plans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one involve falling in love.
I’m in college. I want to date, party, have fun. Not this.
Two
Noel
WEDDINGS ARE DEFINITELY for girls. As much as I love Alice and want her to be happy, I’ve thought about bailing on all of this—tuxes and dinners and registries and bullshit—at least once a month since we got engaged.
Not because I have doubts—I want to marry her. I just don’t care about the wedding.
“Noel, honey, you can’t open the gifts and not write down who sent them. That’s not helpful.” Alice blows her fine blond hair out of her eyes, blue eyes begging for help.
“Sorry. I’m writing them down.” I give her a smile, earning one in return.
“How come you open the presents before the wedding? Isn’t that kind of backward?” Wade asks, grumpy about my insistence that he be here.
“We’re getting a jump on the thank-yous so our honeymoon will be stress-free. It’s socially acceptable.”
“Alice, I never believed for a moment you would commit a social faux pas,” Wade backpedals.
My fiancée stands five-foot-two and barely weighs a hundred pounds, but she scares the pants off Wade. It doesn’t make sense, but Al does have presence, for a sprite.
I pull shiny paper off another box, open the lid and peer inside, then wrestle the item free and hold it up. “Al, what in the fuck is this?”
She squints and tips her head, making me want to kiss her. “I have no idea. Some kind of vase?”
“It looks like a hollow penis,” Wade adds, ever helpful, then cracks up.
Alice rolls her eyes, but the corners of her mouth twitch. “Who’s it from?”
“The Andersons?”
“My parents’ friends from college. They’re so strange.” She tilts her head to one side, then heaves a sigh. “We’ll just have to thank them for the lovely gift.”
I snort, and the twitches on her lips turn into a full-blown smile, the one that turns her pretty face into something I know I can stare at every day for the rest of my life.
The rest of my life. Shit.
It doesn’t seem possible that I’m here, barely twenty-three years old and about to get married. I’ve really only had two girlfriends in my entire life, and calling Tressa a girlfriend is a fudge. She’d made damn sure to keep her feelings locked away and mine unspoken, no matter how crazy we’d been about each other.
Wade digs into the enormous pile of gifts, intent on finishing so we can get to what he promises will be a low-key bachelor party. We’ve been friends since elementary school, which means he and I are aware we have different definitions of low-key, but I’m hoping to keep it under control. The rehearsal is tomorrow afternoon, followed by rehearsal dinner, and being hungover will put my ass in a sling.
A knot lodges in my lower back and I stretch out the kinks, groaning a little at how good it feels. Alice has been wound tight over the wedding, and her anxiety affects me now that we’re living together. She tosses all night, making it impossible for me to get any rest. I’ll lie awake half the night, listening to her mumble in her sleep, sometimes wondering whether or not her restless nights are because of wedding stress or marriage stress. Whether or not she harbors any fears about, you know . . . forever.
We finish opening the presents by four in the afternoon. Wade slams back the rest of his beer and stands, stretching in his old Sigma Nu shirt and popping more joints than anyone in his twenties should, then claps me on the shoulder. “You’re coming straight to the hotel to get ready, right? I need a haircut.”
“Yeah. I’m ten minutes behind you.” We’d been giving each other haircuts since junior high. For some weird reason I missed it after we’d graduated and moved apart.
“You wish you were behind me, perv.”
