At turns hilarious and gut-wrenching, this is a tremendously fun slow burn

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.

---

E
now
sunday, december 31
lliot comes to a stop in a tight thicket of olive trees, turning to stare at me. This far out the sound of
crickets is deafening; the wedding party is a distant buzz. I imagine we walked half a mile away, down a
wide path that went from manicured, to dusty, to farmland.
Jesus Christ, where do we start?