Around the Bend Read Free

serious talks, and a return to the relationship we’d had before Nick had gotten this marriage hair up his butt. Lately, he’d been worse than the girls in my senior class who’d snuck peeks at issues of Bride behind their American History textbooks, as if the whole point of graduation was to get them into a white dress and a lifelong union with the pimple-faced kid who’d asked them to the senior prom.
    “I told you I wasn’t going to spend another three years of my life in the same place,” Nick said. “I’m forty, Hilary. I want more than just a girlfriend to sleep with on Friday nights. I want a life.”
    “Are you nuts? Most men would give their right testicle for a woman who didn’t want anything out of them but a night in bed and the occasional help installing a garbage disposal.”
    On his end, I heard Nick let out a sigh, which sounded so odd, so out of place. In all the years we’d been together, I’d never seen Nick sad. Never seen a side of him that wasn’t celebrating a good time. But lately, there seemed to be less of the party Nick and more of some other man I didn’t really recognize, which was part of what had driven me to push him away. Now I knew why.
    It had been self-preservation. I wasn’t cut out for what Nick wanted, but I also couldn’t let him go.
    “Marriage isn’t always a bad thing, Hilary.”
    Reginald had found his second location and was cheerfully creating a hideously smelly mountain on it. I looked around, figured we were in the woods, not in a public rest area, and I could get away with calling it a nature dump and leaving it to feed the flora and fauna.
    “For some people, it is. I told you already, Nick, I won’tmarry you. It’s not about you, it’s about me. Why can’t we keep going the way we were? Why do we have to change?” Hadn’t he been happy thus far? I had been. Wasn’t that enough?
    “Because I’m tired of the status quo. I’ve been tired of it for a while.” He drew in a breath. “I’ve asked you to marry me at least a hundred times since I met you, but I don’t know if I ever meant it before now.”
    “That was always cool with me. It’s kind of like playing the game of Life. We can put those little blue and pink plastic kids in the car and drive them around the board, but never have to change a diaper.” I had, indeed, liked the thought of being asked, but not the thought of actually putting on a white dress and pledging forever.
    Even now, the words iced my ears, tightened in my chest. I sucked in some air, held it for a long while. Above me, a bird squawked at another, then fluttered away. A turf war? A marital spat?
    “I mean what I’m saying,” Nick went on, ignoring my attempt at a joke. “I want you to take me seriously this time, because I’m not going to ask again. If you don’t want to get married, then…” At this, he paused, and again, I could hear another Nick on the other end, a more serious, no-beer-in-hand man. “Then that’s it, Hilary. We’re through.”
    Something hard and cold slithered down my throat and landed with a thud in my gut. This was a different tone than I’d ever heard from the man who built entertainment centers and kitchen cabinets for a living. A man who worked with his hands, making wood bend to his will, polishing it until it shone with his reflection.
    Today, there was finality in his voice, commitment. Itscared me and made me want to end this trip before it began, run back to his apartment and shake that feeling out of him. What if I ended up on the other side of the country—
    And lost him in the process?
    Tomorrow, I reassured myself, dismissing the foreboding in my gut, Nick would feel differently. He always had before. I smiled, and slipped back into joke mode. “Are you giving me an ultimatum, Nicholas Warner?”
    “Yes, I am.” He sounded tired, lonely, and if I could have, I would have crawled through the phone line and teased him with a touch, a kiss, until this somber mood lifted