Love and Other Words
Page 51

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.