“When?” I asked.
“Just now!” Tabatha said. She swung her camera to the side and suddenly Chris was in view, beaming with pride. “It . . . It was perfect.”
As she described Chris’s proposal, I let myself bask in her happiness. Chris was such a good guy. He’d reached out to me for help with the Knocking, anxious to honor both Tabatha and our family properly. For the proposal itself, the advice he sought was much more vague. I’d told him what she told me—private, meaningful. And so he’d taken her on a trip to Michigan and rented a room at the resort they had stayed at during their first trip together. They had spent the last three days lazing by the river, hiking along the trails, and enjoying each other’s company. Tabatha had, of course, been suspicious, but when two evenings came and went without Chris popping the question, she had let her guard down . . . only for Chris to drop down on one knee the evening before they were set to return.
Sitting here, surrounded by love so sweet it made my teeth ache, I felt a deep, throbbing longing. “Why do you want to be in a relationship so badly?” Michelle had asked me months ago, when I was still swiping through dating apps in search of the one. “You know they can suck, right?”
I don’t remember the answer I gave at that time. It had been something flimsy, a dismissive response to what I’d thought was a dismissive question. Who didn’t want a relationship? Hadn’t we all grown up watching the same romantic comedies, reading the same young adult vampire novels, and dreaming of the day that another person looked us in the eyes and declared themselves ours?
Except, now I knew better. I knew why I was losing Nia. It was because, when Nia looked at Shae, she saw a home. She saw a person who accepted her as she was, with all her bumps and crevices and cracks and beauty and graces. Just like Tabatha accepted Chris and vice versa, and my parents accepted each other. Forever was a long time for a twenty-three-year-old, and yet here was my baby sister, promising it without hesitation.
And none of the stories I read could have ever hoped to capture dedication like that.
*
I dropped my backpack with a thud on the bench next to me. Ricky’s chosen coffee shop, Jackalope, turned out to be only a fifteen-minute drive from my apartment, and without even tasting a drink, I knew I would be back. The colors I’d seen on its website were only more vibrant in real life—the walls were painted bright orange and yellow, teal and highlighter pink. The table we picked was nestled underneath a shoulder mount of a large hare with suspiciously real-looking antlers: the shop’s namesake. We had arrived at the shop at the same time, stepping out of our cars simultaneously, and the smile that had graced Ricky’s face upon seeing me had almost knocked me out. Like my presence was the biggest box under a Christmas tree and it had his name on it—
Stop it, Angela.
Knowing that Ricky just wanted to be friends should have made things easier for me, and to a degree, it did. My daydreaming took on a much more innocent edge now that I knew it could go nowhere, and his small favors—like getting me a latte, as he did now—didn’t send my mind into a flurry. Because I knew they were just that, favors. Ricky liked doing things for people. It made him feel needed. Before the improv show, he had taken Shae out to dinner, and he’d already stopped by my apartment on an evening when I was working late to help Nia change out a flat. From him, a latte wasn’t a hint or a romantic gesture. It was just a latte from a guy who wanted to show off his favorite drink.
And a necklace . . . is just a necklace.
Ricky’s gaze dropped to my collarbone, his grin broadening.
“You’re wearing it!” he exclaimed.
My hands jumped instinctively to the Water Tribe pendant, and I flushed. I’d been wearing it to the hospital lately; it worked wonders as an ice breaker for my teenage patients.
“Yeah, well,” I said. “It’s pretty. Thanks.”
I focused on unloading my backpack, but I could still feel the triumph coming off him in waves. The table groaned in complaint as I dropped my ob-gyn shelf review book onto it, then my First Aid* text, and, finally, my laptop.
“Those look heavy,” Ricky observed.
“Yeah, ’cause they are.” I watched him open up his laptop. “So, what are you working on?”
“I’ll show you. But wait a second,” Ricky said. He pulled out his phone and opened up a timer application. “When me and Shae were in college, we’d do this thing,” he explained, “where when we were working on a project, we’d give ourselves seven minutes to talk, then thirty minutes to work. Rinse and repeat.”