“We can do that,” I tell him. “I want to spend Christmas with you. I’m not just saying that.” Now I understand why grand gestures exist. I want to make him understand that this is not lip service. This isn’t an empty promise I plan to forget about in the next 364 days. This is real. I wish I had a skywriter or a fireworks display in the shape of a heart or a picnic of all of his favorite foods to prove to him the depth of my love.
My eyes lock onto a bag of sourdough bread in a ceramic bowl on the kitchen island.
I walk toward it pulling David with me and remove the twist tie that seals the bag.
“What are you doing?” David asks, confused by the break in our conversation and my seemingly sudden, overpowering need for toast.
I turn back to him and drop to one knee. I haven’t thought this through at all, but it feels right. My bright red gown pools on the floor around me. I look up at him and try to telegraph all the love I feel for him right now. “David?” I ask.
“Yes . . .” His lips curve into a surprised smile.
“I want you to know that I’m in this. I want Saturdays at the greenmarket and Sunday mornings doing the crossword together. I want to get you your favorite ramen before a big work presentation, and I want to know what’s next after you finally master your at-home pizza recipe. And I want to finally go on that trip to Italy. But most of all, I want you. I want you to be my family, too. Will you marry me?”
“Yes, I already told you yes.” There are tears in his eyes as I wrap the twist tie around his ring finger. He pulls me up to standing and gathers me in his arms. Then he lowers his lips to mine. It’s a kiss that holds promise for a lifetime of future kisses—a kiss that’s leading somewhere.
He pulls back for a second to say, “I love you so fucking much, Hannah,” before he backs me against the kitchen island. I pull his lower lip into my mouth and give it a playful bite. His hands fall to my ass and lift me onto the counter. I wrap my legs around his waist as his tongue brushes past my lips.
“I have no idea how to get you out of this dress,” he says against my mouth.
“It’s going to be a nightmare, there are so many tiny buttons.”
He runs his hand up my back and starts to fiddle with the top one. “Can I rip it?” he asks.
“It’s not mine. I need to return it. Whole, ideally.”
He’s gotten through about half the buttons—his progress is slow, doing it blind while we continue our feverish make-out—when there’s a knock at the door.
We break our kiss and exchange a look. I almost suggest we ignore it, but then I remember I told Finn I’d let him know everything was okay and I didn’t. “I think it’s Finn,” I tell David. “This will only take a second.”
When I open the door, I find Finn with a hangdog expression on his face. His cheeks are wet—from snow or tears, I’m not sure.
“What’s wrong?”
“Can I come in?” he asks.
I look over my shoulder at David, who is still standing at the island, and remember the promise I made that I would try to put him first. This feels like a cosmic test. I look back and forth between them, unsure what to do in this impossible position. It almost kills me to say it, but I tell Finn, “This actually isn’t the best time. Can we talk tomorrow?”
David comes up behind me, taking in Finn’s stricken expression. He leans over my shoulder and says into my ear, “This isn’t a time I have to be first. Sometimes it’s fine for me to be second.”
“Thank you,” I tell him, and pull Finn into the apartment.
“Do you want me to make you both some tea?” David offers. “It’s three thirty, I guess I could make sandwiches or some French toast before this goes stale,” he says, eyeing the open bag of bread on the counter.
“Do you have any tequila?” Finn asks.
“That kind of night, huh?” David says and gives a decisive nod.
I lead Finn to the couch, while David goes to the kitchen cabinet where we keep the hard liquor.
The minute we sit, Finn collapses into a fresh wave of sobs. “I told him,” he says.
He doesn’t need to say who he told or what he told them. “No?” I ask.
He shakes his head no.
I pull him into me and rub his back while he cries.
twenty-six
Finn
This year, December 26
I wake up in Hannah and David’s guest room alone. I fell asleep with Hannah big spooning me, but she must have slipped out at some point during the night. I make my way to the hall bathroom where I know they keep the Advil. I feel hungover, even though I’m not. David couldn’t find any tequila, and after I wrapped my crying jag I just wanted to go to bed and turn the page on another disastrous Christmas. I feel like a dried-out husk. My head pounds and my throat is raw from crying.
After I pee and take three Advil, I make my way back to the bedroom where my phone lays on the nightstand. I check to see what time it is: 9:05. Five hours of sleep. Also five texts from Theo, one every hour like he was pacing himself, so he didn’t seem too desperate.
4:45 AM: I’m heading back uptown. I’ll be there when you get home if you want to talk.
5:34 AM: You’re still not home. Call me and let me know you’re OK. I’m worried about you.
6:19 AM: Can we talk? I feel like I messed everything up.
7:54 AM: I’m sorry.
8:42 AM: Please don’t shut me out.
Rage floods through me. I start to delete these messages, so I won’t have to look at them again, but instead I decide to delete my entire text history with Theo so I’m not tempted to comb through our old texts to figure out where I got it all wrong. Where I misinterpreted things so badly and thought he might like me as more than a friend.
The minute I do, I feel hollow. I stare at our empty text thread, five years of memories gone in the click of a button. I think about googling how to get them back, but shove the phone under a pillow instead. I need a clean break.
Over the next days, Hannah and I fall into an easy rhythm marathoning Nancy Meyers movies on her overstuffed couch. The middle-aged protagonists give her an excuse to tell me that it’s not too late to find love at least once per movie, or in the case of It’s Complicated, that maybe things aren’t actually over with Theo, prompting me to throw a decorative pillow at her face, because it’s definitely over.
“Can we not talk about him?” I ask her.
It feels like we’re in college again. We exist in a space outside of time—me, unemployed; Hannah, off work until the New Year—so we sleep until eleven, drink wine with breakfast, and wander down to the bodega on the corner for breakfast sandwiches at six in the evening. Sometimes David watches movies with us. One day he makes a giant glass casserole dish of stuffed shells and serves it to us in shallow bowls topped with parmesan cheese. “Comfort food,” he says.
It takes Hannah three days to admit that she and David got engaged on Christmas. She doesn’t actually admit it, but I force her to tell me when a vintage-looking diamond ring mysteriously appears on her left hand. It turns out the ring was only missing from David’s sock drawer because he realized the first one he bought, with his sister-in-law Jen’s help, was completely wrong. In its place, he asked Brooke if he could use their mom’s ring—Brooke wasn’t using it; she had some five-carat monstrosity from her tacky husband. Hannah strokes her mother’s ring lovingly as she relays the story to me.