Page 40 of Pretty Broken Promises

Tessa buries her face in my neck while the older woman pales in shock. She quickly picks up her tiny dustball of a dog, and dramatically covers its ears.

“Young man those kinds of jokes are not funny,” she stammers.

Tessa peeks back at the lady as I stroll out of the elevator toward the door. She puts her chin on my shoulder. “Sorry about him, Mrs. Wright.”

“Is that you, Tessa? I haven’t seen you around here in a while. Poor Bennett must be so lonely without you. I can't say I approve of your present company,” she tuts, while sneering at me. I didn't think I would care very much, but I still don't like to be compared to Bennett Richards, and found lacking.

“We just had dinner with Benji and the girls. He's doing fine. Ford’s bad sense of humor aside, I kinda love the big dummy, so I think I'll keep him,” she says to the old bat.

I move across the lobby as fast as my legs will carry me still holding her. Once we are outside in the damp spring air, I set her on her feet, so I can look her in the face.

“You love me, huh?” I ask her. It isn't the first or the second time she’s said it, but I do love to hear it.

She turns her head to the side. “You're going to marry me, huh?” she counters.

I can't help myself, and I quickly steal a kiss. Not touching her during dinner was agony. “You bet your ass. The first chance I think you're going to say yes, I'm going to slip a ring on your finger.”

She wrinkles her nose. “Just don't make it some crazy big rock, and I don't want a diamond either.”

“Are you just saying that?”Hegave her a big diamond. Sure it didn't seem like her kind of ring, but girls like those, right?

Her cheeks turn a little pink. “I always kind of thought, not that I pictured it a lot, that you would get me a blue one. Like topaz or sapphire.”

“Blue?” I ask, a little confused.

Now her cheeks turn bright red, and I know she's serious. “It was the color of your football jersey,” she says almost under her breath.

I tip her chin up with my finger to look her in her eyes. “You totally used to check me out when I played football in high school.”

She covers her face with her hands. “Okay, you caught me. What do you want to hear, that before I came to talk to you that day, I had a huge crush on you? That I had ever since our freshman year? Does that make you feel better?”

I take her hand and we continue walking down the street. “Does it make me feel better to know that you have wanted me for the last six years? Is that really a question? Let me put it this way, when I compare the totality of how long you and I have been something to each other, whether it’s as enemies, lovers, or enemies again, the time you spent with Bennett is just a small blip in all of that. So yes, it makes me feel better to know that you wanted me for a lot longer. Just like I'm sure you wouldn't be upset to know that on the top of my list of girls I was most interested in at school you were always number one. Of course, you were the one I thought was also way out of my league. I've never been so glad to be wrong.”

She glances at me out of the corner of her eye and looks adorably confused. I wait for her to say something, but she focuses on something far down the street.

“Out with it, Tessa. We're not holding things in anymore, remember?”

She exhales forcefully from her nose. “I don't know how to say this, without you getting irritated.”

I lightly squeeze her hand, hoping it sends a message of reassurance to her. “It's pretty simple, you open your mouth and force air through your throat to make sounds.”

I can feel her eyes roll without even looking at her. “Yeah, I know how to talk, it's what I actually— you know what, fine.”

I wince. It's never good when a woman says, “Fine.”

“This is the second time in a couple of months that a man has talked about wanting to marry me, and now I'm in this weird place of, where are we?”

“You mean like physically or in life?” Yes, I'm being purposely obtuse. I know that I want to get it out there right now. But that's because I want to lock her down. I want to make sure that she's mine completely, and no one else can ever take her from me again. She deserves more than that. I know, without a doubt that someday I want to marry her, but I want to ask her when we are in a better place.

She tries to pull her hand free from mine. “Forget it. I didn't ask anything just forget it.”

Pulling on her hand, I tug her to a stop. “I'm not asking you to marry me yet, but I think of us as more than dating. I have no doubts that you are my other half. My soulmate. Before you, I didn't even think such a thing existed. I thought it was some cheesy crap that Jen and Shane spout to each other when they're being disgustingly adorable. But just because I haven't asked you yet doesn't mean that you can't count on the fact that I absolutely am going to ask you, as soon as we are in a place where all of this uncertainty and healing is behind us. Or at least as much of it as we can get behind us.”

Her eyebrows scrunch together, and I can't stop myself from smoothing out the line with my thumb. “You realize that you said a bunch of words and I still have no idea what that means.”

“Before we broke up in high school, there was something that I had been thinking about a lot. We were too young to get engaged, but I wanted something more than for us to go to college as boyfriend and girlfriend. It just didn't feel like enough for me. And you're right, we are in an in-between. We're not engaged, but we've come too far to just say we're dating.”

I reach into my pocket and pull out the tiny object that no one knows I've been carrying around. Earlier I almost had a heart attack, because I thought maybe she had seen it because the center stone is a light blue topaz. I open my hand and show her the delicate band with the small blue stone in the middle. It's not fancy, because I had less money then than I do now, but I can't imagine using a different ring. Giving her this one shows her that for me, it has always been her.

---