“Nick.”
“Look at me.”
What could I say? No? I obeyed, glancing at him briefly.
“Harper, I love you.” His gypsy eyes were solemn, completely sincere, and that thing in my chest gave a fast, hard, painful twist.
“Nick, for God’s sake,” I said unevenly. “You barely know me.”
“Okay, fine, I take it back. You’re a shrew and a pain in the ass, but man, that thing you did with your tongue…”
I gave a surprised laugh, and Nick raised an eyebrow. “Can I see you again? Can I shag you again? Please, Harper?” And he grinned, and whatever had been in his eyes a second ago was replaced with an impish light.
I smiled back, and that dark thing subsided, leaving me almost limp with relief. “I’m extremely busy, but you never know.”
“Stay a little longer? Even though I can barely tolerate you?”
I hesitated. We should probably go now, said my brain. “Sure,” said the rest of me.
I know I was supposed to want what normal people wanted. That being loved was supposed to make me feel safe and cherished and happy. And Nick did make me feel those things, sort of. But I never seemed to be able to keep the dark, pulling thing completely at bay. I kept wondering when the other shoe would drop, when this would all end. How much damage would occur when it did.
I was twenty years old, raised by a father who didn’t like to talk about messy human emotions, abandoned by a mother who had once adored me. I tried not to think about it, but in the back of my heart, on the tip of my brain, the thought lurked that Nick could ditch me at any time. My own mother had…why not some guy? Best not to fall all the way in love. Best to protect myself as much as I could.
If Nick sensed something was off, he didn’t ask, and even if he had, I wouldn’t have had the words to tell him the truth. When your own mother deserts you without a backward glance, it’s hard to believe you can be truly and unconditionally loved. Love gets used up, you see.
So…Nick and I had fun together. Kept things light, and if he looked at me too…seriously or whatever, I’d tell him to wipe that look off his face, and he would. But the sex, it must be acknowledged, was flipping unbelievable. Not that I had anything to compare it with, but I knew. I pretended it didn’t mean anything, and we didn’t talk about it, but I knew just the same.
And Nick gave me enough rope to hang myself, never pushed, never again told me he loved me, stopped joking about marriage. When he moved down to the city at the end of the school year, eight months after we’d met, I honestly felt as if I might die. “Drive safely!” I called briskly as he got into his battered car, as the dark thing swelled dangerously. I kept smiling as he started the engine. Took out my phone and pretended to check for messages, which I couldn’t actually see, as my eyes were blinking furiously.
Then Nick cut the engine, jumped out of the car and hugged me, and I hugged him back so hard it hurt, and he kissed me fiercely. “I’ll miss you,” he whispered, and I couldn’t speak, it hurt so much to think about even a day without him, let alone forever, because of course I didn’t expect things to actually work out.
But they did. He called me every day, and we talked for hours. He emailed me at least once a day, sent me tacky New York City T-shirts and Yankees dolls (I’d stick safety pins through their heads and send them back) and really good coffee from a little place on Bleeker Street. I interned at a law firm in Hartford that summer, and a couple of times a month, Nick would take the train to Connecticut to see me, since I felt a little gun-shy about going down to see him.
His mom died suddenly in October—an aneurysm—and I drove down to Pelham, New York, for the wake. When I walked in, the look on his face—love, and surprise and gratitude—went straight to my heart. He introduced me to his sparse family, an aunt, a couple of cousins. Nick’s parents had divorced long ago, and his mom never remarried. When I went back to school, I sent him quirky cartoons cut from the English department’s copies of the New Yorker. Baked oatmeal raisin cookies when he came to visit.
He was snarky and smart and thoughtful and irreverent—and a little sad—and the combination was unbreachable. The amount of feeling I had at the sight of him, the rush the sound of his voice could cause, the heat, the everything…it was terrifying. We were, forgive me, soul mates, though I’d have stuck a fork in my jugular before saying that out loud.
So I tried to keep things light, dodged the more serious and intense moments, never said those three little words. Not until one night at Amherst and Nick was up for a rare weekend. I’d been applying to law schools, and applications were scattered all over my room. Not one of the schools I was aiming for was in New York. Even though Columbia and NYU both had great environmental law programs, I wasn’t about to apply there. Not when Nick lived in Manhattan, uh-uh. It would be too obvious. Mean too much. Absolutely would not build my life around a man, as my mother had, and look where that got everyone.
Nick looked through the brochures and checklists… Duke, Stanford, Tufts. He gave me a long, silent look. I ignored him and chattered on with some inane story about my roomie and her inability to load the dishwasher. We went to a movie on campus. I pretended not to notice that Nick was bothered.
That night, he jerked awake. “You okay?” I muttered sleepily.
He looked at me, his eyes a little wild in the light from the streetlamp.
I sat up. “Nick?”
“Do you love me, Harper?”
I started a little. Maybe it was the darkness, or the hour, or the slightly lost look in his beautiful eyes, but I couldn’t lie. I took his hand and looked at it, traced his fingers, the sweet underside of his wrist. “Yes,” I whispered.
He gave a half nod. Didn’t say he loved me back. He didn’t have to. I knew. We lay back down, and he put his arms around me, and I felt like crying, as if my heart might break if he said anything at all. But he didn’t, and the next day, things were normal. We didn’t mention law school or love again.
On Valentine’s Day of my senior year, I finally went down to New York for the first time, and we did indeed walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. It was frigid and wet and icy, perhaps not quite as fabulous as the experience Nick had envisioned, as I was dying of hypothermia, but he insisted we stand in the middle of the bridge, ostensibly to see if we could spot Mob victims in the East River.
“There’s one,” Nick said. “Sal ‘Six Fingers’ Pietro. He never should’ve boffed Carmella Soprano during the christening.”
“Oh, I think I see one, too,” I said, pointing and hoping we could go to Nick’s soon and have some fabulous sex and then get a quesadilla grande from Benny’s. “Right there. Vito ‘The Pie’ Deluca swims with the fishes, or whatever passes for life in the East River. Can we go now?”
Nick didn’t answer. I looked around for him, but he wasn’t where he should be. No. He was on one knee, looking up at me with such dopey happiness that my heart nearly stopped. He had on fingerless gloves that day, like some Dickensian orphan, his hair blew in the wind and he held up a diamond ring.
“Marry me, Harper. God knows you’re not the girl of my dreams, but you’ll have to do.”
His eyes, though…they told the truth.
If I had been able to find a way to say no without breaking his heart, I would have. If he didn’t love me so damn much, I would’ve cuffed him and laughed it off. If I said no, that would be the end of it, I knew. And so I shrugged and said, “Okay. But I want a huge dress and eleven bridesmaids.”
I knew we were too young. I knew I wasn’t ready. I wanted to wait. Years, preferably. But once we were engaged, Nick put on a full-court press to marry quickly, and