“But they might not even talk to me,” she protested. “You’re making plans for something that might not ever happen.”
Her phone rang and she reached for it, glancing at it before setting it back down. “Don’t know the number, they can leave a message,” she said dismissively.
“They start interrogating you and afterward we run off to get married, it’d look even worse,” I said, glancing at her phone as it beeped with a voicemail notification. “We can get divorced later,” I murmured. “If we can’t stand each other, we can get it annulled or something.”
“This is not how I imagined my first wedding proposal,” she muttered, looking away.
I cringed.
“I’m going to have a cup of coffee and take a shower,” she said with a sigh. “We’ll talk more when I’m fully functional.”
She climbed off the bed and shuffled to the kitchen while I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. I felt like an asshole. She was nineteen. She didn’t want to get fucking married. Hell, I didn’t want to get married. I’d figured I’d have years before I found someone I wanted to make a family with, and when I did I’d do the whole proposal on one knee thing. It sounded like bullshit, but I knew that if I found the right woman, I’d want her to have a story she could tell her girls about. A story she could be proud of. Heather wasn’t getting any of that.
She made a noise in the kitchen that had me shooting off the bed, and when I turned to face her she was white as a ghost.
“That was Detective Robertson,” she said shakily, waving her phone in front of her. “He left a message asking me to call him back.”
My hands grew clammy as I waited for her to say something else.
“Give me forty-five minutes,” she said finally, setting her phone carefully on the counter. “Then we’ll go get our marriage license.”
She didn’t look at me as she walked to the bathroom and closed the door quietly behind her. As soon as I heard the shower go on, I pulled out my phone and checked what the marriage laws were in Oregon.
Then I called my brother.
* * *
“That was easy,” Heather commented as we climbed into the Nova a couple hours later. “You don’t even have to do blood tests or anything.”
“The next part is the hard part,” I mumbled, turning the key.
We’d picked up our paperwork at the county clerk’s office and the next step in our plan was to go tell my parents we were getting married. I’d suggested going to Heather’s parents first to use them as a practice run, but she’d nixed that idea. Apparently they weren’t very close so she was just going to call them instead.
“Do you think your dad’s eyes will shoot lasers?” she joked wanly as she leaned her head back. “Because if you think he has lasers, I should probably just stay in the car.”
“It’ll be fine,” I lied, tapping my fingers on the steering wheel. “My mom will keep him calm.”
“Oh, God. I didn’t even think about your mom,” she grumbled.
“She’ll be happy. She’ll think you’re pregnant—but she’ll be cool.”
“That’s some fast work,” Heather joked, looking pointedly at my junk.
“Just let me do the talking,” I said firmly, reaching over to put my hand on her thigh. “It’s nobody’s business but ours. They can either be excited or not, it makes no difference.”
“Maybe if we just told them—”
“No,” I cut her off, squeezing her leg. “We want to get married. That’s all they need to know.”
“No one is going to believe it,” she said nervously. “They’ll think we’re idiots.”
“Why wouldn’t they believe it?” I asked, giving her a small smile. “I’m clearly crazy about you.”
“Of course you are,” she said easily. “But that doesn’t mean you’d ask me to marry you.”
“I did ask you.”
“Not because you’re in love with me,” she mumbled, turning her head to stare out the window.
Something in her tone made my chest tighten, and I jerked the wheel at the first driveway we came to, putting the Nova quickly into park.
“What are you doing?” she asked, looking around the empty parking lot.
“Hey,” I called, unbuckling her seatbelt. “Come here.”
“Let’s just go, Tommy,” she said, shaking her head.
“No, come here,” I ordered again. I unbuckled my seatbelt and reached for her, yanking her onto my lap.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m crazy about you,” I said seriously, running my hand up the back of her neck so I could grip her hair in my fingers. “No joke. I like you.”
“I like you, too,” she said pointedly, trying to scoot off my lap.
I ignored her movements and waited until her eyes met mine again. “All this shit wasn’t happenin’, we’d wait and see how it goes,” I said softly. “But that’s not how it played out. As long as we’re together, though—I’ll be good to you. I won’t cheat. I won’t ever lift a hand to you. I’ll take care of you.”