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“Lies!”
“Whatever you say, Mama.” He kissed the top of her head before offering the other glass to his grandmother. “Here you go, Nana.”
“Thank you, sweet boy.” Nana patted his arm as she took the glass and swigged.
Duncan’s cell phone rang. It was quarter after three, and Dréa was coming off her shift at the radio station. Long-distance relationships were no fun, but they’d been making it work with their daily phone calls.
“Hi, beautiful,” Duncan greeted her as he returned to the house.
“I miss you, Duncan. I can’t stand that we won’t see each other until next month.” Normally, Dréa waited until the end of their phone calls to say this, but not today. “This long-distance thing isn’t working for me. I don’t like it. Now that we’re engaged, I don’t want to be apart anymore. We need to pick a date that’s soon and start our life together. I’m almost thirty, and my biological clock is ticking, and—”
“Dré, take a breath.” He chuckled.
She sighed. “I’m sorry. I’ve just had a lot of time to think about all these things while we’ve been apart.”
“We’ve only been apart for a week. And you’re two years away from turning thirty. We have plenty of time for babies.” Truthfully, the idea of having a kid right now scared the daylights out of him.
“Let’s get married in Vegas,” she declared.
He laughed. “Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious. Let’s elope.”
He suddenly felt as if he needed to loosen the collar of a dress shirt, even though he was wearing a T-shirt. “What’s the rush?”
“I don’t want to wait. I want you here with me in Denver. I want to wake up in my husband’s arms every morning, start and end each day together. Not a twenty-minute phone call once a day.”
Her comment about having him in Denver irritated him. They hadn’t come to a decision on that yet. He had always imagined settling down in his hometown, raising kids here. East Grand Rapids had been a wonderful place to grow up, and he wanted the same for his kids. But the couple of times he’d tried to share his feelings with her, it was like she tuned him out, like the decision was already made. It was as if her way was the only way.
He loved and admired her strength and determination, but he feared there wasn’t room for compromise where this subject was concerned. And he wondered if she was the same about other areas of her life.
“Are you still there?” she asked.
“I don’t want to elope. My family already has an engagement party planned for us at the Fourth of July party, and I know Mama and my sisters will want to help plan the wedding. Sophia can help you find a dress, and Shannon can take our engagement pictures and help us find a wedding photographer.”
Dréa was quiet.
“Come on. I want to see you walk down the aisle to me, all beautiful in your wedding dress.”
“I do want to wear a pretty dress and walk down the aisle to you,” she admitted.
“I know being apart sucks right now, but we can get through this, okay? It’s not forever. Just for now.”
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you too.”
“Thank you for talking me down from the ledge.”
“You’re welcome.”
“When I come to Michigan for the party, can we pick a date?”
“Yes.”
That seemed to please her, and the rest of the conversation was filled with what happened in Dréa’s day—mostly light-hearted stories about people who called in to the radio show with summer vacations gone awry.
Duncan mostly listened while she talked, still feeling unsettled about the Denver situation, and that remained with him long after they hung up.