Page 55 of Total Dreamboat
Felix
I fell for Hope Lanover in six days and ruined it twice in three more, so it stands to reason that taking more days to ease into things—many more days—is in our best interest.
We resolve to pace ourselves. To spend the summer dating for real. Maximum three “hangs” per week. No sex until we’re sure.
That works for about two weeks.
It turns out Hope and I are not meant for slow and steady. After so many months apart, we’re ravenous for each other’s company. Each other’s bodies. Each other’s minds and souls and hearts.
Our dates become torturous exercises in tearing ourselves apart.
So we bend the rules. Sex is okay but no sleepovers. Four times a week is permitted. Then “not every night.”
“I feel like I de facto live here now,” Hope says to me one night when we’re making supper in my flat.
“Do you want to?” I ask. It just slips out.
She looks at me with wide eyes, and I know I’ve stepped in it.
Until she shrugs and grins at me. “Kinda.”
She doesn’t extend the let on her cottage and one morning I pick her and her single suitcase up.
We enter the hotel unceremoniously, like it’s any other day.
We call the arrangement temporary. After all, she’s immersed in polishing the last third of her book, and still figuring out what she’ll do when her tourist visa expires in three months.
Another fortnight passes and I do the math on how much time she has left, to the day.
It’s not enough.
“What’s going on with you?” she asks that night. “You seem bummed out.”
“Did you know you have to leave the country in seventy-two days?”
She sighs. “Oh. That. Yeah.”
“It’s kind of… killing me,” I say.
She reaches over and strokes some hair out of my eyes. “Me too. But I won’t be eligible to apply for an artist’s visa unless I, you know, publish something.”
“You know how you had that vision of living in rural England and being a writer?” I venture.
“Oh, you mean my lifelong dream? That?”
“Yeah. Well, what if you also did some innkeeping in your spare time.”
“You want to hire me?”
“No,” I say. And then I take the greatest plunge of my life. “I want to marry you.”
She nods, solemnly.
“Well, we did say we’d take it slow,” she says with a straight face.
“And it’s been seven weeks, so.”
“About seven times slower than usual.”
“I can’t let you go again,” I whisper. “I love you too much.”
I know it’s a risk. I know there are a thousand variables I can’t control, and she can’t either, despite our best intentions. That it will be work and compromise and might end badly.
But I want it anyway.
She snuggles up to me. “I love you too much too. And maybe this is just how we roll. Fast and furious.”
“I do have one stipulation,” I say.
“What’s that?”
“The wedding must be on a cruise ship.”
She nods seriously. “Officiated by an Elvis impersonator.”
“Only conch on the menu.”
“I’ll wear my coral caftan as a wedding dress.”
“Honeymoon at Atlantis.”
She rolls her eyes back into her head. “All my dreams really are coming true.”
I pull her close to me. “I’m dead serious about this.”
She looks me in the eyes. “Me too.”