Page 40 of One Little Favor
I turn and lock eyes with Tom, forever grateful that he made this all—Dad’s recovery, me returning to school, and skating here with my dad—possible.
* * *
“You looked so happy out there today,” Tom says as he takes my coat for me and hangs it inside the coat closet of his Upper West Side apartment. Our apartment, really, but even after over a year of living here, I haven’t stopped thinking of it as his. It’s spacious and modern, nothing like my cozy little West Village studio that I gave up the first summer after we started dating.
We’ve agreed that we need to find a new place, one that suits us both better—but his place is so close to Columbia, which came in handy last year when I went back to finish up my PhD.
Turns out Tom meant what he said about howwewould figure this out. He sort of pushed me into going back to school when he insisted he was hiring a new executive assistant the spring after we started dating, and that I was welcome to train him or her, but that he absolutely would not let me throw away my dreams, no matter how much it made his life easier.
I was able to re-enroll last fall. Now I have another full year of my PhD program under my belt and I’m considered ABD—all but dissertation. My dissertation proposal was accepted this past spring, and I started working on it in earnest this summer. In some ways, it feels like it’s all happened so fast, and in other ways this feels like the longest fourteen months of my life.
But through it all, Tom has been there—giving me massages when my shoulders cramp up from so much time hunched over books and my computers, going grocery shopping and cooking for me because I’d forget to eat if he didn’t, making sure I take time to exercise and stay healthy, taking me and my parents out to dinner once a week. He’s a caregiver, this one. Which is probably why he understands my dad so well.
A small smile spreads when I think about the fact that I’ve essentially ended up with someone just like my father—gruff on the outside, but a total cinnamon roll on the inside. And he’s not as good at hiding that part of himself as he used to be. Maybe because now he has people he can trust in his life, people who love him unconditionally.
“Iwashappy out there. Seeing my dad with that huge smile ...” I trail off as I walk into the living room and finally notice the rose petals strewn all over the rug between the two couches that face each other, and the twenty or so candles lit around the room. It’s still daytime, and the sun is low in the sky and casting horizontal light through our windows, so I didn’t notice the flickering candles at first.
I barely have time to wonder who he had set this up while we were gone, before I see a small box on the center of the coffee table. A note propped up behind it that readsOpen Me.
I look over at Tom, eyes wide. He can’t be serious right now, can he?
I bend down and pick up the box, then stand and take the lid off. I burst out laughing when I glance inside. “You’re such a dick,” I tell him.
“You’re the one who said you didn’t want to get engaged until after you finished your doctorate.” His smirk and his small shrug have me reaching out and slapping his shoulder, but he catches my arm before I can pull it back, and tugs me to him, kissing my forehead.
This is not the first time he’s set the stage for a proposal and given me a gift that’snota ring.
“I love you,” he says, “and I want you to stay sane.” He takes the box from my hands and then pulls out the smaller container inside with the newest noise-canceling earbuds I’ve been saying I should buy while simultaneously complaining about how loud my fellow graduate students are in our shared office space. Last week I told him their incessant talking was going to drive me insane. He places the case in my hand and folds my fingers around it. “Because I’m definitely not planning to marry someone who’s been driven mad by a bunch of talkative twenty-somethings.”
Everyone I originally started the program with has graduated or dropped out, so my fellow grad students now are all years younger than me, and sometimes they treat me like I’m their mom, which is fine. I’m good at taking care of people too. Maybe that’s what makes Tom and I so good together—we’re good at taking care of each other.
“God, I sound like an old harpy when you put it that way,” I say with an eye roll.
He kisses my forehead again. “Yes, but you’remyold harpy.” Then he trails kisses along my cheek and down my neck, where he nips at my collarbone. “And I want you to be mine forever.”
I gaze up at him. “I already am yours.”
“Then remind me again why we have to wait until after you graduate?”
Looking up at his earnest expression, I honestly can’t remember why it was so important to me, over a year ago when I started this program, that we wait. Probably because our relationship was still so new and he was already talking about a wedding. But now, almost two years into this relationship, I’ve forgotten all my reasons for hesitating.
“No answer for me?” he asks, and I shake my head no. “Good. I’m thinking Christmas.”
“Christmas, what?”
“You, and me. St. Thomas.”
“I’m not running away and marrying you in St. Thomas in two months,” I insist. We went back last year, right after Christmas, to celebrate our one-year anniversary. But until now, we haven’t talked about a return trip this year.
“We’ll see.”
“Tom,” I insist. “I’m not getting married in St. Thomas.”
“Okay,” he says. “But can I at least give you the ring?”
“Thering?” My voice reflects the hysteria I feel rising in me. He already has the ring?
“I’ve had it for almost as long as we’ve been together, Avery.” My eyes must bug out of my head, because he laughs and says, “When you know, you know.”
