Page 12 of Accidentally Engaged
“Because I didn’t mean to bind you to me. Us to each other. Consent is important, and free will is important. The words tumble out, and my accent flies along with them. I wince a little, knowing that when I’m agitated, my Irish “lilt” turns into an Irish slap, as angry as an old Galway fishwife who’s just caught someone trying to shortchange her. “Because this was an accident, and accidents usually have a bad connotation.”
Note: Testing All Hypotheses is Essential Before Discontinuing an Experiment
She’s trying to resist. She’s attracted to me. She used the wordvery.
Well, I’m in shock, but it’s a happy kind of shock.
“You’re right. Free will is very important. Accidents are often bad things—but not always. Insulin, penicillin, the pacemaker, and even superglue were all discovered by accident. The first three have saved millions of lives. There are happy accidents, and if this feeling that you give me is real, and the voice I hear singing in my head is true—this is the happiest accident I’ve ever had,” I laugh.
Chloe’s eyes glow with a hint of gold for a second, and I understand, without knowinghowI understand, that that golden glow means happiness. “You’re so smart,” she whispers, a little note of awe in her voice.
I shrug. “I’m more academic than athletic.”
“Me, too,” she says, a sudden smile bursting to life.
It melts my heart, and I store it away, so happy that we’ve found our first non-magical thing in common.
“Some of the world's greatest discoveries have been made by accident. Life-changing discoveries. This could be one of them.” I shrug off the insecure voice that says to play it cool, because I’ve already played it so uncool that you could roast a chicken on my level of weak-for-this-goddess, heart-on-my-sleeve mess. “Maybe it could save our lives. Y’know? Make them better. More worth living?”
Chloe nods, slowly, hesitantly. Her fingers are around the sweating glass of ice water I brought her. Her nails tap, and I notice the housewarming plant from my landlord that rests on the coffee table in front of her knees is pulsing in time to her taps. The leaves beat up and down, like breathing lungs.
Oooo-kay. We’ll store that up as well. Plants respond to my wife.
Futurewife.
Possiblefuture wife.
“Of my own free will, and with all intention, and no accidents, I’d like to ask you out on a date tomorrow night. Would you like to come over? I’ll cook you the best meal you’ve had in recent memory.”Way to brag, idiot. What if she’s like Julia Child, Banshee Edition?
But before I can go down the familiar path of second-guessing and berating, Chloe exclaims, “Yes! I would... I would love that.”
“Good! And if you like it, I’d like to take you out again. I have the whole week off, so...” I spread my hands. “I could take you on a tour of the new Botanical Center and Research Lab at PR NYU? It’s closed right now, and the campus is deserted because of Spring Break, but I have a pass to all the buildings. It could be just the two of us, in a garden wonderland.”
Chloe breathes out, a little moan under the exhalation, and all of the sudden, all I can imagine is lifting her up onto the stainless steel tables in the back of the botanical lab, wrapping her legs around my waist, and—
“And on another day, we could go antiquing. Thrifting?”
She rises, and my plant rises.
Not in the air, but the center of the philodendron plant shoots up like six inches, with baby green and white leaves unfurling and sprouting all around it.
Okay, Ineedto ask about how that happens.
“You like thrifting and antiquing?” Her hands are on her hips now, and there’s a tremble in her voice that makes my temples ache.
I think that might be the banshee version of “tell me the truth, or I’ll give you a migraine.”
“Well, yeah, but only for nerd stuff,” I admit. “Old vinyl records, action figures from the series I watched when I was a kid but couldn’t afford to get back then, stuff for my D&D campaigns.”
Chloe is flushed. Breathing hard. The pain in my head leaves, and pressure asserts itself in my groin.
Is she doing that, or am I doing that because I’m imagining her panting, flushed, and on top of me? Or under me. Or sitting ever so strategically above my face so I can... “Whoa.” I bite my lip to try to focus somewhere else. Anywhere else.
“I have a lot of vinyl records. And so does Mad Hatter Music underneath me. Have you ever been there?”
“I keep meaning to, but I’ve never found the time. I thought maybe it was more like modern music stuff, headphones, earbuds, that sort of stuff. We could go this week? Make a day of it? Oh, you probably have to work.”
“I do. But not all day, every day. I do that too much because I don’t have anyone or anything else in my life right now except Marmalade and book club.”
