“I don’t want to get married.”
Emily stared at Owen in shocked surprise. She had just returned from wedding dress shopping, excited from having found The Dress and a little tipsy from the champagne she had shared with her bridesmaids after putting down the deposit, and she was sure Owen had just told her that he did not want to marry her, although that was just… not possible.
Owen was her best friend. They had grown up next-door neighbours and had gone to the same school. They had taken guitar lessons together, played in the same soccer team, and helped each other with homework. Every childhood memory she had, featured Owen through the various states of childhood, from sweet faced little boy, lanky adolescent, through to heart stopping adult.
They shared a birthday month.
Owen had first proposed to her when they were eight. They had been each other’s first for everything… First kiss, first touch… Absolutely everything. There had never been anyone else for Emily… Not physically, not mentally, not even for a moment.
They had gone to the same university and had shared a flat, living like a married couple, as they worked their way through their respective degrees, whilst all their friends had been falling in and out of love, and navigating the hazardous social cliques and after parties. They were the lucky ones, who had found each other early, and had skipped all the bull-shit of broken romances and bad dating experiences.
Once they had graduated and started work, they had bought houses next door to each other, living in one and renovating the other. They spent every spare moment they had renovating the house next door so it would be ready to move into after their wedding, intending to rent out the one they were currently in as an investment.
They joked that if a relationship survived renovating a house together, it would survive anything…
“I am sorry,” she said slowly setting her handbag down on the kitchen bench where they had once burnt a ring into the surface when they had first moved in.
Cooking pasta, she remembered, and drinking red wine, and one thing had led to another, until Owen had stripped her underwear from her and lifted her onto the kitchen bench, his jeans sagging off his hips, her heels digging into his buttocks and her fingers tangled in his hair as they had f-ked like teenagers, not noticing that the pasta was overflowing. Owen had burnt his hand rescuing their dinner, and they had laughed as they applied ice, not noticing that the pot was scarring the countertop in memory of their moment of love.
It was just simply not possible that Owen did not want to marry Emily.
She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry and her throat thick. “I think I misheard you.”
“Emily,” he was sad and gentle, and his glossy, dark hair was in disarray as if he had been running his fingers through it whilst waiting for her to return, something he did when stressed. His face was poetically beautiful in his empathy, the balance of features perfect, his skin flawless with just an edge of stubble just beginning to show through, and his blue eyes striking against the darkness of his hair and the olive of his skin. “I don’t want to get married. We haven’t lived life yet. We have never been with other people so how do we know that we are right together? Everything we have done it has been together. I want to… experience things that are a rite of passage for most people, and you and I have sort of just skipped over.”
“He wants to get drunk and hook up with random strangers,” Emily’s sister, Megan, translated harshly when Emily called her after a crying binge in the spare room, where all the wedding bits and pieces were being kept. Confessing to her sister that the wedding was off whilst surrounded by the cork boards on which she was keeping track of décor ideas, wedding magazines, notepads, the folder where she was keeping the receipts, and the photos she had selected of her and Owen to be made into a photo-board at the event, was another level of sadness, Emily thought.
There was the time as children that they had eaten themselves sick on blackberries, the year they had made forts in their back garden, school camps, high-school performing at the school concert one of Owen’s songs, graduating, holidays skiing, painting the house when they had both spent days picking paint from their hair and had joked that the grey-look gave them insight to how they would look growing old… Oh, the heartbreak was unbearable.
Owen had taken a suitcase to the house next door, and the wardrobe was bare of his clothing. She had not looked further yet, but she suspected that he had stripped the whole house of his possessions whilst she had been out, looking for the right dress to marry him in.
“Or he’s met someone at work,” Megan was not helping.
“That is not Owen, though,” Emily protested. “Owen just is not like that.”
“Where is he now?”
“Next door. He has moved in there.”
“Didn’t waste any time, did he?” Megan was angry on Emily’s behalf. “Planned it. Knew you would be gone all morning. Kissed you a sweet goodbye at the door when I picked you up knowing where you were going, without a hint about what he was planning… There is someone on the side.”
Megan was off men after the last one turned out to be a dud, playing at being single and dating Megan, but, after six months, shying away at further commitment because ta-da! There was a wife and three children at home.
Emily did not think Megan’s advice was unbiased. Just because Craig had turned out to be a waste of air, did not mean all men were the same. Owen just was not like that. She knew Owen. He was like an extension of herself, another limb, a second heart.
“I guess he has been a little… distracted recently,” Emily leaned her head back against the wall. She sat in the corner between the closed door and the wall, as if to prevent Owen from entering – but he had not even tried. Tears ran down her cheeks and dripped off to create tide marks on her t-shirt. She had stopped trying to mop them up, the pile of tissues beside her was testament to how fruitless that endeavour was. “Between work and renovating next door, I just thought… he was stressed, you know? And weddings are always a bit stressful…”
“What you need to do is get all glammed up, put on something sexy, some killer heels, and come f-k me eyes, and go out,” Megan decided. “After he has spent the night worrying about where you are and who you are with, he will regret his cold feet. It is Owen, after all. He has been devoted to you since you both were six years old.”
“He didn’t say we were over… Just that he didn’t want to get married.”
“Don’t you go over there, Emmy,” Megan’s tone darkened. “Make him - ”
The doorbell rang and Emily almost dropped the phone in her haste to stand, pushing herself up the wall and brushing down her clothes frantically.
“The door,” Emily gasped into the phone, breathlessly. “I will speak to you later.”
She tidied her face in the hallway mirror, not wanting Owen to see her in a mess. Or did she? She wondered even as she wiped up mascara on a tissue. No. She would behave with dignity and not dissolve into a black-teared monster. She smoothed the hair back from her face, gave her ash-blonde pony tail a yank to tighten it, and opened the door, mentally preparing for a continuation of the conversation with Owen. They would talk about it, get to the bottom of the problem, have sex and it would all be... “Oh. Daniel.” The disappointment was crushing. Owen’s friend from university, Daniel, flushed, hectic points of colour on his cheeks. “Hi Em. I guess I can’t say it is nice to see you. I am sorry. I am just an errand boy. Owen thinks it is better if it is a clean break for a few days, so… I am here to get some stuff he has forgotten.” “Oh,” it was like a knife to the heart. “He really doesn’t want to see me, at all, then?” “It is not that,” Daniel was apologetic as he edged past her an
As the sun set, the music turned off next door. She went to the loungeroom window, pressing up against the curtains that they had picked together and that she had hemmed to length during a movie marathon whilst he had sanded back the skirting boards in the room, looking out across the front lawn they had sown together, to the other house. After a moment, the lights inside turned off, and the porch light on. He stepped out the front door, pausing to lock it. He did not look like Owen. His hair was styled differently, and the clothing he wore… All of it she recognised having bought, or washed at some time or another, but the way it was assembled on him was somehow… different. A contrived casual dishevelment with the cuffs folded back on his jeans, collar arranged just so, buttons open to show a snug white t-shirt below. He put the keys into his pocket and strolled casually to the car, his long legs covering the distance in no time. Where was he going? She wondered as he pulled away. B
Emily put the notepad back as she had found it, the beat of her heart painful against her ribs, seeming to pound in her throat, and her ears filled with a rush of white noise. On automatic pilot she made her way back through the house, erasing any sign that she had been there, and turning out the lights, until she stood on the front porch, locking the door, much as Owen had done over an hour before. She made her way back to her house - the tears dry now as dread began to set in. Was Megan right? The neighbour across the road was at his letter box. She was certain that he had checked his mail three times already, and Mrs Essen next door was watering very late, standing on her driveway with her hose pointed away from Emily’s house, her back to her, as if determinedly not watching. Snooping, she thought with embarrassed anger. They had obviously seen Owen’s move during the day. She and Owen had become the street’s entertainment, as good as any soap opera, she thought angrily as she let
“People in your sensible world, Em, don’t do that. I don’t care about my job. Designing carparks,” he snorted in disgust. “It is bullshit. This isn’t living, Em, it is… beige.” “Beige?” He laughed, and it was no longer a happy sound, the opposite in fact. “Yes, beige, Em. It is humdrum. It is just existing. It is doing the sensible and expected because it is responsible. It is smothering.” She stared at him, her face pale. “You have never said you feel this way.” “I didn’t want to…” he paused and raked his hand through his hair. “I didn’t want to hurt you Em. But I have to, or I’m hurting myself. My life, my job, my clothing… It’s all just bullshit. Not what I want, to do, to wear. This person,” he threw a hand towards the photos of them laughing on the wall, “is not the person I want to be.” “I love you, Em,” he said. “I love you, but I don’t think I am in love with you. I want to be. But there is no… fire to it. I want more.” He drew in a sharp breath, as if shocked by what he
“No, I do know it says non-refundable,” Emily closed a window to block out the music from next door. Owen’s band was using the house to practise in again. Cars had been rocking up all morning, and the street was lined with beaten up, paint-challenged vans and Utes. Surely there was not so many people in the band? What were the rest of them there for? “But it says, non-refundable unless you manage to rebook the venue on that day. “Now, I know for a fact you have waiting lists because I was on one. The date is still six months out. I am sure if you call one of the brides who were also on that waiting list, someone will want the venue on that date. Hell, if you give me the list of phone numbers, I will call them for you.” As she moved through cancelling the many bookings that they had made for the wedding, Emily was learning to be pushy. People who had been only too happy to be helpful and answer any question they had, who had been always cheerful and pleasant to deal with, showed anot
By the time the ugly, beaten-up cars that crowded the pretty little street began to pull away, and Owen knocked on her front door, she had ordered pizza, opened a bottle of wine, and had two lists lined up on the coffee table. “Wow,” he said, shrugging out of the leather jacket as he entered. “We could use your skills for the band.” “Shall we start at the top?” She was curt as she took her seat, pressing herself tightly against the arm of the couch, her knees tight and her ankle bones digging into each other, physically holding herself together as if doing so would hold her emotionally intact. “Sure,” he said warily, sitting on the couch next to her, sitting close not out of desire for proximity but because it was practical in order to go through the lists with her, she knew. “You seem… mad.” “Mad?” She repeated. “Why would I be mad? I have just spent twenty-two years of my life believing I loved someone and was loved back, only to find out that it was a lie, and now the future we
The doorbell rang and they both jumped, looking automatically towards the hall, guilty as teenagers caught making out on the couch by parents coming home unexpectedly. “Shit, the pizza,” he realised the source of the doorbell first, his laughter shifting as he lifted from her and closed his jeans. He paused a moment, looking down at her, his eyes smouldering. “You look f-king sexy like that Emily,” he commented, and she flushed, pleased despite the offhanded crudity of the comment. He went to answer the door, and she sat up, waiting until the door closed again and pulling her clothing as much to order as she could with her underwear and skirt in rags, feeling exposed and vulnerable, and sluttish. Owen, fully dressed and looking nothing like he had just f-ked her stupid on the couch, joked with the pizza delivery man, as he accepted the pizzas and bid him to have a good night, before using his elbow and hip to close the door. “I will be just a moment,” she told him from the couch.
Emily took the pizzas out to the garbage bin and threw them away, and then returned to the lounge room and drank the rest of the wine, before drunkenly falling asleep on the couch. In the morning, nursing a hangover to accompany her broken heart, she called the real estate agent, and put the other house on the market, as Megan had told her to do from the beginning. She was starting to think that she should have followed Megan’s advice. She eyed up her hair speculatively in the reflection of the laptop. Well, maybe not all her advice, she decided. “What the f–k are you doing, Em?” Owen demanded the following evening, catching her as she returned from work and made her way down the garden path, his blue eyes blazing with anger and his cheeks flushed with it as he strode across the lawn. “What do you mean, what am I doing?” She was taken aback by his aggressive approach, snapped out of thoughts of the latest book she was reviewing with surprise. She backed up a step, suddenly wary. Wh