“I think we should break up,” Clarissa said at the same time.
“What?”
“What?”
“I’m proposing to you and you’re…breaking up with me?”
“You’re proposing to me?”
“I just asked you to marry me,” I said, belatedly pulling the ring box from my pocket and placing it on the table. I opened it and Clarissa gasped.
Her eyes hungrily ate up the four carat pavé diamond and platinum engagement ring that sparkled against the velvet of the box. She licked her lips, and then sighed, tearing her eyes away from the diamond to the surrounding restaurant before her gaze came back to mine.
“Why do you want to marry me, Lucas?” she asked.
“What sort of question is that?”
“An honest one,” she replied.
I sighed. “We’ve been dating for two years,” I replied, listing the points on my fingers. “You and my mother are practically best friends, we get on well, you would be a suitable wife…”
She snorted elegantly and then took a long sip from her glass.
“What?” I asked, flummoxed by her reaction.
“I want to be loved, not just tolerated,” she replied. “You just proposed to me and not once did you tell me you loved me. I don’t want to marry someone because I’m friends with their mother or because they think I would be a suitable wife. Yes, we’ve been dating for two years, but don’t you think it has been more out of habit than because we have deep feelings for one another?”
I gaped at her, opening and closing my mouth like a fish stranded on the beach. This was not what I expected to happen tonight. And maybe I wasn’t the most demonstrative person in the world, but I liked Clarissa well enough.
“Haven’t you ever wanted to feel so passionately in love with someone that you can’t think about anything else? Haven’t you wanted to feel that rush that consumes you when you see the other person and that overwhelming desire to just be with them twenty-four seven?”
“Um…no,” I answered honestly. Those feelings of passion made me uncomfortable and just the thought of a rush of adrenaline was a nightmare for me—it felt too much like a panic attack for my liking. “A marriage can’t be built on such fleeting emotions as…as passion,” I replied.
“They can,” Clarissa replied. “And that’s what I want in a marriage. I want excitement, not…”
“Boring?” I finished for her. “Bland? Dull? Monotonous?”
“I was going to say equable. I want more and, in fact, I’ve—“
“You’ve found someone else,” I said. It wasn’t a question but a statement of fact and I could see my guess validated by the look on her face.
“I have,” she replied. “It’s still new and…well, nothing has come of it yet.”
“But it made you realize what you were lacking being with me,” I replied wearily.
“You’re a lovely man—”
I groaned.
“No, it’s true,” Clarissa said. “You are kind and sweet and stable—”
I groaned again.
Clarissa reached across the table and patted my hand. “You will make someone a wonderful husband one day,” she said.
“But it won’t be you,” I replied.
“No, it won’t,” she said.
Before I could say anything else—I hadn’t even gotten to tell her about the appointment to the royal court—Clarissa stood and brushed a kiss on my cheek.
“I wish you all the best,” she said before walking out.
“I should drive you home,” I said, but too late. She was gone, and I was left sitting at the table with an engagement ring and the entire restaurant witnessing my utter and complete failure.
I picked up my glass of wine and swallowed the rest of it before lifting my hand to summon the waiter. I would need more than wine to get through the rest of tonight.
“Scotch, rocks,” I said.
My father would cringe at me drinking scotch and not raïda or tsipouro, but I didn’t care. It was probably the most rebellious thing I’d done in my life and I was feeling reckless. Clarissa had not only turned me down, but she was leaving me for another man and my father would see that as yet another disappointment to add to the endless list of my disappointments, so drinking scotch could just join the list.
Besides, I’d developed an immunity to raïda and tonight I wanted to get drunk enough to forget all my shortcomings. I would deal with the fallout tomorrow, but for tonight, I just wanted to forget.
Francesca
Sherry and I were about to call it a night when the door burst open and Lucas stumbled in, his glasses sitting crookedly on his nose. I don’t think I’d ever seen Lucas so…disheveled. Or drunk. Lucas didn’t get drunk. There were times when we were at college together that I thought he had some mystical power over alcohol. He could drink me—and almost anyone else—under the table and still pass a sobriety test. In more recent years, he’d cut back on drinking. Now he was the designated driver and the voice of reason and the one who held my hair back when I’d had too much to drink.
“Lucas?” I asked as he stumbled to the bar and slid haphazardly onto the bar stool.
“Frankie,” he slurred and gave me a sloppy smile. “My favorite person.”
Sherry raised her eyebrows at me, but gave us some privacy as I leaned on the bar opposite Lucas and took him in.
“What happened?” I asked.
“You have really pretty hair,” Lucas said, his eyes glazed. “It’s like…chocolate dipped in caramel.”
“Uh huh,” I nodded. He wasn’t wrong, my hair was dark with caramel-colored ombre, but he’d said nothing about it before.
“And I like it short,” he added.
I always wore my hair in a short choppy bob. I was currently rocking an undercut, but again, Lucas had never said anything to make me think he noticed my hair.
“Thanks,” I said. “You want to tell me what’s going on? Shouldn’t you be with your fiancée right now?”
He groaned and dropped his head to the bar.
“She broke up with me,” he said.
“Wait, what?” Those were not the words I expected to come out of his mouth, even with his inebriated state as proof that the night hadn’t gone as planned. “Clarissa broke up with you?”
He moved his head in a nodding motion, although he’d laid it down on the bar.
“She wants passion, and she thinks I’m dull.”
I rolled my eyes and grabbed a bottle of water out of the fridge, opening it and sliding it toward him.
“Drink this,” I said.
He pushed up slowly and took the water, taking a sip before pushing it away and laying his head back down again.
“You didn’t drive here did you?” I asked.
“Uber,” he mumbled.
“So Clarissa broke up with you,” I repeated, still not quite believing it.
“Yep,” he said, tilting his head to look at me.
“Do you want me to punch her?” I asked, fully prepared to take a shot at the woman who could make my best friend so unhappy. “Or I could start trolling her on Instagram. Yeah, maybe that would be a better thing to do, hit her where it would really hurt.”