10
Two days later, on the night before his deployment, Patrick took Paige out for dinner at a fancy restaurant on the boardwalk named Catch 31. It was the first time Paige had seen Patrick in a button-down shirt, along with a dress sweater and his normal jeans. He had wanted to sit at the outside tables with the fire pits, but there was a steady drizzle and a stiff March breeze that forced them to go with plan B.
They found a cozy booth, and Paige allowed herself to enjoy the time together, chasing away thoughts about the deployment and how long it would be until they saw each other again. When the main course came, they talked about the Anderson family, and Patrick asked Paige if she ever saw herself as a mother. He took a bite of his steak—in a seafood restaurant—and waited for her response.
“Sure. Someday. But right now I’m more focused on my career.” She turned the question on him—“Have you ever thought about having kids?”—and took a sip of wine.
“Oh yeah,” Patrick said. “I’d like to have an entire basketball team.”
Paige stopped mid-bite. “You’re dating the wrong woman for that.”
Patrick shrugged. “I figured I would start high and leave room to negotiate.”
Aren’t we skipping a few things? Paige wanted to ask. They had never even talked about marriage, and now they were negotiating kids?
“Let’s take it one step at a time,” she said.
“It’s a hypothetical,” Patrick said, grinning. “And if we needed to, I could be a player/coach and settle for four.”
It wasn’t the only time that night that things got personal. Patrick had a way of asking soft, probing questions, his dark eyes oozing empathy, and Paige would surprise even herself in the way she let him in. They talked about how her father left the family and how her mother had abruptly moved to Nashville in order to marry a pastor as soon as Paige graduated from high school. “That’s the year I stopped going to church,” Paige said.
There were two boyfriends in college, and one in law school who had proposed to Paige before he graduated and moved to New York City. Six months later he moved in with a coworker, and the wedding was off. “He told me in a phone call,” Paige said. But she knew it was for the best; the guy was on his third female roommate now. “I’ve probably got serious abandonment issues,” she said.
“Just a poor judge of men,” Patrick said.
“Undoubtedly.”
Patrick reached over and took her hand. “You can trust me, Paige. I’m not perfect—you’ve probably figured that out—but I would never hurt you.”
Paige leaned a little closer. “I know that,” she said.
Later that night, Patrick pulled into the parking lot of Paige’s condo. They had this thing going where Patrick would jump out of his truck, run around to the passenger’s side, and try to open the door for Paige. But she never waited for him. Instead, she would hesitate for just a moment, then open her own door seconds before he careened around the front bumper to get his hand on the handle.
But tonight, neither of them got out.
“You want to come in?” Paige asked.
He turned to her. “I don’t think I should. I don’t trust myself.”
They were in the front seat of his truck with a console between them. He reached over it and put his arm around her shoulder, and she scooted toward him. She remembered how awkward it had been on their first date.
“Can I ask you a question?” Patrick said.
“Sure.”
He thought for a moment, as if rehearsing the words in his mind, making sure they came out right—editing, revising, restating. “What would you think about getting married?” he asked.
The question stunned Paige and, frankly, confused her. Was he proposing? Was it one of those I’ll-ask-you-to-the-prom-if-you-say-yes questions? After just three months?
“I’m not . . . really sure,” Paige stammered, the surprise evident in her voice. “It seems like everything is happening so fast.”
There was an awkward silence as her mind reeled. Married?
“In my world,” Patrick said, “we make quick decisions and trust our instincts. Plus, I’ve prayed about this, and I knew we were right for each other from that first kiss—actually, from the first time we met.”
Paige had no idea what to say. She leaned toward him, over the console, her head against his shoulder. In her world, she acted on logic, not instincts. And certainly not emotions.
“I just . . . I don’t know,” Paige said, looking out the front windshield. “I love the thought of it, but I would want to make sure it’s right, not just something we do because you’re going away and we want to lock something in.”
“Think about it,” Patrick said. “I don’t need an answer tonight. I wasn’t really expecting one.” He hesitated. “Well, to be honest, I did have this plan of proposing on the boardwalk right after dinner. But then the weather . . . and our dinner conversation about that guy who dumped you in law school.”
The hint of disappointment in his voice stung Paige. The last thing she wanted to do was hurt him.
“I guess I just wanted you to know before I head out that I’m ready to spend the rest of my life with you,” he said.
Paige faced him, inches away. “I love you,” she said. She gave Patrick a long kiss, one that connected them in a way she had never felt before. And when he got out and walked around to her side of the car, she let him open the door.
“See, that didn’t hurt,” Patrick said.
He walked her to her front door. She asked him again to come in but he said he couldn’t . . . shouldn’t. This time she sensed the slightest distance between them—or maybe she was just imagining it.
He leaned down and she stood on her toes and they kissed again. They said their good-byes, and he wiped her tears away and waited as she entered the condo.
She watched through the peephole as he turned and walked away. She got ready for bed, her mind still whirling. And finally, when she had sufficiently dissected the man’s character and made lab slides out of every piece of information she knew about him, every date they had shared, and especially the last few minutes together tonight, she typed a text message.
But she didn’t want it to be just an emotional reaction to the disappointment she had detected. Or a desire to nail things down when they were staring at a few months apart. This was too important, and she had been burned before. That law school relationship had felt right too. At the time, she was sure they had been created for each other. She crawled into bed, placed the phone on the sheets next to her, and stared at the message for a long time.
Was this how it was supposed to be? Were her feelings real and lasting, or were they just because she knew that she wouldn’t see him for three months? And if they were real, couldn’t they pick up where they left off when he returned?
Was she worried because he was a SEAL and she didn’t want to spend her life married to someone who would be in and out every six months? Was she ready to live with the thought that somebody could knock on her door in the middle of the night and tell her that her husband was gone? But then she thought about Troy and Kristen and how they made it all work.
These and a hundred other questions plagued her as she lay on her back and stared at the ceiling, trying to imagine the next three months without Patrick. At nearly two in the morning, she started to doze off. She woke after a few seconds, set the alarm on her phone, and placed it on the dresser. She left the text message unsent. She didn’t trust her emotions; right now they were just too raw.
For a few more minutes, her thoughts bounced around in that no-man’s-land between wakefulness and sleep, jumbling together in a swirling mix of bad court opinions, giggling little boys, and the earnest eyes of a man she was sure she loved. Finally, at 2:30 a.m., she rolled onto her right side, fluffed up her pillow, and fell into a fitful but welcome sleep.