When We're Thirty

by Casey Dembowski

  “What if we got married?” she asked tentatively.

  “Did you just propose to me?” he asked, his voice deep with what Hannah could only call fear.

  She sat up, keeping the blanket wrapped around herself even though his apartment was always distastefully warm. “Hear me out, Bri.” He didn’t say anything, which, knowing Brian, wasn’t a good thing. She plowed on. “I know we’re not ready to be publicly married, but we can go down to city hall and make it official. No one has to know. Then I can go on your health insurance.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s illegal.”

  Hannah shook her head. “It would only be illegal if we pretended to be married.”

  “Okay.”

  Hannah’s heart raced at the word. Had he just agreed to marry her after everything?

  “What do I get out of this arrangement?”

  Crap. She reached for his hand, but he held them both securely in his lap, out of reach. She’d miscalculated. He wasn’t fearful; he was insulted. Cold settled into the inches between them, which felt like a chasm. Brian receded to his side of the bed, closing himself off. Frustration, rather than regret, fizzled in her chest.

  “So, Hannah? What’s in it for me?” His voice dripped with sarcasm, each word dipped in cruelty. “I mean, besides the opportunity to check the divorced box for the rest of my life.”

  “Wow.” She refused to cry. Let him be mean and get it all out. There was no going back from her request. She hadn’t thought that when she’d made it, but the answer was always going to be “yes” or “no.” Either one changed everything irrevocably.

  “This idea of yours is no way to start a marriage even if we were close to ready, which we’re not.”

  “You’re not ready,” she said, finding herself exhilarated. They didn’t fight like this. Brian usually disappeared or walked away. But this was real. She felt it down to her toes.

  “No, I’m not. And more to the point, I don’t want to marry you right now.” Brian was on a roll and, it seemed, had no intention of leaving well enough alone. Hannah tuned him out until his voice reached his tirade’s crescendo. “—between your job and Kate and—” Hannah knew the next word out of his mouth would be the deal-breaker. She’d known it since the first time he came to her apartment. “—Binx.”

  “If you didn’t treat him with complete disdain, he might like you better.” Hannah stood and flipped on the light. She reached for her clothes folded on the dresser, changing back into her jeans.

  “Binx doesn’t like anyone that’s not you.”

  Brian stayed in bed, which only made Hannah angrier. She clasped her bra behind her back underneath her cami, knowing she had the hooks uneven but unwilling to be even partially naked in front of him. She couldn’t look at his calm, complacent face anymore, but it was nearly one in the morning. It was going to be hard enough getting a taxi during peak hours, and she definitely wasn’t taking the subway. She put her T-shirt on over her cami and fumbled with her phone as she slid into her sneakers. The Uber wait time was ten minutes. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do until then, but anything was better than staying there.

  “Hannah, it’s the middle of the night. We can talk about all this in the morning.”

  Brian, her beautiful idiot, thought he could say awful things—insult her best friend and her job and her cat—and they’d just talk about it in the morning. “You just told me you don’t want to marry me and basically hate everything that is important in my life. There is nothing left to talk about. Really, Brian, we should’ve had this conversation a year ago. It would’ve saved us so much time.”

  “I said I didn’t want to marry you right now.” He finally got to his feet and crossed the small space, wrapping his hand around her wrist.

  “Well,” she said, pulling her arm back. “There’s someone who does.”

  Chapter 5

  Will

  Holy shit. She’d actually called. It would’ve been better had it not been almost two in the morning. Will had already been asleep for hours at that point. But Hannah had called, and there was no way he wasn’t heading directly to her apartment. If he didn’t know Hannah so well—or at least, he hoped he still knew her—he would be expecting a booty call. But Hannah Abbott was not a booty-call type of girl. Plus, he was pretty sure proposing with a huge diamond ring disqualified him from such debauchery. Getting to Queens is a money suck, but at least there won’t be traf—he stopped his thought midsentence. He was going to jinx it. Now there would be overnight, all-lanes-closed construction on whatever bridge the cabbie took.

  “Will, hold on!” Hannah’s voice came through loudly over the phone.

  He stopped halfway into a pair of jeans, the phone snugly fitting between his ear and shoulder. “Yes?”

  “Come in the morning. Say, eight?” She sounded exhausted, and it was from more than being up at one in the morning. He wondered what had happened since he saw her last night. Had he caused the fatigue in her voice?

  “I’ll bring breakfast. The usual?” Will waited to see if she’d laugh or replace her standard Sunday-morning order from the three years they had shared that meal.

  Her reply was light and appreciative. “The usual, but no sugar.”

  “Eight it is, then.” He fell back onto his bed, kicking his way out of his jeans, grateful he didn’t actually have to get to Queens and be a coherent, persuasive human.

  “Good night, Will.”

  Six hours. In six hours, he could have a fiancée. Once they discussed the details, she’d said. He smiled to himself, burrowing back into bed. Hannah had always been a step ahead. She was astute enough to know that Will hadn’t asked on a complete whim. He should’ve thought the proposal through more. But then he wouldn’t have done it. He would’ve stayed quiet as he had for the past several years, silently watching Hannah’s life flourish. It wasn’t that he hadn’t missed her—he had. But he couldn’t be around her and not love her, which had become highly problematic for all his relationships. But then there’d been Madison. She’d made him see past Hannah and want to love someone else. So he had let Hannah go, fallen in love, and done everything right. He had made peace with the Hannah-shaped hole in his life. Those things happened—college friendships stayed in college, people grew up and apart, life went on. And it had. Until four months ago, when Madison had quite literally screwed everything up.

  When he’d come out of his vodka-induced haze a month ago, he had found himself a thirty-year-old man whose life was on the brink of destruction—his girlfriend gone, his family ties strained, and his job dangling from a tightrope. After a full week of no booze or other vices, he’d woken from a dream of Hannah—a memory, really. In the dream, Hannah had slipped her hand into his, running her fingers through his hair. It had been sophomore year before he’d realized his feelings for her. She had leaned in ever so slightly, and he jumped down from his stool to greet one of his fraternity brothers and to flirt with some other girl. Lila? Lilly? A month later, Hannah was dating some asshat from the baseball team. If Will remembered correctly, the two had met that same night over a game of beer pong. But she had liked Will first. That was the important part of the dream. All these years, he had secretly loved her. Maybe she loved him back.

  Will jumped as his phone vibrated on his bedside table. His heart quickened a bit at the second vibration. Hannah? No, of course not.

  “Stop calling me, Madison,” he said without bothering to hide his contempt.

  “I will if you let me come over.” Madison was whispering. Somewhere along the line, she’d gotten the idea that whispering was sexy. He’d tried explaining to her several times that it was dropping your voice, not whispering, that denoted sexiness. But still, she whispered. It also meant that her fiancé was home.

  “No.”

  “I miss you, William.”

  Maybe she meant it, maybe not. Their breakup, her infidelity, and then her constant attempts at an affair had blurred the lines of the truth too much for him to kn
ow who she wanted. Either way, it didn’t matter.

  “You’re marrying my brother.”

  “That didn’t stop you before,” she said, a hint of amusement coloring her tone.

  He ran his hand over his face. It had been one moment of weakness. Everything that had happened between the three of them had been so fresh. His wounds had not yet cauterized and were constantly reopening at the seams. When she had appeared in his doorway, looking like the woman he loved, it had been as if he willed her into existence. The whole night had been a mistake, one of the worst of his life. It sent him spiraling, and he had only just figured out how to slow it all down again. But even with his resistance and the physical distance from Madison, the night they had shared after she’d chosen his brother lived with him, in the farthest corners of his mind, haunting him with its injustice.

  “I can’t—no, Madison,” he said, the sudden wrongness of even this phone call hitting him. It wasn’t that he couldn’t be a part of the infidelity, but that he didn’t want to be. Not anymore. “Stop calling.”

  He hung up then threw his phone onto his nightstand. She would call back and might even show up at his place. Madison wasn’t used to being denied. But he would not be party to her antics, especially now. He conjured an image of Hannah in his mind. For the first time, she appeared as a thriving and talented grown woman. An inquisitive, worried, and yet slightly intrigued expression played across her features, each emotion battling for equal ground. He closed his eyes, willing sleep to come. Tomorrow, life might begin anew.

  Chapter 6

  Hannah

  A leftover tidbit of half-and-half floated in Hannah’s coffee mug, resisting all attempts at removal. Meeting at eight in the morning had been ambitious. For two nights, she’d barely slept, and now she was supposed to be making life-changing decisions. She rubbed her face. Calling Will had been a gut reaction. She’d been pissed at Brian and herself and filled with disappointment. Marrying Will was ludicrous, but as long as his reasons checked out, she was going to do it anyway. Hannah’s stomach lurched. Why had she said eight in the morning?

  At least the kitchen was cleaner than in recent weeks. Last night, before getting the brilliant idea to hide from her thoughts with Brian, she’d cleaned practically the whole apartment after work. Screw spring cleaning. Stress cleaning had a much better success rate. She eyed the refrigerator, scanning the assorted photos for any remaining of her and Brian. Instead, she found the Wilderness tickets still stuck in the clip. They had to be returned. It grated at her nerves. Brian would get no use out of them, except maybe through scalping. His delicate sensibilities probably made “scalping” a dirty word. So maybe she was still angry. She smiled into her coffee—better angry than bawling. Maybe she’d keep them and take Will. The concert was in a few months; it could be their honeymoon. Did a marriage of convenience get a honeymoon? Probably not, but an island vacation didn’t sound so bad. No parents, no work, no responsibilities. Yeah, she could definitely use a honeymoon.

  The clock on her phone flashed eight, and at the same time came that distinctive knock. She should’ve recognized it on Thursday. Will had come up with a coded knock for Hannah and Kate their junior year. It let the girls know they had approximately thirty seconds to get decent before he came in. Hannah and Kate had come up with funny retorts to the knock that year, but she couldn’t remember any. She stopped in front of the door, gripping her coffee mug, and took a calming breath. If she opened the door, her path would divert from the expected. She could turn down the offer, nullify the pact, but underneath all the apprehension, a spark of excitement remained. Marriage was always a crapshoot. Maybe if more people thought it through practically instead of emotionally, fewer marriages would fail. Maybe she and Will were batshit crazy.

  She shook her head, smiling. Only one way to find out.

  Standing outside her door, a tray of coffees in one hand and a brown bag with what she hoped was an egg everything bagel with a veggie smear in the other, Will looked like a memory. He greeted her warmly, but the set of his shoulders, the tightness in his cheeks, and the dulling brown of his usually bright eyes showed his anxiety. Whatever Hannah felt for Will—nostalgia, love, or attraction—the rambling hello he offered as he handed her the coffee intensified those feelings. The Will she knew didn’t get rattled or nervous. Even with their former closeness, Hannah had only been granted glimpses behind the veil. But proposing couldn’t be easy, and most guys at least had years of a stable relationship backing them up. Will was flying by on his looks and the goodwill of old memories.

  He stopped in the kitchen doorway, still clutching the paper bag. His eyes darted around the small space, stopping on Hannah every so often as she reached for plates and mugs. Every time their gazes met, she looked away, focusing on the plates, setting the table, or carefully pouring her coffee from the cheap paper cup into her mug. But she could still feel his gaze each time it passed over her. One of them had to say something. The conversation needed to be had, or it would be like this forever—awkward, confused, and energized. He had proposed. It should probably be him. But then again, she called him here. Hannah turned to him, ready to start the spiel she’d spent too much of the last hour going over, reminding herself that it was Will and a wedding, not peace talks between warring nations.

  “You look like hell, Abbott,” he said, his true smile finally appearing. “What’s on your mind?”

  She leaned across the table over the egg everything bagel with vegetable cream cheese. “Well, you see, this long-lost friend showed up at my door the other night with an engagement ring. Things got a bit murky after that.”

  “Long-lost? Really?” He leaned forward as well. They mirrored each other from across the table, elbows against the hard surface, hands clasped in front of them, and expressions sarcastic.

  Hannah rolled her eyes. They really were idiots. “Last time I saw you, you were dancing the horah at a wedding. If I’m not mistaken, you left with one of the bridesmaids before cake and didn’t even say goodbye.”

  For a moment, his expression turned pensive, but then he smiled. “I’ll have you know I dated Valerie for three solid months.”

  Hannah held up her hands. At least he knew her name. “Fine. An old friend turned up at my doorstep the other night with an engagement ring.” She toasted him with half of her bagel.

  “Was it for you?”

  Hannah chucked a piece of bagel at him. “Seriously, Will.”

  “You’re really considering doing this?” His expression was amused yet surprised.

  The hair on her arms stood up, and her shoulders tightened. “Should I not be?”

  “Don’t get me wrong. I’m stoked that you are considering marrying me, Abbott.”

  Of course he would still call her that, a habit he’d fallen into after a frat row party two weeks into their friendship. She supposed there were worse things he could’ve called her—such as “Nana,” which was what Kate called her at her drunkest. It always started with “Hannah Banana,” but by the end of the night, she would just be “Nana”—not even the whole fruit.

  “It’s just not your style,” he said, sitting back in his chair. “I expected to get laughed out of your building. Spontaneity was never your strong suit.”

  Will’s definition of spontaneity fell more along the lines of spur-of-the-moment tattoos than random trips to Wawa. The muscles in her back unclenched a bit.

  “You’re not a drug addict, a recovering alcoholic, or dying or anything, right?”

  “We’re all dying, Abbott,” he said, his tone somber for a change. “But no, I am not actively dying. Nor am I addicted to anything harder than caffeine.”

  She nodded. “Okay.”

  He stood and took a lap around her small kitchen. “Now that that’s out of the way, do you have any other questions?”

  The detailed mental questionnaire she had meticulously crafted disintegrated, each question dropping from her mind as she tried to recall it. Everything she wanted to know
about his life in the last five years was replaced by one blinding need. “Why?”

  Hannah watched Will pick at his fingernails, his eyes trained on what must have been the most interesting hangnail ever. It was becoming increasingly apparent that Hannah didn’t know this Will. He had changed since graduation, and it wasn’t simply growing up. Whatever the change was, it was rooted deep in him. There were still hints of the boy she had loved all those years ago, but there was a weariness to him too. It was as if all the fears he had and all the expectations he had to meet were crushing him.

  “Why what?” he asked, leaning against the doorjamb.

  There were so many whys, but she would settle on one for now. “Why do you need to get married?”

  “Always so on point,” he said, tapping his nose twice. He sat down again and took a sip of his coffee.

  “I mean, that’s why you want to initiate the pact, right? There’s a reason you need to be married,” Hannah said lightly. She knew she was being pointed, but he was wasting time if his reasons were less than noble.

  “It’s not anything...” His eyes scanned the kitchen before landing on her. “Can we do this anywhere but here?”

  It was an odd request, but then again, sitting at a table figuring out the details of a sudden marriage was an odd thing to do on a Sunday morning. They had always done their best talking while walking. “Where do you want to go?”

  THIRTY MINUTES AND a subway ride later, they were almost to the High Line. When Hannah needed quiet on loud days in the office—and there were many loud days—she sometimes came here or to Madison Square Park. She’d sit and people watch, imagining the lives of whoever caught her eye, practicing her profiling skills as if she were writing a feature story that started with that very meeting. Sitting on a New York City park bench, the man illegally feeds a pigeon... It was weird being here with Will—or with anyone. The only person she’d ever walked the High Line with was Stephanie, on the morning before her wedding as her sister had a panic attack about becoming a wife and stepmother at twenty-four. In a city where it was impossible to ever be alone, it was important to find havens.