Anne had no response to give.
“I thought about it all evening. All morning, too. And I keep wondering—Anne, whydidyou react like that to what I said? Was it”—Sadie hesitated—“too much? I know I can be a little dramatic sometimes, but in retrospect, that might not have been the right moment to lean into theatrics.”
Her voice was light. So light, in fact, that it lifted high enough for Anne to feel the fear that lay beneath.
“It’s really fine, you know,” Sadie continued, squeezing her hands in her lap, “if you don’t share my, my intensity about our friendship. If you don’t see our friendship in the same way I do. Honestly, I can see that what I said put a lot of pressure on you. Which was unfair.”
Startled, Anne turned toward Sadie. Her face was tight and pale, her shoulders hunched. She looked like she was bracing for impact.
“You think I reacted like that because I don’t feel what you feel?” The possibility of this interpretation had never occurred to Anne. “That isn’t true. Not at all.”
Sadie, who’d been staring down into her lap, raised her head. “It’s not?”
Anne took a deep breath and said, trying not to listen to herself, “Sadie, I don’t think I can live without you either.”
Silence followed.
Then Sadie said very quietly, “Oh.”
She twisted her hands together again. They were beautiful hands, strong and well-formed, featuring long, tapered fingers stacked with numerous rings. Pianist’s hands, despite Sadie’s total lack of musical skill. Anne had admired those hands for years, loved the sure and confident way they moved through the air.
“So.” Was it shyness? Was that what was crawling through Anne? “There we are.”
“There we are,” Sadie repeated.
Another long pause.
“We feel the same way,” Anne said ridiculously. “About our friendship.”
“Do we?”
There was an uneasy note in Sadie’s voice. Anne didn’t like it. “I just said that I can’t live without you either. I don’t know how much plainer I can be.”
“I’d like you to say more.” Sadie rubbed her right hand over her left, a nervous gesture Anne recognized. “What does that mean to you? Tell me what you want.”
She’d never have a better opening. So Anne turned, finally, to fully face Sadie, and possibly herself, too.
“I want,” she began slowly, “for us to spend the rest of our lives together. Just us. Just you and me, like this, living next door to each other. Or in adjacent apartments in Manhattan, if you want to take that job. Or even living in the same place. I don’t care, as long I’m with you. I want you to keep writing poems on my stationery. I want to keep helping you track down the most niche vintage designer items anyone’s ever pulled out of an overstuffed rack. No dating, no men. Nothing to get in the way of our commitment. I want to promise you, and I want you to promise me. For us to promise each other. I’ll even sign something legal, whatever you want, Sadie, justplease—” She stopped. Started again. “There’s a lot less sand in the hourglass than there used to be. I don’t know how much I’ve got in there. But I do know—I know for an absolute fact—that no matter how much sand is left, I want to share it with you.”
Limp with her confession, Anne sat back against the couch and pressed her hands into the seat cushion to stop them from shaking.
Sadie let out a loud, hard exhale. “Well,” she said shakily. “Well, then.”
“And?” Anne waited a beat. Nothing. “Sadie, I walked myself out on the plank here. I think I deserve a little more than ‘well, then.’”
“You just proposed to me.” Sadie stood up, a look on her face Anne couldn’t decipher. “I think I’m entitled to a moment of shock.”
“What? I absolutely did not—”
“Spend the rest of our lives together.” Sadie started to pace, ticking off each sentence on a finger. “No matter how many years we’ve got left, you want them to be with me and no one else. And you want us to make a never-ending promise to each other. By signing a piece of paper. Whatisn’tconjugal about that?”
“No! I’m not asking you to marry me, I’m asking you for a lifetime…commitment. All right, I’ll admit that when you say it that way, it sounds a lot like marriage, but there’s a big difference.”
“What difference, exactly, are you seeing? Is it that we’re not registering for dinnerware at Geary’s? Are we skipping the wedding Pinterest board?”
“Please don’t joke. I’m being serious.”
“So am I!” Sadie stopped pacing. “Twenty-four hours ago, you were furious with me because you thought I was skipping town, and now you’re proposing a marriage you’re also sayingisn’tmarriage? You’ll forgive me if I’m using a bit of flippancy to pry open whatever part of you thinks this is a logical development.”