the three of us were going to be spending any amount of time together.
Trey went inside ahead of me when we got home, and I was thankful for a few moments alone with Scott in his beat-up old Volkswagen.
“So that was painful,” I said.
“It was fun.”
“The beginning part, I mean.”
“It didn’t really surprise me.”
“He’s not usually that . . . forward.”
“He was just checking out the guy who’s been hanging out with his sister.”
“Hanging out, huh?”
“Sure. Hanging out.”
“Um . . . About that ‘love’ thing.”
He cocked an eyebrow.
“You know, the whole ‘I love your sister’ thing. . . .”
“Yes?” His grin told me he’d been expecting the topic to arise.
“Well . . . it’s just that I’ve never really heard you say the word before. I mean . . . not directly to me. So it kinda took me by surprise when you just blurted it to my brother.”
“What are you getting at?”
I sighed and weighed my words. “You’ve only known me a few months,” I said.
“Yes.”
“So . . . really, you don’t know me very well at all.”
He looked at me for a moment before responding. “I know you well enough.”
“It’s just that . . .”
“I’m sorry I blurted it out to your brother before having said it to you,” he said softly, running the back of a finger down my cheek. “I just wanted him to know that you were safe—that I wasn’t out to harm you.”
I nodded, unsure of what to say, of where to begin, of how to explain.
“I love you,” he said, and something in me softened a little with the words. Something resolute and hard. An armored vestige of my childhood’s pain.
“Do you remember the second part of what I told him?” Scott asked, breaking into my thoughts.
“The part about marriage?” I asked, my voice husky from the tears I was striving to restrain.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve been trying to forget that part.”
“Why’s that?”
“It gives me the heebie-jeebies,” I said with an unsteady giggle, emotions wreaking havoc on my poise.
“In a good way?” He was a little perplexed.
“In a heebie-jeebies kind of way.”
“I meant it, you know.”
I was trying to reach the point where I could consider “love” without breaking out in hives. Adding “marriage” to the mix was making me itch.
“Are you going to pull a Scarlett O’Hara on me again?”
I shook my head. I’d learned my lesson at the toy museum. Zingers at crucial moments were not worth the collateral damage. “Scott . . .” I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to put my thoughts in some order. He seemed so casual about the subject, and it made me a little leery. “Do you talk about marriage a lot?” I finally asked, opening my eyes to scan his face for sincerity. “Because it strikes me that if you’ve always been as casual about it as you were tonight, you should have been married a few times over by now.”
“I’ve seldom ever talked about it—or thought about it—except in theoretical terms.”
That gave me pause. “Why not?”
“My youth pastor when I was in ninth grade.”
My curiosity was fast overcoming my distress. “He made you take a vow of celibacy?”
He shook his head. “Sam Collier. A General Patton–esque man with all the people skills of Attila the Hun.”
“Sounds pleasant.”
“He was actually perfect for the job—imagine ten guys like me in the same youth group.” I crinkled my nose in sympathy. “He was former military, actually. And he had this really infuriating ability to predict just how stupid my next idea was going to be.”
“And he’s the reason you’re still single at age thirty-six?”
“Thirty-seven in a few weeks.” Scott leaned his head back on the headrest and seemed to be picturing the scene. “One of the guys in our group asked the colonel—that’s what we called him—what he thought about divorce, and he told us what he thought about marriage instead. He said, ‘Gentlemen, my best advice to you is never get married. Respect marriage. Fear marriage. And absolutely do not get married!’”
“What?”
“He had a point. There were so many marriages, even in my church, that were falling apart, that he told us we should only consider getting married if we were absolutely, fiercely determined to fight for it with all our worth for the rest of our lives. And if we didn’t have a kind of warrior’s zeal and compulsive commitment to give to it, we should run from it as fast as our scrawny legs could take us.”
“So he wasn’t an optimist, is what you’re saying.”