The Happy List (Better With You #1) - Briar Prescott
1
Gray
People can be extremely inventive. Take, for example, an anechoic chamber. It’s a room that absorbs all sound inside it and lets no sound in from the outside. Complete and total silence. Silence so all-encompassing that after a bit, you’ll start hearing your own heartbeat and the blood flowing in your veins. Your stomach rumbling and the hissing of your lungs when you breathe.
It’s not an especially comfortable feeling. Spend enough time in a chamber like that and the ringing in your ears becomes deafening. If you move, your bones seem to make too much noise. Eventually you’ll lose your balance because the quiet fucks with your spatial awareness.
I can relate. Boy, can I relate.
The room around me is so silent that I could hear a pin drop. I swear I can hear the vein in my brother’s forehead pulse. I can’t see him, but I can hear it.
I can even hear his thoughts. Please don’t let Grayson do something embarrassing.
Sounds about right. Or I imagine that’s what’s going through his head. It’s not that I have a lot of experience. This is the first time in my twenty-eight years I’ve broken the unwritten rules of decorum my brother follows religiously, so it’s no wonder the guy looks shocked. To be fair, I don’t think it’s the breakup that bothers Con so much as the unexpected social situation it creates that he doesn’t have a clue how to navigate.
I turn my attention back to the brewing storm that is my girlfriend. Well, an ex-girlfriend, I suppose. If nothing else, the public humiliation has just sealed the deal for good.
“What?” Cecilia says slowly, breaking the weird as fuck anechoic chamber effect. I look down at the stony face of the person who, in the very near future, is going to dig her key in the side of my car and scratch a dick on it.
The country singers that threaten to destroy a cheating boyfriend’s property, cut off the sleeves of his suit, and pour marinara into his laptop case are Cecilia’s guilty pleasure, so I hope one day she can remember me fondly as the man who gave her the chance to live out the fantasy of bashing somebody’s headlights in with a baseball bat.
In the grand scheme of things, saying no to a very public marriage proposal might be relatively close to cheating in the list of unforgivable relationship sins, so I’m basing my thought process on the assumption that the punishment is about the same in both cases.
“Cee…” I say, but I follow it up with nothing. I don’t know how to fix this situation. It’s not that I want to hurt her or break her heart.
But I don’t want to get married either.
She lets go of my hands, and her jaw twitches as she looks to the side at the family that has gathered around us.
In hindsight, I should have known something was going on. Who the hell throws a leap year party? Twenty-ninth of February might not happen every year, but it’s hardly a cause to gather up family on both our sides and rent a whole restaurant for the occasion. Now that I think about it, the fact that it’s Marmolada, the place where Cee and I had had our first date, should have tipped me off sooner.
Technically speaking, it’s my birthday, too. But I don’t like birthdays. I’ve never celebrated them, so all in all, a surprise engagement party, disguised as a surprise birthday party, disguised as a leap year party is not the greatest idea. I don’t mention it, though. I think I’ve done enough damage for one night without throwing shade at Cee’s party planning skills.
“What do you mean by no?” Cecilia whispers as she glances toward the crowd of parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, nieces, and nephews that surround us. She’s furious. The twitching nostril is a dead giveaway.
“Can we maybe talk about it somewhere else?” I ask quietly, turning my back to my brother and Cee’s parents, who already have similar expressions of disappointment on their faces.
“I asked you to marry me,” Cee says unnecessarily. By this point, the chef is peeking out of the kitchen to witness the whole train wreck of a proposal in person, so she really doesn’t need to clarify what’s happening.
“But why?” It’s clearly the wrong thing to say because I’m almost certain smoke will start coming out of her ears any moment now.