Sing

CHAPTER 25.

JONATHAN

Her hair fell across our fists, which were balled up together around a found box holding my sister’s ring. My hands shook as I removed it. My rib cage ached like it was stretched by an ever-expanding balloon inside it. With the tube out my chest, it was filling with blood, drop by drop. I was sure the feeling of expansion was air, or my imagination, but the fear of it made it hard to get the garish thing on her finger. The size was right, but the stone was wrong. All wrong. I wanted something else for her, something more original, a ring that could only belong to a goddess.

“I won’t disappoint you,” I said.

“I’m not worried about you being the disappointment.”

Irene’s voice cut in. “I declare you engaged. Time to go.” She put her hand on my shoulder.

“I want to tell you what you do to me the night I agree to marry you,” Monica whispered.

“They have to put me back in. I don’t want you to see it.”

“Jonathan, please—“

“Time to go,” Irene said more firmly.

“Go,” I said to my fiancée. “Please. Come back in an hour. Then you can tell me about our wedding night.”

Her head tilted a little and her eyes widened. Yes, it was quick, but wasn’t that the point? She kissed me a second too long because we ended with me grimacing. She must have known it wasn’t about her, because she got up and walked out with out looking back. Good woman.

I submitted myself completely to Irene and Gregory, who had broken a hundred rules or more to give me five minutes to ask properly for Monica’s hand. The rules were good. They were there for a reason, which was, I couldn’t handle five minutes kneeling. I felt like I’d just run a marathon that ended in a dark alley, where I’d been beaten with baseball bats and cut into small pieces with a serrated knife. Or something that made me too weak, too pained, too outside myself to manage my own body.

They got me out of my clothes, reinserting, realigning, and recalibrating the devices attached to me. They accepted my gratitude for as long as I had the wherewithal to express it, which was an eternity, but probably about five minutes in the rest of the world. Then I fell off the cliff of consciousness for awhile. Might have been the drugs, or my body giving out like it did a few times a day. Even then, I didn’t have the energy to fully feel angry, though there was a cord of that in my spine. Mostly, I felt fear. I was responsible for her now, and though the unknown was bad enough to face alone, in the dark, unprepared, I felt as though I had something to live for tomorrow.