Wished

Chapter 25

25

Apparently, it is absolutely impossible to convince someone of something if they are convinced something else is the truth.

Me telling Max we aren’t married is met with the same disbelief as if I’d told him the sky was green, trees could talk, or that I didn’t like kissing him. All of those are obvious lies of such a huge proportion they’re incomprehensible.

Exactly like it’s incomprehensible we’re not married, madly in love, and wanting to try for a baby.

“We’re not married,” Max says flatly, disbelief coating his words.

He insisted on breakfast, and since I’ve never been able to think on an empty stomach, I agreed. We moved the tartine and coffee to the kitchen, and while Max pressed fresh orange juice and cut up a few apricots, I threw on one of the chic dresses I found in the wardrobe and quickly braided my messy bed hair.

“That’s right. We’re not married,” I say.

A spray of sunlight falls over the breakfast table, settled beneath a large window in the bespoke kitchen. It’s a cheerful, brightly lit space with long stretches of white marble counters, hand-crafted cabinets, and hand-milled brass fixtures. There’s a crystal bowl full of ripe apricots, fragrant peaches, and nectarines on the counter. A vase full of sunny yellow tulips. It’s just about the prettiest kitchen in existence, and last night, while we were eating, drinking, and making love, I didn’t appreciate its charm.

“You made a wish on the Bride’s Parure and then...” He holds his hands out in front of him in a “voila” gesture.

“Exactly.” I lean forward, the scent of toasted baguette and cherry jam tickling my nose. “Exactly. If we go back to Geneva, maybe we can figure out what we missed. We can reverse this. Why ...” I frown at the look on his face. “What?”

He smiles and tilts his head. The way his lips curl makes a sweet, apricot-flavored ache roll through me. For a moment I get lost in the way he looks—black hair, sharp nose, rough-cut features that flicker from stoic and stony to playful and sweet in a millisecond.

“Darling. If you’ve changed your mind about a baby this year, that’s all you have to say. We can wait. I married you. Whether we have children or not, it’s life with you that I want.” His gaze goes bedroom-eyed and intimate, and I almost melt into a puddle and drip from my chair onto the glossy wood floor.

“Gah,” I say, then I realize gah isn’t a word.

Max’s smile widens and he flashes his teeth, all happy, as if everything is settled. He picks up a slice of apricot and sets in on my plate. “Have some apricot. It’s delicious.”

His fingers are glossy and wet from the juices. He watches me as he licks the liquid from his fingertips.

Is it hot in here? Yes. It’s definitely hot in here.

I grab my cloth napkin and fan myself. The white of the cloth waving in the air is like a sign of surrender, as if already I’ve accepted this as my new reality.

Well, the heck with that.

I shove the napkin back into my lap. “Max.”

He quirks an eyebrow.

“We are not married.”

He nods, pouring me more coffee from the French press. A puff of steam rises between us and the arabica scent fills the air.

“If not the baby,” he asks, “then ... is this foreplay? Like when we play grumpy boss and her naughty secretary?”

“What?” Grumpy boss and her naughty secretary? Me and Max play what?

“Professor and failing student? Are we role-playing this morning?” He looks at the ceiling, considering this and rubbing his chin. “This could work. We’re not married. Which means—” He looks back to me, his expression lighting up.

“No,” I say. “No. I’m not role-playing. I’m not joking. I’m not suffering from a delusion. I’m telling you, we’re not actually married. This isn’t reality. This is a wish. The myth of the Bride’s Parure was true and ... Stop laughing!”

His laugh is deep and mellow, and the rich notes reach down into my belly and turn me inside out. Have I ever heard him laugh before? Really laugh? I’ve heard him make sounds of amusement, give small, careful laughs, or speak with a smile in his voice. But I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him laugh with his entire body.

His shoulders shake, he leans forward with obvious glee, and his mouth twists into the most delighted smile. There are things in life that are infectious—the flu, annoying songs—and apparently, Max’s laugh.

Everything in me lights up at his laugh, and I want so badly to join him. It’s as if he’s let go of everything, dropped all his worries and fears, and is as light as a ray of sunshine. And he’s asking me to join him.

He stands then, crosses the small space between us, takes my hands, and pulls me up. When I stand he tugs me against him.

I hit his chest with a small thud, and then he wraps his arms around me.

His eyes are still brimming with laughter as he looks down at me. “Did I mention today how happy you make me? You always make me laugh.” His hands spread over my back, holding me close. “When we met?—”

“At the art museum?” I ask, wondering if he has the same memories as he did before.

“Yes,” he says, his hand stroking along the curve of my back. “I knew within seconds of seeing you that I was going to marry you. It was love at first sight. Luckily, you didn’t make me wait too long.”

Oh gosh. He’s giving me that look again. The “I love you till death” look.

The hard part is I’ve always wanted him to look at me like this. I just wanted him to do it of his own free will. For three years he saw me cleaning his house. There was never any love at first sight. He loved Fiona, not me.

“What about Fiona?” I ask.

“Fiona who?”

When I first made the wish, Max told me he’d called Fiona and she’d said, “Max who?” He was devastated. She’d been his best friend for nearly a decade. And now he doesn’t remember her either.

“You love her.”

“I love you,” he says.

“In the real world, you love her.”

“Impossible.”

I step back, breaking free of his arms. “No. It’s not. In the real world, I clean your house and you ... you ignore me. There wasn’t any love at first sight.”

“If I saw you, no matter what reality we were in, I loved you. Trust me.” His expression says he’s so confident of this fact there’s no way I’ll change his mind.

I drop my head, looking down at the wood floor sparkling in the late-morning sun. My shoulders fall. “This isn’t right,” I say, my fingers curling into my palms. “You don’t love me. You think you do, but you don’t. You never had a choice.” I look back at him—at his concerned expression and his wrinkled brow. “You and I both know what’s most important is having a choice.”

He reaches out, brushing a strand of hair behind my ear. “Not true,” he says. “There’s no choice in love. The second I saw you I fell hard. The only choice I had was whether or not I was going to acknowledge it, and then, what I was going to do about it.”

I shake my head. “I wish that were true.”

He takes my hands, unfolds my curled fingers, and clasps them with his. “It is true, no wish needed.”

My chest feels hollow and his words echo around it, banging off my ribs and knocking into my heart. They hurt.

Maybe he does love me. Maybe after last night he did. But he never said the words. He made his choice. He told me to come to him, remind him of his letter, remind him of what love was. But that was when he expected to forget me or to forget that he liked me.

What am I supposed to do now, when the opposite of what we believed would happen did?

I wish I could ask his advice.

I clutch his hands and he smiles down at me. I’m struck by the fact that our pose right now is just the same as it was in our wedding photo on the nightstand.

In Max’s mind we’ve been together for seven years. He’s my friend. My confidant. My lover. My husband.

Maybe I can ask him for advice.

“If you did believe me,” I begin, “that this isn’t reality and we aren’t truly married. That we didn’t really speak until a few days ago. What would you do?”

He thinks for a moment, his thoughts flowing, his mind working. Then he finally asks, “Was I happy in this other reality? Were you?”

“Happy?”

He nods. “Were you happy?”

Heat creeps over my cheeks as I think back. Was I happy? I thought I was. I loved my family, my friends, my job. But was I happy? Perhaps there’s a demarcation between acceptance and happiness and I didn’t realize the difference between the two. Like Max said before, I was all in on making others happy, but for some reason I hesitated when it came to doing things for myself.

“I think I have my answer,” he says, studying my expression. “And me? If this other world is real, was I happy?”

“I don’t know,” I admit. “You seemed lonely. You were often ... alone.”

“I didn’t have anyone?” He seems to find this idea unfathomable.

I shake my head. “Not after Fiona turned down your marriage proposal.”

He lifts an eyebrow. “I was turned down?”

“Shocking, I know,” I tell him, unable to hide a smile.

He smiles back. Squeezes my hands. “Then if I were to give you advice, I would say ... stay. Don’t try to fix this. I’m happy. You’re happy. I don’t want to go back somewhere where you’re not.”

My heart gives a painful hard thud in my chest. “Even if this isn’t real?”

He gives me a heartbreaking smile. Around us the sun lights up the cheerful kitchen, and outside a late-spring wind blows, whistling jauntily over the old stone.

“Who’s to say what’s real and what isn’t?” He leans forward and brushes a kiss over my mouth. His lips taste of cherries and apricots.

He wants to stay. But if he remembered his old life he wouldn’t want to. I know this because he felt that way only yesterday.

When Max pulls away, he smiles. “There. How did I do? I always enjoy playing out your philosophical debates. You keep me on my toes.”

Wait. “What?”

He frees my hands. Gives me a crooked smile. “I quite like the ‘not married’ angle. What do you think about me chatting you up in a bar, using terrible pick-up lines, and then coming home for some hook-up, one-night-stand sex? We haven’t done that in years.”

And that’s when I realize, if we’re going to get out of this mess, I’m going to have to figure it out myself.