A couple is arguing about marriage. It's come out that one of them has wanted to get married, but they've been hiding that desire for a long time. How will the other react, if at all? Thirty minutes.
Garry was slouched in the rough wooden chair, arms hanging loosely at his side. His eyes were closed, and he drew a deep sigh, his whole body rising and falling with the doleful breath. He poured a small glass of Southern Comfort and passed it across the table to a woman who leaned forward from her equally weary posture to take up the drink. He filled his own tumbler to near the top, and raised it in small ceremony. No cheers were exchanged in that old little kitchen. No toasts were made under that single light bulb, set in a tacky orange shade that made the whole kitchen look as though it was built in the early 80s, and had seen no renovation in its time. What it had seen was mildew and termites, and many a night much like this one, with few words, and plenty of cheap liquor.
He pulled out his pack of cigarettes and deftly grabbed one with his lips. He offered a pack across the table, paused a moment, and frowned. Looking inside, he sighed again, crumpled the empty container and tossed it into the trashcan nestled in the corner. It landed with a satisfying metallic clunk.
“Sorry,” he mumbled past the cigarette. “I have another pack in my room.”
“You know I don’t smoke Luckies anyway,” she said, pulling a Slim from behind her ear.
He flicked his lighter and reached it across the table, the flame cast flickering orange across her face, and for a moment, he could see her as the woman he’d met six years prior. She was still beautiful, her delicate features slim and soft and distinguished. There was something gone, though. There were wrinkles where there should not have been, tiny creases at the corners of her mouth, and bags under her light green eyes, and there was something gone—that glow of youth, that buzzing energy that screams of life and health.
“Garry,” she said, her voice cracking, dry and smoky. She coughed and cleared her throat and tried again.
“Garry.”
That was the way she sounded back in college. That was the voice of the woman he loved. He drank deeply, hating the taste, waiting for the muscles in his neck to release. He hung his head backward and stared at the bubbles in the paint of the ceiling, dragging at his cigarette and billowing smoke to the top of the room.
“Yes love,” he answered, still staring up toward heaven.
She was quiet for another moment, the whole house quiet, with only the sound of the cheap plastic clock ticking away on the wall, and cars speeding in the distance.
“Lets get married.”
He didn’t look up. He didn’t move for five thundering ticks of the clock. He drew again heavily at his cigarette. A small shrug shot across his shoulders, as if to say “Why not?” She didn’t see this.
“Loren,” he said, almost a groan and he pulled his head up to look at her. He leaned forward and rested his arms on the table, which shifted and leaned with a loose creak as it accepted his weight. He took another breath, composing himself like a man deciding to leap from a precipice.
“Lets do it.”
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