It happened one casual Saturday afternoon, when I was least expecting it, there was literally nothing unusual about the day at all. We’d just been hanging out as per usual, nothing special, nothing to make me suspicious. Joe wasn’t even acting strange, so there wasn’t anything to give him away. Maybe if he’d been sweating a little, or hopping from foot-to-foot anxiously, I might have been able to guess what was coming, but there was nothing. We were simply lying in the sun at the end of Joe’s garden, just out of sight of our parents so we could kiss occasionally, when all of a sudden he bounded up onto his knees like an excitable puppy.
“What are you doing?” I teased, blocking my eyes a little from the sun. “Will you just lie down for a little while longer? I’m enjoying the sun, it’s nowhere near cold enough to go inside just yet…”
“I don’t want to go in,” he interjected, brushing his hair out of his eyes. Ever since we’d started dating, he began growing his hair out, and although it looked a little too messy, I loved it. It felt like mine. I loved running my fingers through it, pushing it off his face, just generally touching it at every available opportunity. “I need to talk to you. Sit up, please.”
“Urgh, don’t make me,” I groaned playfully. “You’re killing me here.”
“You need to sit up,” he insisted, tugging at my arm. “I promise you it’ll be worth it.”
I assumed it was going to be some silly Joe bullshit, something I wasn’t totally in the mood for, but I did as he asked anyway, just in case it was important. As it turned out, it was a good job really. It was the most important conversation I would ever have in my life!
As I looked at him, all ready to complain, he totally blindsided me by sending me that heart-stopping grin of his, zapping all of the bad mood from my veins. “Okay.” I chuckled, unable to resist smiling back. “You’ve made me move, let’s have it.”
“Charlotte Jones,” he started, which had every single one of my limbs freezing in shock. I’d had Lottie from Joe, Lotts too, mostly, but never Charlotte. No one called me by my full name ever, especially not Joe, so whatever he was going to say would be huge.
That revelation created a massive ball of fear, which lodged firmly in my throat. I tried my best to calm it down, but it wasn’t going anywhere. Nor was my racing heart.
“I have known you for far too long now,” he continued, seemingly oblivious to my shock. “You’ve always been there, no matter how much I try to escape.” He laughed loudly at that, proving he was joking, and I did my best to join in—although to be fair the noise that came out of my mouth was more strangled than anything else. “And I’ve really come to realise how much you mean to me.”
Oh God, I thought in a state of sheer panic. What the hell is going on here? My entire body trembled with worry as I tried to work out where he was going with this. I didn’t want to assume he was going to break up with me, but what else could this be? That was the only logical next step…
“I love you.” He leaned in and kissed me lightly on the lips. “I love you more than I ever thought I would be able to love anyone.” His fingers lightly brushed my cheeks, but I was doing my best to ignore them. All I wanted to focus on was his lips, and the words spilling past them. “You’re sweet, kind, and very funny. Adorable, in fact. I honestly don’t know where my life would be without you.”
In that moment I wanted to tell him I couldn’t even imagine an existence without him in it, but I couldn’t because the emotion had built up so powerfully inside of me. I feared the second I opened my mouth would be the moment I totally freaking lost it.
“Lotts, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t want to lose you, ever. I want you to be mine. I want to be with you, to love you, to make you happy forevermore. I can’t even begin to imagine a future with anyone else in it…which is why I went out the other day and got you this…”
He tugged a small box out of his pocket, one that had my eyes bugging out of my head. The ring inside might have been small, inexpensive, and not totally to my taste, but we were young, and Joe had gone out into the world, with money that he’d earned from his part-time job, with our future in his mind. He’d brought a ring just for me, with a promise to commit to me.
I actually couldn’t believe it.
I slapped my hand across my mouth, the entirety of our relationship flooding my mind all at once. There might have been a few ups and downs—the downs mostly because of the secretive nature of us—but we were happy…and about to get a whole lot happier by the looks of things. All I’d ever wanted was to be Mrs. Davies, and now it looked like that fantasy was about to get one step closer towards becoming my reality.
“So, what do you say, Lotts? Fancy being my wife?”
“That is not how you’re going to ask me,” I scolded, matching his jokey tone, trying my best to override everything else inside of me. “I appreciate the romance of everything else you’ve said, but ‘fancy being my wife’ isn’t going to cut it, I’m afraid.”
“Okay, okay, that’s fair.” He held up his hands in a defeated gesture, making me giggle a little manically. This whole situation had me hysterical, and I wasn’t sure how to handle it. Did I laugh? Should I cry? “So, Lotts, I love you…I’ve loved you forever, I want you to make me the happiest man alive. I want to work every day to make your life wonderful, so would you agree to be my lawfully wedded wife?”
“Yes,” I burst out through the hysteria. “Of course I will.” I wasn’t doing a very good job of holding in the feelings, they were flying down my face! “I would love to be your wife.”
As he scooped me up in his arms, I felt like nothing could go wrong with the world. I knew we could make one another happy. After all, we’d been in each other’s lives since we were babies, if we were going to get bored of each other, it would have happened already. This was perfect, Joe was definitely the man I was destined to spend the rest of my life with, and now he’d realised it too! It might have taken him a little longer than it did me, but that hardly mattered now.
“I told you it was worth sitting up for, didn’t I?” he teased, as he slid the ring onto my finger. My heart pounded heavily in my chest as it hit me just how serious this was. We couldn’t keep us a secret anymore if I was walking around with a ring on my engagement hand…people were bound to start asking questions eventually. Much as I wanted the world to know that Joe was mine and I was his, I couldn’t help but panic that it’d change the dynamic between us. I wasn’t quite ready for that to happen, not when things were so perfect. The secretive thing was working for us. What if being open and honest didn’t?
“Well, I guess we better tell our parents soon then,” Joe announced, his thoughts clearly in the same area as mine. “Don’t you think?”
“I do,” I replied slowly. “But I’m a bit nervous.”
“They won’t hate it, you know,” Joe did his best to reassure me. “I think they might actually want us to end up together.”
“That might well be the issue,” I told him dryly, brushing that stray strand of hair from his eyes again. “What if they start getting too involved?”
“We’ve been together for months now, we’ve been doing this all alone. I honestly don’t think there’s anything they can say to affect us by this point, is there?”
I pondered upon that for a second, before realising something that might change. “They may be a little more cautious about us hanging out alone together now…particularly in one of our bedrooms.” That wouldn’t have been necessary, after all we’d only done it once and it didn’t seem like either of us were in a massive rush to go there again, but I didn’t want our time together to be restricted in any way.
“It’ll be fine, stop panicking, will you?” As Joe’s lips crashed against mine, I did my best to follow his request. After all, this was supposed to be the happiest day of my life, not something to freak out about. “We’re happy, we’re in love, we’re going to get married. That’s all we need to be concerned about.”
“Yeah, okay.” I nodded, doing my best to agree with him. “You’re right, I know you are…this is just so huge! I can’t believe you planned this!” The fact that Joe had done this for me made my brain totally gloss over any less-than-perfect times we’d had, any moments I’d doubted what we had. How could any of it be bad when he’d gone out of his way to make me his fiancée? He had to be in it as deeply as me, his feelings had to be as strong as mine. Finally, after all that time, I could start to relax and feel more confident in us.
In that moment, Joe made me feel safe, he made me feel special. I liked being a part of our club—the Lotts-and-Joe club, which had become much better now that we were older—and I relished the fact it was going to last forever.
Of course, circumstances changed, we didn’t end up getting our happy ever after and I couldn’t help but wonder how much our age had to do with that. Maybe we put too much pressure on ourselves by making such a huge commitment at such a young age. Maybe it made a lovely relationship something to be so concerned about, maybe if we hadn’t, we could have dealt with what came next much better…