I Don't Want To Get Married

“I don’t want to get married.”

              

Emily stared at Owen in shocked surprise. She had just returned from wedding dress shopping, excited from having found The Dress and a little tipsy from the champagne she had shared with her bridesmaids after putting down the deposit, and she was sure Owen had just told her that he did not want to marry her, although that was just… not possible.

Owen was her best friend. They had grown up next-door neighbours and had gone to the same school. They had taken guitar lessons together, played in the same soccer team, and helped each other with homework. Every childhood memory she had, featured Owen through the various states of childhood, from sweet faced little boy, lanky adolescent, through to heart stopping adult.

They shared a birthday month.

Owen had first proposed to her when they were eight. They had been each other’s first for everything… First kiss, first touch… Absolutely everything. There had never been anyone else for Emily… Not physically, not mentally, not even for a moment.

They had gone to the same university and had shared a flat, living like a married couple, as they worked their way through their respective degrees, whilst all their friends had been falling in and out of love, and navigating the hazardous social cliques and after parties. They were the lucky ones, who had found each other early, and had skipped all the bull-shit of broken romances and bad dating experiences.

Once they had graduated and started work, they had bought houses next door to each other, living in one and renovating the other. They spent every spare moment they had renovating the house next door so it would be ready to move into after their wedding, intending to rent out the one they were currently in as an investment.

They joked that if a relationship survived renovating a house together, it would survive anything…

“I am sorry,” she said slowly setting her handbag down on the kitchen bench where they had once burnt a ring into the surface when they had first moved in.

Cooking pasta, she remembered, and drinking red wine, and one thing had led to another, until Owen had stripped her underwear from her and lifted her onto the kitchen bench, his jeans sagging off his hips, her heels digging into his buttocks and her fingers tangled in his hair as they had f-ked like teenagers, not noticing that the pasta was overflowing. Owen had burnt his hand rescuing their dinner, and they had laughed as they applied ice, not noticing that the pot was scarring the countertop in memory of their moment of love.

It was just simply not possible that Owen did not want to marry Emily.

She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry and her throat thick. “I think I misheard you.”

“Emily,” he was sad and gentle, and his glossy, dark hair was in disarray as if he had been running his fingers through it whilst waiting for her to return, something he did when stressed. His face was poetically beautiful in his empathy, the balance of features perfect, his skin flawless with just an edge of stubble just beginning to show through, and his blue eyes striking against the darkness of his hair and the olive of his skin. “I don’t want to get married. We haven’t lived life yet. We have never been with other people so how do we know that we are right together? Everything we have done it has been together. I want to… experience things that are a rite of passage for most people, and you and I have sort of just skipped over.”

“He wants to get drunk and hook up with random strangers,” Emily’s sister, Megan, translated harshly when Emily called her after a crying binge in the spare room, where all the wedding bits and pieces were being kept. Confessing to her sister that the wedding was off whilst surrounded by the cork boards on which she was keeping track of décor ideas, wedding magazines, notepads, the folder where she was keeping the receipts, and the photos she had selected of her and Owen to be made into a photo-board at the event, was another level of sadness, Emily thought.

There was the time as children that they had eaten themselves sick on blackberries, the year they had made forts in their back garden, school camps, high-school performing at the school concert one of Owen’s songs, graduating, holidays skiing, painting the house when they had both spent days picking paint from their hair and had joked that the grey-look gave them insight to how they would look growing old… Oh, the heartbreak was unbearable.

Owen had taken a suitcase to the house next door, and the wardrobe was bare of his clothing. She had not looked further yet, but she suspected that he had stripped the whole house of his possessions whilst she had been out, looking for the right dress to marry him in.

“Or he’s met someone at work,” Megan was not helping.

“That is not Owen, though,” Emily protested. “Owen just is not like that.”

“Where is he now?”

“Next door. He has moved in there.”

“Didn’t waste any time, did he?” Megan was angry on Emily’s behalf. “Planned it. Knew you would be gone all morning. Kissed you a sweet goodbye at the door when I picked you up knowing where you were going, without a hint about what he was planning… There is someone on the side.”

Megan was off men after the last one turned out to be a dud, playing at being single and dating Megan, but, after six months, shying away at further commitment because ta-da! There was a wife and three children at home.

Emily did not think Megan’s advice was unbiased. Just because Craig had turned out to be a waste of air, did not mean all men were the same. Owen just was not like that. She knew Owen. He was like an extension of herself, another limb, a second heart.

“I guess he has been a little… distracted recently,” Emily leaned her head back against the wall. She sat in the corner between the closed door and the wall, as if to prevent Owen from entering – but he had not even tried. Tears ran down her cheeks and dripped off to create tide marks on her t-shirt. She had stopped trying to mop them up, the pile of tissues beside her was testament to how fruitless that endeavour was. “Between work and renovating next door, I just thought… he was stressed, you know? And weddings are always a bit stressful…”

“What you need to do is get all glammed up, put on something sexy, some killer heels, and come f-k me eyes, and go out,” Megan decided. “After he has spent the night worrying about where you are and who you are with, he will regret his cold feet. It is Owen, after all. He has been devoted to you since you both were six years old.”

“He didn’t say we were over… Just that he didn’t want to get married.”

“Don’t you go over there, Emmy,” Megan’s tone darkened. “Make him - ”

The doorbell rang and Emily almost dropped the phone in her haste to stand, pushing herself up the wall and brushing down her clothes frantically.

“The door,” Emily gasped into the phone, breathlessly. “I will speak to you later.”

She tidied her face in the hallway mirror, not wanting Owen to see her in a mess. Or did she? She wondered even as she wiped up mascara on a tissue. No. She would behave with dignity and not dissolve into a black-teared monster. She smoothed the hair back from her face, gave her ash-blonde pony tail a yank to tighten it, and opened the door, mentally preparing for a continuation of the conversation with Owen. They would talk about it, get to the bottom of the problem, have sex and it would all be...

“Oh. Daniel.” The disappointment was crushing.

Owen’s friend from university, Daniel, flushed, hectic points of colour on his cheeks. “Hi Em. I guess I can’t say it is nice to see you. I am sorry. I am just an errand boy. Owen thinks it is better if it is a clean break for a few days, so… I am here to get some stuff he has forgotten.”

“Oh,” it was like a knife to the heart. “He really doesn’t want to see me, at all, then?”

“It is not that,” Daniel was apologetic as he edged past her and down the hallway. “I don’t know, really,” he added, reading the expression on her face. “It is no use asking me, Em. We are blokes, we don’t talk about stuff like that. My friend asked me to pop next door to pick up some stuff after a break-up, I don’t ask the details, I just do it.”

“It is a break-up?” Emily’s voice trembled. “Not just that we are not getting married?”

Daniel reached under the bed and came out with Owen’s spare guitar and a shoe box. “Em…” He grimaced. He really did not want to get involved.

She sighed. “You don’t know the details.”

“No, I am sorry.”

“Has he said anything at all to you about this? You know… in passing, before?” She wondered, grasping for anything, anything at all to explain where this heartbreak had come from.

He stepped around her and paused in the doorway, his back to her. “Maybe a bit here and there,” he admitted, his pity for her written all over his face and posture. “It wasn’t entirely… unexpected.”

“It was to me.” She said tightly, her chest tight and her stomach in her throat. Tears threatened to overflow again, and she fought them back pridefully. The tremble of her bottom lip betrayed her. “What did he say?” It was so painful to plead for the information.

“Em,” he did not want to say anything. “Just, you know… You have both been sort of perfect. No drunken binges and one-night stands, no major relationship dramas, no adventures. Just what is sensible, all the way from childhood through to now. He has sort of said he is going to be thirty in two years, and he is the only almost thirty-year-old he knows who has no stories to tell. That he thinks he is dull.”

“I don’t find him dull,” Emily replied, woebegone.

“Em, I have already said more than I should,” Daniel winced and flushed, embarrassed to be caught in the middle of a breakup. “Forget it.”

As she closed the door behind him, Emily wondered how she was meant to forget it when in one afternoon her entire life had been uprooted.

She stood by the kitchen sink, the window looking out upon the neat and tidy galvanized iron fence with its prettily blooming honeysuckle that divided the two properties and thought it a fitting view. Divided was how she felt. Divided in half.

She heard music start - the volume turned right up. Rock music, the bass of it shaking the glass in the windows, and distance distorting it into a crash of sound and drumbeats. Not a band she recognised, but then, she had never understood rock music. Oh, some of it was alright, but most of it was just… noisy. Owen had always liked it though. Whenever she borrowed his car, there was something in the cd player, and she knew he listened to it in his ear-pods when they ran together, same as she listened to opera.

It was one of those quirky things about them as a couple, that their musical tastes were so opposite, something that had always been a source of amusement. A prime example, they had said, of how opposites attract. But it had made choosing a wedding song a nightmare… She gripped the edge of the bench as she realised that after all that too and fro-ing, the song they had picked to share their first dance as Mr and Mrs would not be played.

They would not have their moment, on the vintage dancefloor, strings of fairy lights overhead, in the pretty garden they had booked for the venue, in their wedding finery, gazing into each other’s eyes as Mrs and Mrs… “Oh, god.” She spent fifteen minutes crying into the dishwater and washing the same coffee mug over and over before she pulled herself together.

She made herself a pot of tea and took it into the lounge room, but every show seemed to be a romantic comedy, and that was just salt in the wound. In the end she just sat there, in the silence, with the tea growing cold before her, untouched, and stared at the pictures of Owen and herself laughing down at her, waiting to wake up from the nightmare where Owen did not want to marry Emily and had moved out of the house they shared.

She considered calling her mother, but quickly discarded the idea. She loved her mum, beyond all things, but her mother would interfere. She would call Owen’s mother, who was her best friend, who would then call Owen, and both mothers would probably end up coming around together, to go speak to their respective child and things would just get unpleasant with four people involved in something that really just concerned two… No. Calling her mother was a bad idea.

She realized that she had left her phone in the spare room when she had answered the door to Daniel. What if Owen had messaged…? She retrieved the phone, her heart hammering in her chest. No messages. Not a single one. No quick sweet: “Thinking of you” as normally kept her phone busy. No “Do we need milk?” or “Did you pay this bill?” Or “Shall I grab takeaway on my way home?” Nothing. The silence was deafening.

She sent a quick message to Megan. “Don’t tell mum. Don’t tell anyone.”

A reply came swiftly. “As if I would.”

Emily held the phone in the palm of her hand. It would be pathetic to message Owen, she told herself. The screenshot was a photo of them, laughing together. She touched his face. He had been happy there, his dimple on full display, his laugh wide and his eyes dancing. What had happened in the interim, she wondered, to make him want to end what they had together? Surely Megan couldn’t be right… Could she?

She felt at an utter and complete loss for what to do, who to reach out to for help and support. Every other time she could remember in her life where she had been this upset, he had been there for her. When she had lost her first pet. When the girls at school had been mean. When she’d had her first car accident. When she had not gotten the honours mentor she wanted. Her first rejection letter from a literary agent. When she had not gotten the job position that she had wanted…

The biggest thing in her life had happened to her, now, and she did not have his shoulder to cry upon. His absence when she needed him, and the fact that she needed him because of his absence, rendered her impotent, unable to take action, almost numb from the shock.

She typed: “I miss you.” And then deleted it.

As the sun set, the music turned off next door. She went to the loungeroom window, pressing up against the curtains that they had picked together and that she had hemmed to length during a movie marathon whilst he had sanded back the skirting boards in the room, looking out across the front lawn they had sown together, to the other house. After a moment, the lights inside turned off, and the porch light on. He stepped out the front door, pausing to lock it.

He did not look like Owen. His hair was styled differently, and the clothing he wore… All of it she recognised having bought, or washed at some time or another, but the way it was assembled on him was somehow… different. A contrived casual dishevelment with the cuffs folded back on his jeans, collar arranged just so, buttons open to show a snug white t-shirt below. He put the keys into his pocket and strolled casually to the car, his long legs covering the distance in no time.

Where was he going? She wondered as he pulled away. But more so… How could he look so relaxed and cheerful when he had just torn her world apart? She waited at the window, frozen into place, like a caricature of a nosy neighbour. Perhaps he was just going to the shops. An hour passed, and nothing. She peeled herself away from the curtains.

She took the spare keys out of the drawer in the hall table where keys lived in between uses and let herself out of the house. She crept across the slightly overgrown grass like a criminal. Technically, it was her house, she told herself defensively trying to shake off the feeling of doing wrong. Somehow in all this, they had reversed ownership, and he had moved out into the house she legally owned, whilst she remained in the one that he did. Perhaps he had thought, as he was the one leaving, it made more sense, was more considerate, rather than move her out, but it hardly mattered, she justified. It meant that she had the greater right to let herself into the house, then he had to be there.

Even if she was doing so in order to go through his things.

She was tense as she unlocked the door and turned on the lights. But it was just Owen. If he came back, she would say she wanted to speak with him. She had plenty of reason to want to do so, after all.

How had one day made a stranger of him?

The house smelled of the renovations, glue, fresh paint, and wood-dust. It echoed hollowly as she closed the door behind her. There was no furniture in the house to absorb the sound, and the lounge and hallway floors were still bare cement. The floating floorboards were stacked in the lounge waiting installation. It had been their plan for the next day to begin that.

Did he plan on doing it by himself, now?

The thought of Owen finishing the renovations on the house that they had been meant to live in as a married couple and eventually a family, brought the tears to her eyes again and she rubbed them away with the backs of her hands impatiently. It was not the time for another melt down, she scolded herself, she didn’t know when he would be back, and she didn’t want to be caught skulking through his things. There was a desperation and lack of dignity to being found doing so. To doing so, in the first place, she admitted as she crept down the hall.

In the bedroom, he had set up a very makeshift bed from a camping mattress he must have borrowed from Daniel, and a sleeping bag. There was something very adolescent about the arrangement. At least if Megan were right, Emily thought wryly, and he was planning on hooking up, he would not be bringing his dates back to the house to f-k. No woman in her right mind would think it was a sexy set up, as bare as it was of even the most basic furniture.

His beaten-up suitcases and shoes, and a few boxes of items from the house, were stacked against the wall with little care, as if he had impatiently shoved what he considered unimportant there and moved on to other things. As was typical of his priorities, his guitar and amp were perfectly set up with attention to detail and had a notepad and paper next to them indicating that even in the short time since he had moved out, he had found time to play. She flicked through the notepad. Music and lyrics. There was nothing unusual to that.

Ever since they were teenagers, Owen had composed his own songs. Some of them they had performed together during high school, and during their university years when they had played at weddings, restaurants, or busked for extra cash. Owen had always loved performing, but it had never been something she had liked to do. She had always felt like a mouse pretending to be a peacock when she performed.

She loved to sing, had studied opera for many years, but her voice belonged to someone else, she had always thought. Someone bolder, someone flashier, someone more vivid than she was. She had given away her studies when there had been nowhere left to go other than pursue it as a career, because singing for a living wasn’t something she could imagine herself doing.

She had performed because Owen had wanted to, but he had known that she was not comfortable on the stage, and slowly, over the years, in concession to her reluctance, he had stopped asking and she had been relieved.

She almost set the notepad aside, but then hesitated. Sometimes Owen, in haste, would write things down on the back cover of last page of his notebooks, that were not music related. She turned the notepad to the back. On the last page, was something scrawled in messy, almost illegible handwriting. She flipped the notepad upside down, making the last page the first. “Two Way Street. Cordelia, 7pm, High Street.”

Cordelia. Cordelia was the name of the wedding singer they had hired. A pretty, young woman with a slightly husky voice that Owen had thought was great. She’d had a good repertoire, and an easy-going charm that made her very approachable. Emily had thought she seemed a little spacey and vague and had hoped she would not prove unreliable on the day, but Owen had been keen to give her a shot.

They had never met her on High Street at 7pm, it had always been daytime. Initially they had met at a coffee shop, and later had gone to see her perform at a winery, doubling an audition with a date night. Emily remembered how lovely it had been, sitting in the dapple shade of a grape vine, eating cheese and olives and drinking wine with Owen, listening to Cordelia sing, and imagining their wedding together.

Her heart tightened in pain.

She checked her phone. It was nearly eight. No, she told herself firmly. This was not a corny romantic comedy where the groom fell in love with the wedding singer, and realised he was not in love with his childhood sweetheart. That sort of thing did not happen in real life.

There was some other explanation.