A Month To Live - Extras

The Fiancé

Being engaged wasn’t hard to get used to but it still felt strange. Even saying the words out loud didn’t make it seem real. In my head, I was still young – okay, so I was still young, only twenty-one after all – but marriage seemed like something only adults did and I didn’t feel very adulty. Sometimes I still felt like a teenager. It’d taken me almost a whole year when I turned twenty to accept the fact that I wasn’t a teenager anymore and by that time I had to prepare for being twenty-one!

It was fun telling people the news though. Mom and dad had came over that same night and it took her a long while to calm down. She loved Bradley and wouldn’t stop hugging him in practically a chokehold until dad finally dragged her off. He was pleased too but he, like myself, tended to be more reserved with his emotions.

Bradley’s dad I thought already knew before the proposal but apparently, he was none the wiser.

‘But, how did you get the ring?’ I asked Bradley when we had a quiet moment amidst the chaos. ‘Surely he worked out what you were going to do when you asked him for it.’

Bradley smiled at that and took my left hand in his, looking down at the object of our conversation.

‘He gave me this a long time ago,’ Bradley replied, twisting it slightly so the diamond lay more in the centre of my finger.

‘Really?’ I asked, surprised at his revelation. ‘When?’

‘Day after high school graduation.’

‘What!’ I exclaimed. My eyes widened as I looked up at him. Hell, we’d been going out only a few months by then!

‘Yeah, he came up to me in the morning and gave it to me. Said he just knew,’ Bradley shrugged not seeming half as shocked as I was by his dad’s erratic behaviour.

‘What did you say?’ I demanded. I wanted to know every single detail and I couldn’t help but wonder how he kept this from me for so long. I tried to recall whether Bradley had acted strange that day but I couldn’t remember at all. It was too long ago.

‘I didn’t say anything. I was, uh, a little taken aback. And I think you were in the shower or something so I just hid it with my football stuff. I knew you’d never look there,’ Bradley grinned, sliding his fingers through my own.

‘How did you know?’ I asked quietly after a few seconds of just looking back at him fondly. ‘That it was time.’

‘I always knew, Raegan,’ he said, lowering his voice too. He touched my chin. ‘I couldn’t wait any longer. I wanted to hold out until after college but I’ve still got a year, you a couple. And, you know how it is, we’ll probably be engaged for a while before we can plan everything out... I didn’t want to waste anymore time.’

‘I’m going to marry you so hard,’ I declared, yanking his head down for a kiss.

Even thinking about him now and the words he’d said to me on the beach made my heart ache in my chest. He was the most stable thing in my life. The one thing I was one hundred percent certain wasn’t a mistake. I was unsure about a lot of things – like what classes I was taking and whether I was making the right decisions when it came to work-life balance. But being with him, I’d never doubted.

‘Thinking about your boyfriend, are you? Or should I say fiancé!’ Elaine asked, appearing with a plastic box in her arms and dumping it on top of another.

George’s mom worked at the little theatre in Richmond. She did so many different things that it was hard to pin down exactly what her job title was. I did have the chance to see her act around Christmas, though, and she gave one hell of a performance. It made a lot of sense that George was her child because he was one of the most dramatic people I’d ever met. Elaine often complained that her other boys didn’t appreciate her talent as much as he did. It did not surprise me in the least when I found out what a mommy's boy George was.