Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
I can do this.
I've had a whole week to think about all the things I love about her and all the things I miss so much now she's not around, I've had a whole week to mope around like a soppy, pathetic, romantic bastard, I can do this.
It should not be this difficult.
Dear Charlotte – I...
Dear Charlotte. You're not perfect, but you're perfect for me, and –
Dear Charlotte, this week has been hell, and I don't...
Okay, it's impossible, and I absolutely cannot do this.
I scribble out the latest stupid line I just tried to write out, sighing and burying my head in my hands. Eight pages in, and I can't come up with a single entire sentence that doesn't sound completely cringeworthy or even comes close to telling her how I feel about her.
You'd think, after four years, I'd know what to say to her.
This is useless.
I'm never going to figure it out.
She deserves better than this paltry attempt. I should be singing 'Can't Take My Eyes Off You' with a marching band as I dance down the bleachers in front of a crowd of all her friends. I should be kissing her in the rain after writing her a whole bunch of letters. I should be climbing up a fire escape with a bouquet of roses after pulling up in a white limousine. I should march through a field in the pouring rain to tell her I love her, 'most ardently'.
God, all the romantic movies we've watched together, and I can't even come up with a single line to express how much I love her, never mind some outlandish, unforgettable display of showboating.
Who am I kidding?
The good news, I guess, is that Charlotte knows I'm not that guy. I'm awkward and shy and introverted and I look like the nerd I am. Something tells me a dorky, gangly guy with wire-rimmed glasses and puffy hair singing tunelessly along to 'Can't Take My Eyes Off You' won't have quite the same effect as when Heath Ledger did it, and that if I walked through the rain to meet her in a gazebo, I'd look less Mr Darcy and more drowned rat.
"Come on, Ethan, get it together," I mutter, dragging my head up out of my hands and shaking myself. I stand up, pacing around the room, and it's official: the cabin fever is bad enough that I'm officially crazy, and now I'm talking to myself. "Alright, alright, focus. You got this. Charlotte's not expecting Ryan Gosling. She'd expect it to be you. It doesn't need to be a showstopper performance, just you. Honest. Real. Authentic, yeah, she loves 'authentic' stuff... What else does she love?"
She loves classic books. I could do that thing where I cut a hole out of the pages in a book I know she likes, to hide a ring in there... But she'd probably be more mad at me for wasting a good book, and I don't even have a ring yet...
An hour-long Google search later, I find that there's not a single jewellery shop open in the entire country, never mind the local area.
This whole lockdown business has escalated quickly, in just the last week.
I can order a ring. I could find her jewellery box and try to measure one of her rings and use that as a guide, sure, but none of the websites I look at can guarantee when they'll deliver, and if Charlotte sees the delivery box she'll only ask what it is and I am the worst at keeping secrets, so it'd ruin the whole thing...
Okay, so no ring for the grand proposal.
Which is maybe a good thing, because I bet she'd have a great time picking out the perfect ring for herself, and she'll probably do a better job of it than I would. I bookmark a couple of rings I think she'd like, trying not to look for too long at the price on any of them in case it gives me a literal heart attack, and step away from my computer to go back to pacing around the room.
I give up on that soon enough, and go to make myself a coffee. Maybe that'll help.
My phone rings while I'm in the kitchen, and I prop it against the toaster once I swipe to answer.
Charlotte's face fills the screen, and my heart lurches.
Such a sap, Maddox.
"Hey, sweetie!" she says, beaming. "Whatcha doing?"
"Just makin' coffee." I grin back at her, lifting the French press to the camera before I pour it. "How about you?"
"Sitting in the garden."
She flips the camera, showing off a lush green garden, the grass recently mown but already sprinkled with daisies. The red-brown fence at the back of it and the paving stones on the deck, where she's sitting on a sun-lounger. I can see her pale legs stretched out in front of her on it, as she swings the camera around the garden.
She flips it back on herself and I notice she's wearing the blue earrings I bought her on holiday in Tenerife last year.
"I'm starting to think we should've just said 'screw it' and quit our jobs and moved out to the country and bought some little cottage in the middle of nowhere just to have a garden. I miss having a garden," she sighs.
I laugh. "It's your job we stayed near the city for, remember?"
"Alright, Mr Self-Employed. We can't all make a living selling ad space on our vlogs about video games."
"I talk about Reddit threads, too."
"Yeah, and Pokémon, I know. You think I'm not fully aware of that giant stuffed Charmander in our living room?"
"It's a Charizard," I correct her, like she doesn't already know, and Charlotte giggles. "What're you reading?"
"I found my old copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover from when I was like, seventeen." She waves a slightly faded-looking book with a nondescript green cover at the camera. "It's not as good as I remember, but it's okay. What are you doing?"
"You mean in the last hour since I text you?"
Charlotte laughs again, lips curving up in a bright smile and God, I wish she was here. I can't believe it's been a week since I kissed her. She waits for me to answer, apparently oblivious to the fact I'm distracted thinking about the next time I'll get to kiss her.
"Uh..."
Shit. Shit, I can't tell her what I've actually been doing this morning, since we last messaged. Oh, nothing much, Charlotte, just planning the perfect thing to say to you to ask you to marry me, because I realised I want to spend the rest of my life with you.
Never mind a ring showing up in the post: I think saying that would ruin the surprise, just a little.
"Not much. Had a vlog to film for tomorrow. Some stuff to plan for my Twitch stream later."
"Eight o'clock," she declares. "I've got my reminders all set to tune in."
I laugh, rolling my eyes at her and picking up the phone in one hand, my coffee in the other, taking her back into the living room. "Why? You hate my livestreams."
"I don't hate them."
"Alright," I concede, "but they're not your kind of thing."
I was still working when I met Charlotte. I was a paralegal.
I hated it.
I hated the hours, I hated the office, I hated the work.
She thought my 'little hobby' of a YouTube channel I'd been running for a few years at that point was really cute. A few dates in, she told me she'd watched some of my videos but didn't really get it. "Do people really like watching someone else play a video game?" she'd asked, genuinely baffled by the concept.
We'd been dating a year when the channel started to take off. It was exhausting to keep it up alongside my job. She didn't get it, sure, but she was supportive: Charlotte was the one who encouraged me to ask to cut my hours to part-time and invest more in my channel.
I quit my job completely about a year after that.
She never understood it, and she didn't really enjoy watching it, but she always said she liked how enthusiastic I was about it, and she was never scornful of it.
"I don't have to like video games to want to just watch you for a couple of hours. It's like hanging out with you."
"You're cute."
Her nose wrinkles and her shoulders shrug a little. "I know."
She doesn't know the half of it.
She starts updating me on the situation with her twin Laura's best friend, a girl called Serena who lives in our building. Apparently she's been having screaming rows with her boyfriend all week (which now she mentions it, might explain some of the noise I've been hearing from upstairs this week), and now it's finally calmed down and they're talking about how they feel about kids and marriage and stuff. Charlotte sighs, telling me she hopes it works out for them, but she imagines what a big, scary conversation that must be.
My stomach twists the whole time she talks, and I have to work hard not to give too much away. I'm sweating through my t-shirt.
She notices something is up, because her mouth twists and her forehead puckers in a frown. "I'm boring you, aren't I? Sorry. I know you don't really care about some stranger's drama.
"No!" I say, maybe a little too quickly. "No, that's not it, I just – just feel bad for them, is all. I promise, I want to hear all about it."
Charlotte and I never really talked about getting married, or kids, or our futures, or anything like that, but... I guess we never really needed to. We were serious and committed to each other so early on. I guess she's always expected me to propose at some point, but it wasn't something we discussed so much.
We've been to a couple of friends' weddings, over the last year or so. Once one got engaged, it seemed everyone was. We've had five weddings in the last year. Charlotte would say something at each one, like how she didn't want lilies at her wedding, or she thought it was tacky to have such a big group of bridesmaids and groomsmen, or that she could never get married abroad because she'd never expect her friends to pay that kind of money just to see her tie the knot.
It wasn't like I didn't have my share of opinions. When her friend from uni had a kid and we went to visit, we both laughed over the name (they'd called their kid Leia, after the Star Wars character) and I'd joked to her that if we had a son, I'd definitely name him something appropriately dorky.
Everything had always been such a throwaway comment though, or part of a joke.
Hearing her tell me this gossip I don't actually care about, though, I wonder if we should've talked about it more, before I go ahead and propose to her.
As if she can read my mind, Charlotte turns suddenly serious and says to me, "Ethan?"
"Yeah?"
"Can I ask you something?"
My stomach lurches and my heart is somewhere in my throat, but I nod and say in the most breezy voice I can manage, "Sure, anything."
And she asks me, "How do you feel about pineapple on pizza?"