When We're Thirty Casey Dembowski (the chimp paradox .TXT) 📖

more physical therapy?” Brian asked, falling back against his pillow.

“You know I can’t afford—” She stopped, an idea suddenly taking shape. She didn’t need to marry Will for health insurance if she could marry Brian. How hard is it to spend a few hours with someone you don’t like? Hannah had been doing that for months. Brian had been sliding further down the boyfriend-quality chart for a while, but he had his moments. Maybe marriage was exactly what he needed to finally get his shit together.

“What if we got married?” she asked tentatively.

“Did you just propose to me?” he asked, his voice deep with what Hannah could only call fear.

She sat up, keeping the blanket wrapped around herself even though his apartment was always distastefully warm. “Hear me out, Bri.” He didn’t say anything, which, knowing Brian, wasn’t a good thing. She plowed on. “I know we’re not ready to be publicly married, but we can go down to city hall and make it official. No one has to know. Then I can go on your health insurance.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s illegal.”

Hannah shook her head. “It would only be illegal if we pretended to be married.”

“Okay.”

Hannah’s heart raced at the word. Had he just agreed to marry her after everything?

“What do I get out of this arrangement?”

Crap. She reached for his hand, but he held them both securely in his lap, out of reach. She’d miscalculated. He wasn’t fearful; he was insulted. Cold settled into the inches between them, which felt like a chasm. Brian receded to his side of the bed, closing himself off. Frustration, rather than regret, fizzled in her chest.

“So, Hannah? What’s in it for me?” His voice dripped with sarcasm, each word dipped in cruelty. “I mean, besides the opportunity to check the divorced box for the rest of my life.”

“Wow.” She refused to cry. Let him be mean and get it all out. There was no going back from her request. She hadn’t thought that when she’d made it, but the answer was always going to be “yes” or “no.” Either one changed everything irrevocably.

“This idea of yours is no way to start a marriage even if we were close to ready, which we’re not.”

“You’re not ready,” she said, finding herself exhilarated. They didn’t fight like this. Brian usually disappeared or walked away. But this was real. She felt it down to her toes.

“No, I’m not. And more to the point, I don’t want to marry you right now.” Brian was on a roll and, it seemed, had no intention of leaving well enough alone. Hannah tuned him out until his voice reached his tirade’s crescendo. “—between your job and Kate and—” Hannah knew the next word out of his mouth would be the deal-breaker. She’d known it since the first time he came to her apartment. “—Binx.”

“If you didn’t treat him with complete disdain, he might like you better.” Hannah stood and flipped on the light. She reached for her clothes folded on the dresser, changing back into her jeans.

“Binx doesn’t like anyone that’s not you.”

Brian stayed in bed, which only made Hannah angrier. She clasped her bra behind her back underneath her cami, knowing she had the hooks uneven but unwilling to be even partially naked in front of him. She couldn’t look at his calm, complacent face anymore, but it was nearly one in the morning. It was going to be hard enough getting a taxi during peak hours, and she definitely wasn’t taking the subway. She put her T-shirt on over her cami and fumbled with her phone as she slid into her sneakers. The Uber wait time was ten minutes. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do until then, but anything was better than staying there.

“Hannah, it’s the middle of the night. We can talk about all this in the morning.”

Brian, her beautiful idiot, thought he could say awful things—insult her best friend and her job and her cat—and they’d just talk about it in the morning. “You just told me you don’t want to marry me and basically hate everything that is important in my life. There is nothing left to talk about. Really, Brian, we should’ve had this conversation a year ago. It would’ve saved us so much time.”

“I said I didn’t want to marry you right now.” He finally got to his feet and crossed the small space, wrapping his hand around her wrist.

“Well,” she said, pulling her arm back. “There’s someone who does.”

Chapter 5 Will

Holy shit. She’d actually called. It would’ve been better had it not been almost two in the morning. Will had already been asleep for hours at that point. But Hannah had called, and there was no way he wasn’t heading directly to her apartment. If he didn’t know Hannah so well—or at least, he hoped he still knew her—he would be expecting a booty call. But Hannah Abbott was not a booty-call type of girl. Plus, he was pretty sure proposing with a huge diamond ring disqualified him from such debauchery. Getting to Queens is a money suck, but at least there won’t be traf—he stopped his thought midsentence. He was going to jinx it. Now there would be overnight, all-lanes-closed construction on whatever bridge the cabbie took.

“Will, hold on!” Hannah’s voice came through loudly over the phone.

He stopped halfway into a pair of jeans, the phone snugly fitting between his ear and shoulder. “Yes?”

“Come in the morning. Say, eight?” She sounded exhausted, and it was from more than being up at one in the morning. He wondered what had happened since he saw her last night. Had he caused the fatigue in her voice?

“I’ll bring breakfast. The usual?” Will waited to see if she’d laugh or replace her standard Sunday-morning order from the three years they had shared that meal.

Her reply was light and appreciative. “The usual, but no sugar.”

“Eight it is, then.” He fell back onto his bed, kicking his way out of his jeans, grateful