Better Unwed Than Dead

  BETTER UNWED THAN DEAD

  by Laura Rosemont

  Copyright © 2013 Laura Rosemont

  Smashwords Edition

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  “I hope today is just a hint of what’s to come this summer.” Julia Ellery spread a red and white checked cloth over a broad expanse of sun warmed stone. Kicking off her flip-flops, she lay on her back and stretched her arms over her head, flexing sun starved calves. “Winter never wanted to let go. I was ready to suggest we move to Georgia and live with your mom and aunt. But now I’m glad we’re right here, because right here is perfect.”

  Nick Brice, love of her life, set the picnic basket down and stretching out beside her, propping his head on his elbow. He nodded in agreement. It was a warm, picturesque June day on Ohio’s Lake Erie coast. Marblehead Lighthouse towered just over their shoulders in a white, fifty-foot column. Distant coaster trains climbed and plummeted across the bay at Cedar Point. Cotton puff clouds dotted an endless blue sky and boats slid across Sandusky Bay with such lazy leisure that even their very masts and sails must have known that ninety glorious days lay ahead.

  “Mmm, right here is perfect. You ready to eat?” He reached for the basket, filled with grapes, cheese and French bread, as well as the finest Lake Erie’s wineries could offer, smuggled into Marblehead Lighthouse State Park in a discreet thermos.

  “Not yet.” Julia closed her eyes and yawned as a whip of wind kicked waves across the bay, sending a refreshing spray over the jutting rock shelf she’d claimed as theirs. “I want to just sprawl here and enjoy the sunshine for a while. It feels so good.”

  Nick abandoned his pursuit of the picnic basket to admire his girlfriend. Between owning and operating Peninsula Gifts and helping care for her elderly, senile mother—her last living relative—she was always on the go. He enjoyed seeing her enjoy a rare, quiet moment. As a middle school teacher, he had the whole summer to enjoy such moments, but for Julia they were harder to come by, no matter how much he tried to help.

  He watched passively as one spaghetti strap slipped from her pale shoulder and the breeze repositioned the hem of her short red sundress an inch higher on her thigh. But when, with eyes shut, Julia pulled her chestnut hair free of its ponytail and fanned it around her head, Nick knew it would take a man with far more willpower to simply let her be. He cupped his palm over her knee and slowly slid along her thigh, pleased when his touch elicited a slight sigh from her lips. “We can see Millennium Force from here,” Nick commented, referring to the 310-foot tall roller coaster dominating the landscape across the bay.

  “You can see Millennium from damn near everywhere,” Julia pointed out, catching his hand before it could venture so far up her thigh as to expose her panties.

  “No one can see us,” Nick promised. “No boats are close enough, and for now we’ve got this side of the park to ourselves. Don’t worry. I’m keeping an eye out.”

  Julia lifted her head and peeked around. Sure enough, the sailboats that had been drawing nearer were now farther off and the man fishing off the rocky ledge nearby had moved on. Shutting her eyes again with a slight smile, she let Nick’s hand continue on its naughty path.

  “Do you remember when I took you to Cedar Point last August?” His fingers darted beneath the edge of her panties, brushing her dampening labia. Julia’s breath caught and she nodded with a small gulp and lick of her lips. Nick leaned in to taste the moisture left by her tongue, his body aligning closer so she could feel his firm erection through his jeans. “At thirty years old you’d never been on a roller coaster, yet you grew up across the bay from the coaster capital of the world. I took you on Millennium Force and as the train careened around the turns and over the dips, you screamed out that you loved me.” He ground his knuckle against her clit and then slipped his middle finger inside her.

  Julia whimpered in pleasure, but could not resist arguing. “I didn’t mean to say I loved you. I meant to say I loved this, ‘this’ being the ride. But once I said it, you wouldn’t let me take it back…Ah! Yes, right there.” She arched her back off the rock and lifted her hips with the motion of his hand, fingers searching blindly under his black t-shirt to grip at the muscles in his lower back.

  “Have you ever regretted that I wouldn’t let you take it back?”

  “Wha—oh, Nick, yeah, like that….”

  Nick sighed. “Now I’m kind of regretting I couldn’t keep my hands off you for a few minutes. I’m trying to have a serious conversation with you, and you’re not following.”

  Julia opened her eyes and glared. “Focus on one thing at a time, buddy. Finish what you started here then we’ll talk.”

  He grinned at her bossy tone and glanced around, making sure they were still alone before throwing one leg over hers. Unable to resist, he ground his throbbing cock against her hipbone, pressing his lips to hers while increasing the pressure and speed of his hand to just the way she liked. Her primal cry of pleasure came quick, and was swallowed by his kiss.

  Recovering from the flaming hot orgasm, Julia reached for Nick’s zipper, but he stopped her before she could work it down.

  “No?”

  “No.” He gestured to a couple with three young kids and a golden retriever heading their way.

  “Later then, at home, I owe you big time.” Julia winked. “I had no idea that’s what you had in mind when you suggested a picnic, but you’re definitely planning all our outings this summer, and every summer from here on out.” She straightened her sundress and rolled onto her belly.

  Reaching for the basket, she tried not noticing Nick casually licking his fingers clean, fearing she’d end up re-aroused and have to cut their picnic short so she could take him home and pounce.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Well what?”

  “Have you ever regretted that I wouldn’t let you take back telling me you loved me?”

  Julia looked at him like he was crazy. “Hell no,” she said with certainty, popping a grape into her mouth. “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, bar none.”

  “Good.” Nick quickly stood and pulled her up as well, sitting her on the jutting rock shelves behind them. He fell to one knee. “Julia Ellery, will you marry me?” He looked up from the sparkling diamond ring pulled from his pocket to Julia’s stunned expression. He expected an answer in the affirmative. After all, they’d been living together since the fall and the honeymoon phase of their relationship was still going strong. He treated her like a treasure and knew she found him exceptionally handsome with his dark hair and dark eyes.

  Speechless for a long moment, Julia finally found her voice. "Nick, I—I love you! I absolutely adore you and couldn't ask for a more wonderful man." She faltered when his face lit up like Christmas. "But I cannot marry you. I really, really don't dare.” Her tone shifted from apologetic to crisp, “You already know that."

  Nick rocked back as if she'd slapped him. Julia felt as if she had, even though she’d given him fair warning about her inability to wed soon after they’d started dating. She couldn’t fathom why he would even ask now. Despite her bewilderment and mild annoyance, tears stung her eyes. Both their gazes fell to the open jewelry box in his hand.

  "Julia--"

  "Nick, you know we can't risk marriage. I couldn't stand losing you. I thought you understood." Even as she made the profession, she felt a terrib
le stab of longing. It was such a pretty ring! An antique, like most of her bobbles, the diamond was exactly what she'd have chosen for herself…if she could ever safely marry. Nick knew her taste so well. In fact, he knew every aspect of her so well—mind, body and spirit—that she couldn’t imagine how he thought she'd readily accept a proposal. It was his life on the line, for goodness sake!

  Nick remained kneeling, glaring pensively at the ground. Julia thought he’d flinch away when she fluffed his hair, but instead he stiffly joined her on the ledge.

  "This is about that ridiculous dress isn't it?"

  "You know it is, but it's hardly ridiculous. Do you really want to die young? Because that's what would happen if I got married in any dress but the dress."

  "Honey, come on--"

  "I told you all this last fall. You said you understood!"

  "I understood you had a family legend, folklore. That there was a superstition connected to your great, great whatever grandma’s wedding gown. But I’m not a believer."

  "But I am! There's proof! Two husbands dead before their time after their wives opted to not wear the dress on their wedding day. My mother didn’t follow her mother’s good example. She followed her poor grandmother’s example, and the result… Nick, we can’t risk having what happened to my dad happen to you.”

  "Julia, come on, honey. I want to marry you. I need to. I want our relationship to be official."

  "And I need you to keep living.”

  “What about when we have kids? Don’t you want them to be legitimate? Or do you want them to be bastards like me?”

  “What difference does it make? Who would label them illegitimate bastards when they’re raised in a loving, two-parent household, marriage certificate or no?”

  Nick rolled his eyes at Julia’s naivety. “Plenty of people would, Julia. When you’re raised in the south by a single mother and no one is quite sure who your daddy is, you learn early the things people will say.” Elbows resting on his knees, he scrubbed his hands over his face in frustration.

  Julia rubbed her palm over his back, trying to sooth him. “Ok, I do understand your desire to have our future family to be legitimate—although I still can’t imagine who in their right would call our children bastards—okay, maybe in a little southern town thirty-five years ago people were that crass—but still, it’s not worth risking your life over. As long as our children are raised by us in a loving environment, a wedding won’t make a difference.”

  Nick wasn’t ready to give up so easily. "So, let me make sure I have this straight. You’re truly never going to marry me because you can't do it in a supposedly cursed moth eaten sack?

  Come on, Julia." He stood and began pacing.

  "Don't talk about it like that," she whispered, looking around as if the spirit of the missing gown might somehow overhear and dole out retribution. “And it’s not a sack, and it’s not moth eaten. At least it wasn’t the last time I saw it.”

  "Why would you even want to be married in a dress you fear so much? No, no. Don't answer. It's because I'd 'die young' if you didn't." He groaned then dropped back onto the rock ledge,long legs stretched out and his arms crossed over his chest, looking very much to Julia like an overgrown, pouting child.

  "Well, if I had the dress to wear, then there wouldn't be anything to fear." God help her, why did the dress have to stolen along with other valuables during the burglary three years earlier? Why did she suddenly, desperately want to be Nick's wife when just ten minutes ago cozily cohabitating and out-of-wedlock babies hadn't bothered her? Julia glanced at the small velvet box resting between them and knew the answer. When he asked 'will you marry me' and flashed that ring under nose, her long and stringently suppressed desire to be a bride, a wife, one half of a holy union, had broken free like a bird from its cage. That and it was an utterly gorgeous ring.

  “Julia, don’t you ever think maybe it was simply bad luck your dad was killed? And maybe your mom, in her grief and developing illness, blamed an old family legend for his death? Maybe she fixated on it a little too long and hard and passed a substantial dose of that hysteria onto you.”

  “You think this is hysteria?”

  “Julia, the doctors diagnosed your mom with Alzheimer’s when she was only in her fifties. Don’t you think maybe the early stages of that, combined with the trauma of your father’s death, played into the crazy things she told you when you were a young child? Why exactly are you so convinced of all of this now?”

  For a moment Julia was stunned, but then her anger rose. “Are you implying I’m developing Alzheimer’s or something because I don’t want you to die? Are you kidding me?” She tried not to get upset, but he was picking at one of her fears—that she might inherit her mother’s disease. She’d been a late in life surprise to her parents. Her mother and father married in their early twenties but it had been two-decades before a pregnancy occurred. Her father was killed before her birth. By the time Julia was a teenager, her mother, in her mid-fifties, had been diagnosed with the disease. Julia had grown up on a diet of scrambled information, confusing conversations, vague recollections and convictions of curses. She was nearly twenty and in counseling to help deal with her mother’s deteriorating condition when she finally accepted that the mother she grown up loving but often not understanding had been suffering from a degenerative disease. She managed to gain understanding over many perplexing things from her upbringing, but she’d never been able to shake loose the fear of the curse. She simply could not forget the sound of her mother wailing, declaring herself a murderess for not wearing the heirloom gown on her wedding day.

  “I’m not saying I think you’re developing Alzheimer’s, but hell, I think there’s something odd about you believing so strongly in hocus pocus that you’ll let it affect our life this way.”

  “Well shit, I didn’t know you found me so odd!” Now she was the one with arms crossed. “You know, if this thing about the dress bothers you so much, makes you think I’m ‘odd’, I don’t know why you want to marry me so much anyhow. You should have no problem finding another woman to marry you and raise a brood of non-bastards.”

  “I don’t want another women, I want you. I’m not saying you’re odd or becoming ill. I’m just saying that maybe you should step back and consider this objectively. Your mom fed you this bullshit from the cradle. It’s my opinion that she couldn’t help believing it because of her disease, but whoever said you have to believe so fully? ”

  “Because the risks, Nick! I couldn’t stand losing you, I—”

  “I know, I know.” He resumed his place on one knee and slipped the ring onto her finger. "All I’m asking right now is that you wear this for me, and try to spend a little time thinking rationally about all this. I would be crazy to indulge your fears when I want so badly for us to be more than common law." He kissed her hard, furiously.

  Even after a year, his kiss still sent her head spinning and pulse racing. When he released her, Julia took a calming breath and looked at the ring, marveling at how incredibly right it felt there on her hand. Nick seemed so determined, and she had no more will to argue. What harm could come from a perpetual engagement? After all, it was such a pretty ring, meant for wearing and enjoying.

  She tried doing as he wanted—stepping back and objectively viewing the curse she was raised on the way other girls were raised on Cinderella and Snow White. Yes, she supposed it sounded ridiculous, and if she were the one on the other side of the proposal, she’d think she was crazy, too. For a moment she pictured herself in a brand new wedding gown, sewn just for her. If she could, she’d choose something strapless and streamlined. She imagined walking down the aisle to Nick. The visualization felt good, and for a moment she felt a soaring joy. And then she remembered the yellowed newspaper clippings detailing the Lake Erie salt mine collapse that had claimed her father’s life just two weeks before her birth. She imagined what sort of newspaper clipping would detail Nick’s untimely death, and slammed the door on the line of thought
before panic took hold. Julia made up her mind. She would just refuse to ever set a date, thereby keeping the Nick alive and in her arms.

  WHEN Julia awoke the next morning she found herself alone in bed, though she was usually the first one up. Slipping through the house, following the scent of freshly brewed coffee, she found Nick in his study hunched over the computer, brow furrowed with concentration. “What are you doing?”

  Nick glanced up. "Huh? Oh, it’s nothing, just a research project. Maybe something I'll use for a lesson plan next year."

  Julia accepted that readily, not noticing when Nick tilted the monitor away from her. He was always looking for new ways to freshen up his classroom. She showered and dressed in the comfortable khaki slacks, white blouse and tennis shoes she always wore to the shop and then headed out the door, leaving Nick to his project.

  An hour later the telephone rang in her shop. Julia stepped away from the shelves of Great Lakes themed ceramics she'd been dusting and picked up the phone. "Peninsula Gifts, how can I help you?"

  "Hon, where's the picture of your grandma in the wedding dress?"

  "It's in the blue photo album on the shelf in the hall closet. Why?"

  "Just wanted to have a look at it...I have to go. Love you."

  Julia looked at the receiver and frowned. She didn't know what Nick was up to, but it couldn't be good. Three hours later he breezed into the shop and strode up to the counter with a steely-eyed determination that had the few customers milling around eyeing him warily. Julia saw one alarmed woman duck around the corner and reach for her cell phone, no doubt expecting a hold up.

  "Julia, I'm leaving."

  The woman relaxed but then shot Julia an embarrassed, sympathetic smile and shuffled out the door, not wanting to witness an awkward breakup scene.

  "Leaving?" Hearing, but not believing it, she refused to meet Nick's eyes and instead focused on rolling a porcelain seagull ornament in bubble wrap.

  "Not you, Marblehead."

  Now she was really confused, but at least the floor was back under her feet. "Marblehead? You're not going to leave me, but you won't live with me or in the same town with me anymore?"