Read Online Splinters of Light by Rachael Herron - Free Book Online

dropped their voices to silence. Even the noise of the attached bar quieted.
    Mariana’s fingers clenched around her napkin. She heard a woman sigh. Then another. But she couldn’t fix her face, couldn’t get the right words lined up, couldn’t, couldn’t . . . She was going to, she would fuck it up, there was no way she could explain, she didn’t even know—
    “Mariana?” He was white around the eyes. “Don’t leave me hangin’ here, babe.”
    She felt the word “yes” in her mouth, tasted it. Then Mariana said,
“No.”
    The worst part was her volume. As if an almost-silent whisper of the same word wouldn’t have had the same devastatingeffect on him. But she practically yelled it, the terrible word hanging above them. Luke pulled his head back as if she’d hit him with pepper spray. He retreated a million miles just by blinking.
    Confident, strong Luke. Never, in the two years she’d known him, had she seen him in retreat. Not once. He’d been so sure she’d say yes.
    She’d thought she would, too. Up until thirty seconds ago.
    Then she was on the floor with him, and her arms were around his neck. Her lips against his cheek, she murmured, “I’m so sorry. So sorry.”
    Luke stayed completely still, as if the “no” had turned him to stone.
    The few gasps she’d heard when she’d answered changed into a swell of approval. She could almost hear them changing their minds. Perhaps they’d misconstrued her answer. “Yes,” that must be what she’d said. Perhaps her “no” actually meant “yes,” maybe that’s the way they worked as a couple.
    “So sweet,” she heard a woman say.
    A man offered a hearty “Congratulations!”
    Mariana kept her face against Luke’s neck. How could she stand up? How were they possibly going to be able to walk out of the restaurant and back to the car where they’d left it on Polk Street? When they got home, how would she brush her teeth next to him before getting into bed with him? Her fingers were pressed so tightly against his shoulders that she knew she would leave ten tiny bruises there against his skin, markers of the time he got it so wrong, so very wrong.
    Luke didn’t speak.
    He still hadn’t moved, still stuck in a kneel that now looked more like a crouch. No tears. Too hurt for tears.
    “I’m so sorry. I can’t. No, Luke.”
    Finally, he spoke. “I heard you the first time.”
    Slowly, so slowly, Luke stood, extending to his full enormous height. He carefully placed his credit card on the table, alongwith the car keys. The jacket he’d hung on the hook at the end of their booth creaked over his shoulders. “I need to walk.”
    “Wait . . .”
    He left.
    When Mariana presented the flustered waitress with her card—not his—the woman looked as if
she
were about to cry. Mariana didn’t answer when the hostess automatically asked if everything was okay with the meal as she pushed her way out the heavy old door.
    Fucked it up.
She’d fucked it up. Again. She fucked everything up.
    It wasn’t until she got home—dark, no lights, he wasn’t there—that she remembered the ring that they’d both left sitting in the candy bowl. He’d told her about it once, late at night, right at the beginning of their relationship.
I have my grandmother’s ring. I’ll only give it to the right woman, and I’ll only give it away once.
    She’d dreamed of the moment Luke would ask her to marry him. Stashed somewhere in the house she had an earmarked
Brides
magazine, the product of an afternoon spent in Barnes and Noble waiting for a phone call that never came from a blogger with connections to the
Shambhala Sun.
    But she couldn’t.
    She wasn’t . . .
    God, the whole point was that Mariana wasn’t enough for
herself
yet. How could she be enough for anyone else? She broke things. She was a fuckup, practically a professional one. It was a miracle the app was still running, that it hadn’t put viruses on the phones of everyone who’d downloaded