Alien Tango

But your timing is the worst ever. I can’t handle this.”
    He sighed and rubbed his forehead. “Look. I’m rich. I’m successful. I’m reasonably good-looking, and before you walked on the alien side of life, we were pretty compatible in bed. I’m working in a similar field, so you’d never have to lie to me. I didn’t come here to terrorize or upset you. I came to ask you to marry me.”
    My jaw dropped. He reached out and closed it gently. Then he reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a small jewelry box, and handed it to me.
    “Open it. Please.”
    I did. I was too stunned not to. Inside was a beautiful diamond solitaire, not too big. I didn’t like large stones because I thought they looked like paste on my hands. This was exactly the size I would have picked for myself. I didn’t know that much about precious stones, but I could tell the diamond was of exceptional quality.
    “I know you’re not recovered. But I also know that once you say it’s over, it’s over. So, I don’t need an answer today, this week, not even this month. I just want you to at least consider the fact that I love you and want to marry you.
    “Where was all this popularity when I was in school?” Whoops, again, not something I’d intended to say out loud. I managed not to ask why he’d waited until now to propose—it wasn’t as if we hadn’t seen each other over the past few years. Of course, I’d been essentially avoiding him for the past five or six months, so it’s not as though he’d had any opportunity.
    Chuckie laughed. “It was there, you just didn’t notice all the time.” He stroked my face. “You never noticed, did you? That I was in love with you?”
    I was still staring at the ring. I tried to ignore the fact that I’d thought Martini was close to proposing, officially, really proposing, a few times recently. I’d wanted that, so much. For him to do something romantic instead of just saying “marry me” while we were at breakfast or killing a fugly. He’d said “marry me” thirty minutes after we’d known each other. Of course, he’d said “I love you” a lot, too. And Chuckie never had until tonight.
    “No. You never said anything, and it never occurred to me.” Not even in Vegas.
    “I couldn’t risk losing you.” I looked up at him. He gave me a half-smile and shrugged. “I wasn’t kidding—I couldn’t have survived high school without your friendship, and college wouldn’t have been all that great without you, either.”
    A small thought waved at me. “Is that why you went to A.S.U. instead of Cal Tech or MIT?”
    He grinned. “Well, that and the fact that I’d already figured out that I was going to be happier in business than I was locked in a science lab.” He stroked my face again. “But, truthfully, if you’d wanted to go to an all girl’s school, I’d have found a loophole somehow that would have let me go there with you.”
    I’d never considered Chuckie in the stalker-boyfriend category, but clearly, even the laid-back guys who liked me were at least slightly obsessive. I’d have complained, but I’d been overjoyed he’d gone to college with me.
    I felt beyond dense and emotionally battered. I closed the box and handed it back to him. “I’m not saying no. I’m not saying yes. I’m saying I can’t keep this unless or until I say yes.”
    “Fair enough.” He put the box back into his pocket. “So, ready for dinner?”
    “Not really.”
    “Well, fake it. Pretend you’re having fun. I won’t be overly amorous unless someone we hated is nearby and then we’ll be totally into each other. You need to eat, and you might as well dance. I know you’ve always thought I was kidding about this, too, but I’ve taken ballroom dance for years. You’ll love my tango.”
    I started to laugh. “Okay, I think I can handle it, even the tango.”

CHAPTER 66
    DINNER WAS RELATIVELY OKAY. We ended up with people neither one of us had known well at our table and so got away with not having to talk to them too much.
    I managed to choke a little food down, mostly because Chuckie coaxed me into it. It all tasted like wood chips to me, but my stomach hurt a little less.
    He kept me filled up with Cokes. The waiter was extremely attentive, I presumed because Chuckie tipped well. There was something vaguely familiar about him, but it was dark, and I had other things on my mind than checking out some little guy in an ill-fitting tux. I had a big guy in a perfectly