You kept it off of your dating profile, you explain, because it scares guys away sometimes.
“Or it attracts the wrong guy,” you say. “Like the kind who doesn’t really like women, and would prefer to not have to communicate with a woman on an emotional level.”
He seems intrigued.
“I bet I could make you love me.”
“I’m telling you,” you say. “I can’t.”
“Bet I could make you eat those words.”
“Fifty bucks?” you suggest.
The two of you shake on it.
You spend the next fifty years together, him showering you in romance from dawn to dusk, bombarding you with flowers and serenades and trips to romantic B&Bs. He writes piles of poetry inspired by you, published even, on reputable presses, with nothing but your name as the title, in numbered volumes. He fills you with children, celebrates you at every turn, with every breath. Your life with him is more wonderful than you ever could have imagined, more wonderful, certainly, than you deserve.
He stays by your side to the very end, when you’re on your deathbed. He refuses to leave you. He spends his days reading to you, telling you stories, putting ice chips on your tongue.
On your last night alive, when you know you don’t have any energy left to wake to another morning, you take your husband’s hand in yours and you squeeze it tight. When he pulls his hand away, he opens his palm and finds a fifty-dollar bill.
When he looks at your face, your eyes are closed, your breathing stopped. The money in his palm tells him his love for you was requited, but the proof isn’t in the fifty bucks. It’s in the fact that you cared enough to die before he could look in your eyes to find some seed of doubt.
Happy You Can’t Feel Day!
