Hold Me Close

there was a ring

"Can I sit?" Keira asks, voice bare and hoarse. I nod. Her puffer jacket rustles as she occupies the space beside me.

Conscious of the tears streaming down my face, I use my sleeve to harshly rub at my skin. It probably makes the redness staining my cheeks worse, but Keira isn't looking at me anyway. She stares straight ahead, eyes fixed to the granite headstone.

"This is your first time here."

"Yeah."

A silence cages us in together. It builds four walls around us and her grave, constructing a roof that has a hole punched through it by Keira's heavy sigh. I look up. She is staring at the grass beneath us, fingers raking through the green blades repeatedly, over and over. Forwards, backwards, left, right. She is careful not to pull the grass out from the soil. She sighs again.

"You don't wear a ring," Keira says, the end of her sentence lilting upwards as if she is asking me a question. Transfixed on the movement of her hands, I mumble a response that neither of us understand. Keira glances upward at me, a flicker of amusement upon her teary eyes. "Or do you?" It is a reference to my complete avoidance of her outside of playing football. I should have known she wouldn't remain unaware forever.

"Rings make me feel claustrophobic," I answer honestly, though I am not sure why I do. Scarlett didn't leave me her friends in her will. (No – she only gave me everything else.)

"I knew that, actually. Scar told me." I can't think of a situation where that would have popped up. "Did she ever ask you, then?" Keira's palms press flat against the grass. I almost fall over, as if her question has knocked me off balance.

"Sorry?" I must have heard her wrong. This will be some Northern phrasing that I don't understand.

She speaks more plainly; "Did Scarlett ask you to marry her?" Keira doesn't know. I always thought that the only likely person to know was her. She doesn't know. "After the Euros, we bought one for you and one for Lucy. Just us two. She was so particular, faffing over anything imaginable. And she said," recounts Keira with a fondness people only seem to possess when talking about Scarlett, "that you were going to hate her for being the one to ask, so she had to make it really special. I don't think I'd ever seen her more bothered than in that ring shop, choosing between one or the other. And when I told her I wasn't going to ask Lucy for ages, she panicked and pulled out her calendar. She wanted to do it at Christmas." Keira's voice cracks. "Then... You guys were arguing so much, and she wanted it to be over." Fear jolts through my body – maybe she does know – but Keira doesn't notice. "She was done fighting, wanted the rough patch to be finished and forgotten. She was hopeful, you know."

Our breakup was mutual.

She couldn't have been that hopeful.

The 'what if' thoughts I have managed to dodge suddenly rush over me, a tsunami of questions that exist because now I can't be sure that there would have been no more of us. Mourning someone you know you didn't have a future with is profoundly different to mourning someone who had an engagement ring hidden away somewhere.

At this moment, I consider telling Keira everything. She knew about the constant arguments. Would she be surprised by the truth?

Would she hate me?

I never made friends with her, not really. She would choose Scarlett every time, and I expect nothing less. Somehow, Scarlett's death would become my fault, wouldn't it? Her girlfriend breaks up with her and, all of a sudden, she's dead. If that happened to my best friend...

It hits me that Scarlett is really dead.

Scarlett is dead and Scarlett wanted to propose.

Scarlett bought me a ring, Scarlett loved me, Scarlett was going to make sure I wasn't alone. Scarlett loved me and I loved her.