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“You really thought I was going to dump you?” I asked after a few minutes.

“Yes.”

“Why would you think that?”

“You didn’t see the look on your face when I told you I loved you.”

“What did it look like?”

“Like you were pulling over to kick me out of the car after telling me to fuck off!”

I laughed. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“I’m not kicking you out of the car. And I’m not telling you to fuck off. I’m telling you that I love you, and I have for a while. I didn’t want you to be the one telling me to fuck off.”

She cried a little more before finally drying her eyes and leaning back in her seat, leaving me with a big wet spot on my jacket. She smiled at me, and looked like she was about to say something when she started crying again. I didn’t know what to do.

“Now what?” I asked. I was concerned, but it suddenly struck me as funny, and I couldn’t help but laugh at her.

“It’s not funny!” she said, slugging me in the arm.

“I know,” I said, trying to be serious. It wasn’t working, and soon she was laughing with me. “I don’t care if you love me for my money,” I said once we were both down to occasional giggles. She slugged me in the arm again. “You were with me when I was poor. That’s good enough for me.”

“I don’t care about the money,” she said, wiping her eyes, still being attacked by a giggle here and there.

“Good. When I gamble it all away or buy a piss-poor Central American dictatorship and get deposed, we’ll still have each other.”

“They usually execute deposed dictators,” she said with a smile.

“You know that the wife of the dictator is usually right there beside him.” I winked at her.

“As long as I have good shoes!” she sang, doing her best impression of what I guessed was Madonna doing her ‘Evita’ thing. “Wait,” she said suddenly. “Wife?”

“Okay, maybe that’s pushing it a little, but you know, down the road, if you agree to it, then it’s an easy bottle of rat poison later and you got yourself a fortune and no stupid man-boy to be burdened with.”

“Only if I get a Jewish wedding.”

“Really?”

“No. Not really. But I’ll let you know eventually if you are husband material.”

“Gee, thanks,” I said, putting the Mercedes in reverse and pulling out of the parking spot. “Where do you want to go to celebrate our newfound love?”

“How about you drive around and I’ll give you that blowjob?” When I turned red again, she laughed. “Let’s go to your place so you can get one and not be so uptight about it.”

CHAPTER 9 - With This Ring

April 18, 2015

I waited in the closest parking spot to the Delaney Building as I could find. Kassandra would be out of class in a few minutes, then we were going to spend Spring Break down in Orlando. It was more a treat for Kass than me. I asked her to pick a place, any place on Earth she wanted to go for a week, and she chose Orlando. She’d never been to Disney World, even though her parents had visited four times since she’d been born. If I she hadn’t told me that, I would have thought she was insane. When I came up with the plan, I’d been thinking of Tahiti, Australia, hell, even Cancun.

My phone buzzed and I checked the text, seeing that it was Kass. I let her know where I was, then started the car. I stared at her in the mirror when I saw her, and never took my eyes off her until she was seated next to me.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Then why are you staring at me? You’re creeping me out.”

“Because I still can’t believe a girl as attractive as you is with a dork like me.”

She winked. “You’ve got a big, hard wallet.”

I laughed and she joined me, both of us enjoying our private little joke. For the last three months, the only argument we ever had was when she wouldn’t accept a gift, or take any money that I’d offered. Her parents were still paying for her tuition, and she refused to move out of the dorm. I’d almost gone into a rage one night when she wouldn’t even take twenty dollars to go see a movie with a couple of her friends. She’d sat next to me, holding both of my hands, and explained that she was scared to death that either I’d think she was only after my money, or that I’d begin to think I could buy her happiness.

That was a month ago, and we hadn’t had an argument since. I had no choice but to accept it, and in truth, it was the right answer. There were a lot of things I was beginning to have a hard time staying objective about, and though I wouldn’t admit it, it almost always had to do with money. I’m not meaning to imply that money was the root of all of my problems, as it had definitely solved any
normal
problems I or my parents had ever had. But almost daily, I’d see other problems that I knew I could solve, or at least help, by throwing money at them.

Except it just wasn’t that easy. And it was making me a little crazy inside, impatient. My plan was for the long haul. I’d plotted out the next decade of my life in terms of making money. After a decade of amassing the largest fortune I possibly could without receiving scrutiny from any authorities, I’d planned out the second decade of how I was going to spend it all. I hadn’t used Qwerry to find out which problems were the most pressing, deciding that it would be better to understand the world within the context of living in it daily, instead of trying to read text on a monitor and maybe look at some pictures or video. The fate of other human lives would most likely hang in the balance, and I wanted to try and get it right the first time.

“Are you excited?” Kassandra asked me, breaking up my frustrated thoughts about being unable to do much of anything for another nine years.

“Yeah.”

“Wow. You sound
soooo
excited.” Her sarcasm wasn’t dripping, it was flooding the car to where I couldn’t breath, which only made me laugh again.

“I am excited,” I said, putting a hand on her leg as I turned into the parking lot of her dorm building. “I’m excited to be with you. I’ll admit that Disney World and Florida in general don’t really excite me as much as say… a private island in the Bahamas, or a ride down the Amazon, maybe being chased by headhunters.”

“It’ll be fun,” she said, putting her hand over mine.

“Of course it will. I’ll be with you.”

“While appreciated, that still means you won’t be enjoying the trip.”

“We’ll go see the Kennedy Space Center,” I said with a smile, reminding her that I was a sci-fi nerd. “I’ll have fun there.”

“Well then, while we’re there, I’ll be having fun because you’ll be there.”

She wrinkled her nose, letting me know that she’d be about as bored at KSC as I would be at Disney. I squeezed her leg and gave her the
get lost
motion with my other thumb. She wrinkled her nose even more before exiting my new car, which was Mom’s old
Camry. I’d opted for staying as cool and inconspicuous as possible, which was another thing that was driving me crazy. Every time I saw one of the new Challengers rumbling down the road, or any of the old muscle cars for that matter, I felt the misery of material longing attack me from every angle. I could buy anything I wanted, possibly even one of the poorer states like Mississippi or Alabama, yet I couldn’t even have the car of my dreams.

I fantasized about cars for the entire ten minutes it took her to gather up all of the things she’d be taking on the trip. When she exited the building with her new suitcase in tow, I smiled at my little victory. Kassi had tried to argue with me about a new suitcase, but I’d told her how uncivilized it was to go on vacation with everything stuffed into an army surplus duffel bag. I also told her how I knew what she was doing by refusing, and that she’d better knock it off and take a new suitcase before she ended up traveling to Orlando inside that army surplus duffel bag.

She’d punched me in the middle of my chest hard enough to sting, then picked out the cheapest suitcase she could find, one so cheap that it looked like it would burst into flames the first time a baggage handler touched it. After half an hour of argument, with two of the sales ladies grinning while trying to not pay attention to our dispute, we agreed on a middle-grade one. Victory: Tyler.

“When does our plane leave?” she asked when she was seated and buckled up.

“Seven in the morning,” I answered, navigating my way back to the main road.

“Are we going to stay at the airport hotel?”

“No. Why would we do that?”

“Your parents…”

“Kassandra, you’re such a prude,” I said, mocking her for all the times she’d done it to me.

I’d finally gotten over having her stay over, but for some reason, that made Kass uncomfortable, and she hardly ever stayed the night with me. She didn’t want my parents to think she was a college whore, I guess. My parents absolutely loved her. They were a little put off by her piercings, the ones in her lip and eyebrow seemed to bother my father more than my mother for some reason, and her two visible tattoos, which made my mom uncomfortable.

I’d caught both of my parents staring at their objects of discomfort a little too much at first, and had told them privately that it made Kass feel weird. The truth was that it didn’t bother Kassi at all. She loved when people gave her uncomfortable looks because of the piercings and tattoos. It bothered me though. Mom and Dad didn’t disrespect her for her oddities (according to their generational tastes), and in fact had quizzed her at great length with genuine curiosity until she’d revealed information concerning another piercing that made my mom so flustered that she tried three times to stumble through a reply. Dad was embarrassed as well, but he’d hidden it by claiming he needed to get something from the fridge.

“It just bothers me,” she said. “I love your parents to death, and I know they like me, but it’s just weird, you know?”

“Now you know how I feel about getting head in the car,” I muttered, but she’d heard me.

“Oh, it is
not
like that at all. Your parents wouldn’t be sitting in the back seat while it was happening.”

“You think they’ll be in my room with us?” I gave her a look to let her know she was completely insane.

“They might be outside the door.”

“What? You’re insane.”

“Well, what if they have their little notebook and are taking notes?”

“Please tell me you are kidding,” I said, laughing. “Like… they are going to mark you down for not making me… you know what? I’m not having this conversation. You’re insane. Nuts. Completely fucking bonkers.”

“I see your mom, giving me the evil eye every so often.”

“What?”

“She does. She gives me the look that says
you’ll never be good enough for him
.”

“I’m dropping you off at the state mental hospital then going home,” I said, turning my head to check my blind spot before changing lanes.

“Have you told them yet?” she asked, changing the subject.

“About which thing?”

“Both. Either.”

“No, not yet. I’m more worried about the conversation that deals with moving out on my own than I am about the getting married one.”

“Your mom will never let you leave,” she teased. “Especially not with me.”

“If you don’t stop, I’ll bring her on the honeymoon.”

“Maybe she can give me some tips on how to
do
things.”

“Oh my god, you are so gross.”

We both cracked up laughing, carrying on all the way home, until I pulled into the driveway.

*****

July 4, 2014

I was nervous as hell. My father had repeated to me over and over to not lock my knees. Don’t lock your knees. Don’t lock your knees. At first I thought he was pulling my leg. I’d locked my knees before Kass came down the aisle, and almost spilled over head-first into my best man, Joey Galbraith.
It must be some kind of mind trick
, I thought, tempting fate by almost locking my knees a second time. I’d have to look that one up on the computer one day. Maybe in the future, they’d discovered why men faint when they lock their knees standing at the altar.

It wasn’t like I was nervous because I was making a bad decision. Usually it was the girl that couldn’t wait for the wedding day to arrive, and while I’m sure Kass was excited to become Mrs. Tyler Gallagher, I’d bet money, my quantum computer even, that I was the more excited one. I loved her so much that as soon as we got home from the reception, I was going to finally tell her about the computer. Not just tell her, but show her. I’d formulated a list of all the things I needed to warn her about, but most of those revolved around money. And money… just wasn’t an issue.

Someone in the audience coughed and I looked around. Kassandra’s side of the aisle was sparsely populated, the majority of them girls she went to school with, an aunt from back east, and her cousin Nico. His real name was Hayden Nicholas Perkins, but for some reason, he wanted everyone to call him Nico. He seemed like a pretty cool dude, two years younger than Kass, and was about to be deployed to the Mediterranean with an entire task force group as a warning to Syria.