He chuckled, and I blinked up at him. “What’s funny?” I asked.
“The expression on your face. I can practically see your mind spinning. And you thinkI’measily spooked.”
I scowled. “I’m not scared of taking your last name,” I said. “But anyway.”
“Anyway what?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, grasping for a change of topic.
“Anyway, write something,” he said. “Do it now. I’ll stop bothering you.”
“I wouldn’t even know where to start,” I said, but it wasn’t true. I thought back to a short story I’d written for a creative writing course in college. I only had a handful of pages, but it was something . . .
David leaned under the seat in front of me and grabbed my carry-on bag. “Here,” he said, excavating my laptop. “Just try it for twenty minutes. If you hate it, we can have sex in the bathroom.”
I sat up and widened my eyes. “Really?”
“Really. But I’ll be timing you.”
I accepted the computer. “Deal.”
A few minutes later, my fingers flying over the keyboard, a flight attendant in the aisle waved at me. “Ma’am? Hello? It’s time to stow your laptop.”
I blinked twice at her. “What?” I asked. “But we’re nowhere near Chicago.”
David snickered into his fist. “We’re about to land.”
“But I just started writing.” Had I completely lost track of time with my nose stuck in my laptop?
“Please stow the laptop and bring your seat back to the upright position,” the flight attendant said.
I shook my head in disbelief but did as she said.
“So, how’d it go?” David asked, grinning as I packed up the computer. “Not well, I presume.”
With his ribbing, I frowned, even though I was giddy over the fact that the words had poured out of me. “I didn’t want to do it in a disgusting airplane bathroom anyway,” I teased.
“Liar.”
I snuck my arm between David’s back and the seat to wrap him in a sideways hug and rest my head on his ribcage.
“You realize that you wrote for an hour straight,” he said, rubbing my arm.
I’d read over my story, decided I’d liked it, and created an outline. I’d started thinking harder about characters, the ones I already had and the ones I would add. I’d even written another handful of pages. I smiled. He was right, of course. I had enjoyed it. “Thanks for making me do it.”
“If it’s going to interfere with our sex life, though, I may have to forbid it,” he said.
“Impossible,” I said through a smile, glancing up to catch his adoring gaze. As the plane began its descent, I reached up to finger a piece of his hair, then touched his lips. He’d done nothing but prove to me over and over that he wanted me by his side. That he wanted me to become the best version of myself. That he cared. “David?” I said.
“Hmm?”
“I want to move in with you.”
He squeezed me against him. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “Let’s do it. I don’t want to wait any longer to start our life together.”
“Honeybee,” he said, kissing my forehead, “it has already begun.”
