“Now,” I echoed, the word settling in my chest like it had finally come home.
He nodded once, like that was the permission he’d been waiting for.Then he swallowed, smile tilting lopsided.“Okay,” he said to himself more than to me.He stepped back just enough to see my face and took both my hands, rough palms warm and sure.
“I had a speech,” he confessed, cheeks going pink, “with metaphors about foundations and beams and how you make everything I build mean something.I can’t remember any of it.”
“You don’t need a speech,” I told him, because he didn’t.
He took a breath.“Cassidy Morgan,” he said, and my name sounded like a vow even before he made one.“I want every ordinary day with you.I want to fix the hinge twice because your dad says once isn’t good enough.I want to make coffee at that little table and read whatever you’re writing across from me.I want to carry in groceries, forget the eggs, and drive back just to do it together.I want to build our someday, and I don’t want to wait for someday to start.Will you marry me?”
He dropped to one knee right there on the plywood floor.He pulled a small box from his pocket, simple, worn at the edges like he’d carried it for a while, and opened it to a ring that was exactly right: a clean band, a stone that caught the lamp and seemed to hold the light like a secret.
I laughed and cried at once, a sound that felt like a release valve.“Yes,” I said, the word bursting out of me before he could even ask it properly again.“Yes.”
His relief was so bright it made my eyes water.He slid the ring onto my finger with hands that have fixed tractor engines and planed boards and held me together more than once.He stood, and I went up on my toes, and we met in the middle the way we always do.
The door behind us creaked.
“Please tell me she said yes,” Adam stage-whispered, already crying.
I turned, ring flashing, and the trailers filled with people like a tide.My mother, with her hands to her mouth, his mother with her arms wide and tears spilling like she’d been waiting all day just to let them fall.My father, pretending he wasn’t wiping his eyes.Dean with a whoop that made the stovepipe ring.Clara and Mason, with matching grins.Jackson barreled in, sawdust on his knees, and launched himself at my legs, with Chase following close behind him.
“You’re gonna be my real family for real,” he announced to Brody.
“He was always your family buddy,” I told him, bending to kiss his hair.
“Yeah, but now it’sOfficial Official,” he said, very seriously, and Brody scooped him up in his arms.
There were hugs from every direction, congratulations layered over jokes layered over instructions no one asked for.Someone popped a bottle of sparkling cider with the champagne, and someone else produced paper cups.My mother inspected the desk and said, decisively, “We’ll need a lamp here, maybe some built-in shelves for your notebooks,” as if a committee had assigned her the role.Dean and my father immediately began an animated discussion about the merits of the pellet stove versus a small wood-burner, while Judy and Clara plotted curtains and our wedding as if they were the same thing.It was chaotic and warm and exactly how I wanted to start a life: noise softened by love.
Brody never let go of my hand.Even as Chase gave him his best attempt at the big brother talk and Judy insisted on a photo, “First picture in your first place!”, His fingers stayed threaded through mine like a promise.
At some point, the crowd thinned, and my mother threatened to return in the morning with muffins and small appliances.There were last hugs, last jokes through the door, last admonitions tosleepandeat,andcall if the heat does anything weird.The dusk deepened to almost night.Quiet gathered all around us.
Brody leaned his shoulders against the closed door and looked at me like I was something magical he’d found and still couldn’t quite believe belonged to him.His hair was a mess from too many affectionate hands.His shirt wore a thumbprint of paint I hadn’t noticed before.
“You, okay?”he asked, that soft way he asks when he’s ready to listen to whatever comes out.
I lifted my left hand and let the ring flash in the lamplight.“I am,” I said.“More than okay.”
He pushed off the door and came to me.His hands found my face, gentle, reverent.“I know you could’ve done all of this without me,” he said.“I love that you chose to do this with me.”
“I honestly couldn't imagine it any other way,” I said.
His mouth curved.“Good,” he murmured, and kissed me once more, slow and sure, sealing something that felt already decided.
We turned on the pellet stove together, he showed me the trick for the igniter, and watched the flame catch.Warmth unfurled, small at first, then steady.We sat at the little table with two paper cups of the exact wine we had drunk when Chase and Brody had come to my small apartment to make sure, I felt safe.
“You know,” he said, pretending casual and failing, “the shop will go right there.”He pointed through the window to the spot past the pines we’d circled on maps and napkins.“Someday we’ll look back at where these two boxes stood and laugh about how we thought this was enough space.”
“We’ll miss it,” I said, surprising myself with the certainty.“The small.The way we could hear the other breathe from any corner.”
He smiled.“We’ll keep the feeling of this place on purpose,” he said.“We’ll build our house around it.”
We moved to the bed when the room turned full dark, not because the night demanded it, but because the sheets were crisp and the day had been long, and I wanted to know what it felt like to fall asleep in a place we had chosen and made real with his hands.
He clicked off the lamp, and the stove cast a low, golden pulse that softened the room into a hush.We quietly stripped down in front of each other and as we crawled into bed together, he tucked me into him, palm warm and flat over my belly, that unconscious claim he makes that never feels like taking, only belonging.
I listened to the fire tick and his breath even and the small sounds a new space makes when it’s learning you.I thought of stages, microphones, and names said out loud.I thought of desks and pages and mornings that smell like maple toast.I thought of the girl who ran and the woman who walked back on purpose.
