“Why now?” I ask with a laugh. “All season you could have tried to get me out here.”
“I did suggest it, but you kept giving me the ‘someday’ runaround. Today’s the day. One we’ll remember.”
He steps out onto the ice, and he turns to offer his hand.
“I’m going to need two of those,” I say as I lift my foot and place it onto the ice, rather than gliding out like I’ve seen him do so many times. “I don’t know that this will be an immediate love for me.” My whole body is tense as he takes my second hand and skates backward, pulling me along with him.
“I’ve got lots of time to teach you.”
“Oh my god. Can you stop teasing me?” I say, but I can’t smack him or stomp my foot in annoyance. “I need to know what’s going on.”
“I won’t bury the headline,” he says.
And I want to tell him it’s bury the lede, but I need him to spill the secrets he’s been keeping.
“I’m staying in Bellerive for the foreseeable future.”
I tug on his hands, and I glide straight into his arms, grasping onto him for dear life out of joy and absolute terror. “How?” I ask, framing his face while he keeps us moving.
“A lot of negotiating and a sympathetic King Alexander,” he says. “I took a pay cut—a pretty big one—and renegotiated a multiyear contract that gives the team the room to get good players for a second and third line that should help our overall performance.”
I try to search his expression, even as he keeps us moving across the ice. “You don’t care about the money?” He’s so careful with what he spends. “What about your career? Will it suffer here? Are you giving up too much?”
“I get to play. I get you. That’s all I really want. You beside me while we build a life and a family together. Us, investing in this island and the people here. That’s what I want, and that’s what I’m getting.” He takes a deep breath. “Maybe it’s all happening earlier than I thought I wanted, but I never knew a love that feelsas big, as important, as the one I have with you could be mine. I never saw you coming, but there was no way I could let you pass me by.” He glides us to a stop, and then he smooths down my hair and kisses my forehead. “At the end of my hockey career, I wanted a life worth living beyond the rink, and I know I’ll have that with you. How lucky am I that I getthisrelationship so early and that I know its value with such certainty?”
“God, I love you. How did we end up here?” I can’t help the touch of awe in my voice. It seems like a lifetime ago that I was watching game tape and interviews of Logan and trying to get a handle of what kind of player he was, what kind of person.
“We started at this arena,” he says. He lets go of me to reach into his pocket. “My two loves.” He flips open a tiny box with one hand, while his other keeps me steady. “I’d get on one knee, but I’d be afraid you’d fall, and I gotta start this life with you by keeping my promises. Doctor Sawyer Tucker, will you marry me?”
I cover my face with my hands, a sob bursting forth before I throw my arms around his neck and bury my face in his chest.
“Now?” I choke out. “You want to marry me now?”
“Name the time and the place and I’ll be there. I’m committed to this life with you. Not a single doubt in my mind. You’re my present and my future, and our relationship is the most important thing in my life.”
“Yes,” I say, wiping my face and wobbling on my skates. “Yes.”
He holds the box for me to take the ring. “You get the ring while I hold you. I didn’t think this through well.” He lets out a self-conscious chuckle.
But he did. This arena has changed my life, and while it might be his favorite place to be, it’s quickly become mine too. Because I get to see him do what he loves, experience the joy it brings him, see the body and its mechanics in a whole new light.
If anyone had ever asked me where I wanted to be proposed to, I never would have said a hockey rink. But I also wouldn’t have thought my perfect partner would be ten years younger than me, a professional athlete, or a man who’d put me above everything and everyone else. There was no way for me to knowhewas coming or that we were even possible.
We’re an example of how the world works in strange and fabulous ways. That sometimes it takes years for all the threads of a life to be sewn together in a pattern that finally makes sense, where you can see each stitch, but also the whole mosaic of squares that make up the quilt of your life. And I’m so grateful that the new squares we’ll be sewing onto our life quilts will be done together—side by side. The greatest gift.
“Are you really going to teach me how to skate?” I ask after I’ve slid the square cut diamond ring onto my finger.
“Can’t have the mother of my children sitting on the sidelines,” he says. “I want you right beside me, part of the action.”
It’s exactly where I want to be, too, and when I rise up to kiss him, I almost slip, my feet shooting out behind me. True to his words, he tightens his arms around me, keeping me close, keeping me steady before drawing me into a kiss.
“Today’s just the start,” he says. “I never knew life could be so good.”
Epilogue
Logan
Two years later
