And she had tried to be careful.Considerate.She had presented her love to him and then left him to do with it what he would.
But this man had come here and told her that not only did he love her back, but he wanted all those things that Matilda had assumed for some time would never be hers.
“I know that I’m a little off the beaten path,” she told him.“I mean, as a human.”
“I’ll tell you right now,” he said, in his sternest voice, and it licked through her in a completely different way, “that I am definitely not open to hearing anybody talk shit about my girl, Matilda.”He leaned in closer.“Including you.”
She thought that her smile might crack open then and split her whole face.Maybe it already had.She wasn’t sure she had it in her to care, not when she finally understood what all her sister’s books had been talking about all this time.Not when she couldfeelit like this.That somehow they had gone from two people to one entity tonight.
There was no going back from that.
And related to that kind of magic, she knew she didn’t want todatethis man.
“The thing about me,” Matilda said, “as maybe you’ve observed over the past six weeks, or, you know, my previous whole entire life, is… When have I ever done anything the way I was supposed to?”
He grinned down at her and then kissed her, just enough to get them both a little breathless.“Tell me what that means,” he said when he pulled away again.
“What if forever started right away?”she asked.
And then she got to watch as Tennessee’s smile lit him up, as if he had his own sunlight beaming out from within.As if they both did.
“If you mean what I think you mean,” he said, low and gruff and as sure as ever, “my answer is yes.A thousand times yes.”
And when he kissed her the next time, she kissed him back.Then they started celebrating right then and there, because suddenly, forever was within reach.
It was everywhere.
Early the next morning, they gathered their things from her house and then his.Matilda sat on a stool in the diner and smiled blandly at the regulars when they trickled in at five on the dot.
Then, because she didn’t like sitting around with nothing to do, when she was finished eating the breakfast that Tennessee made her—without asking, because he knew what she liked—she busied herself in the kitchen.Wiping up, washing dishes.
And when he closed the place early with a sign on the door saying he’d be back in the morning, they drove out of town.They headed down into Marietta and hit up the courthouse, where they applied for a marriage license and because this was Montana, got married on the spot.
They didn’t exchange rings.They held hands and had to stop the truck to kiss a lot all the way back up the hill to Cowboy Point.
Then they ate at Mountain Mama Pizza that same night, on their very first public date, so that everyone could start catching up to where they’d been for a while now.
And really, Matilda thought, as she sat at a table with Tennessee’s arm around her shoulders and the Bennett sisters’ delicious concoctions on her plate and in her belly, this was the way to do it.
Forever was already sorted, so they had all the time in the world to figure out exactly what they wanted that to look like.
Because they already knew how it was going to end.
The two of them, together.
Everything else was purely optional.
Epilogue
Jenny Lisle wasremarkably pleased with herself.
Cowboy Point was welcoming in spring with a buzz of reaction to stern, unyielding, straightlaced Tennesseeactually datingditzy, odd, generally disheveled Matilda Stark.They were talking about it everywhere.They weren’t pretending anymore.
Jenny thought it was great.For the town and the newly dating couple.
Though Jenny thought that her son, who looked deeply satisfied himself and alsoat peacefor the first time that she could remember, was doing a little more than justdating.
She decided she would keep her peace on that, unless and until he decided to talk about it.Or turned up for tea he didn’t want again, the way he’d done when he was a closed-off teenager, too.Not that she would remind him of that.He might be in love, but he was still prickly.
