Her cheek hits my skin as she tangles her fingers with mine. “What were you running from?”
My nose wrinkles. “Everything, I guess, and also nothing. My parents were hinting at retirement, and Wolfe didn’t want the bar. He was already deep into a tattooing apprenticeship and he had Amia on the way. Almond was in the middle of cosmetology school. It was clear that if it was going to be passed down, it would be to me, and it was also clear that if they couldn’t pass it down to me, they weren’t going to stop working anytime soon. At the time, it felt like a lot of pressure. Like the weight of their happiness rested solely on my unprepared shoulders. So I did what I always did: I ran. Took avoiding my problems to the most dramatic level and got out of here.” I shake my head. I was so stupid. “I don’t know what I was thinking, or if I was at all. I didn’t even tell anyone I was leaving before I went. I left a note for Wolfe to find, and he did, but… it wasn’t right. None of it. Running from my problems. Making my parents work foryearsmore. Missing out on Amia’s milestones. Missing out on Wolfe’s and Almond’s, too. All because I was scared to have real-world responsibilities, as if those wouldn’t come for me one way or another eventually, whether I hurt the people I loved or not. But I chose the path that led to the most damage anyway.”
“You came back, though,” she says. “And you chose transformation. Wings. To be a man who stays rather than runs.”
I sigh. “Yeah,” I agree. “I’ve tried, anyway.”
She tugs me to the bed, gently encouraging me to let go of the tension tightening the muscles in my back as she pushes me into the pillows. Following after, she tucks herself into my side, burrowing into the space where she fits perfectly.
“You’ve succeeded,” she says once we’re settled to her liking. “Surpassed expectations. You don’t just stay, Fox, you make things better. We all make mistakes that we regret, some bigger than others, but our mistakes aren’t what make us who we are. How we respond to them is. How we learn from them is. You made your mistakes, and the lesson you learned turned you into the sort of man that everyone around you can rely on.”
I breathe in her lilac scent, willing her words to take root in my soul. “I wish it was easier to feel like it was all worth it,” I reply. “I wish I could justbelieveyou.”
“You should always believe me,” she says. “Honestly, I’m kind of… not happy that you had those mistakes or needed the changes to yourself after, because I love your family and it sucks to think of them hurting with you gone, but… I’m grateful, I guess. It’s selfish, but it makes me feel so much more secure knowing that you’ve learned the importance of simplystayingthe hard way.” She lays her hand on my chest, then props her chin on it as she continues. “I never fully believe that I’ll get to keep the good things I’m given or that the people around me will love me enough to keep me. I always wonder when they’ll realize I’m not all I’m chalked up to be and leave me in the dust. With you, I don’t have to worry. I know you’ll stay, because the alternative would send you spiraling down a hole so dark, you’d never come out of it. You can’t handle the hint of an idea of you being like the man you used to be, and that’s comforting to me, because the man you used to be isn’t a man that I would feel safe with. The man you are now may leave during arguments or when things get too hard, but he comes back. He stays in the way that matters, and that means a lot, Fox. To me.”
I roll just enough to cocoon her in my embrace, letting my feathers cover us both—transform us both. “You’re easy to stay for,” I murmur into her hair. “My precious Poem. How have youtaken the worst of me and turned it into something good? What sort of magic do you possess?”
She puffs a warm breath over my neck. “No magic,” she replies, the words muffled by my heartbeat. “Only a thankfulness for your suffering born of selfishness.”
“I love your selfishness,” I tell her. “It fits so perfectly beside my need to worship you.”
She hugs me, warm hands pressing into feathertips on my back as her soft breaths sync with mine. After several moments spent in quiet bliss together, she breaks the silence with a knife, shoving it straight through to my heartstrings and plucking them on the blade.
“When I was a little girl, I used to dream about moments like this,” she all but whispers. “A man whoknowsme, and loves me anyway. Loves me because of it, maybe. A man who wouldn’t want to be anywhere else but by my side. I couldn’t wait to grow up and have that man and make a family with him. Have little babies whose whole entire world would be loving me, if only for a few years. Have children who come home from school to see my face and know without a doubt that they love me as much as their little hearts can love. It seems simple sometimes, like maybe the things I want aren’t aiming high enough, but… It’s what I want, you know? I want a life where I come home every day to a family who not only wants me with them, but finds joy in me just as much as I find joy in them. I want the sort of life that your mom has, waking up every day to your dad’s heart beating for her while the surety that her children cherish her as much as she cherishes them settles in her bones. And before that, I want to be one of those children that she cherishes so that I can learn to do it right from a woman who does it perfectly. I don’t have any aspirations outside of those. I work because I have to work, and I enjoy it because I love being a part of this town, but if I hadthat family… I’d be happy to never work another day in my life. I’d have all I could ever want or need in them.”
That is both the sweetest and most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever heard. “Your aspirations are perfect,” I tell her. “They’re beautiful and pure and so you.” I roll us until I’m on top of her, framing her face in my hands. I wipe away trails of wetness as they escape large, slate-gray princess eyes. “I want to be that man for you,” I murmur, kissing a tear my thumbs can’t reach. “I want to tuck you into my side every night before we go to bed, then kiss you awake every morning. I want to make little mini-Poems that wrap me around their fingers the same way you do. I want your eyes blinking up at me from tiny faces, and your attitude pouring forth from lisping mouths.” I lay my mouth against her nose, then her lips, pressing our hopes together between bated breaths. “What I wouldn’t give to have no escape from the life we could build. Trap me there, kit. Tie me down if you need to reassure yourself I’ll never leave. I’ll chain myself gladly to this future, if you’ll only let me.”
Her smile reads rueful. “Careful, Fox. That almost sounded like a marriage proposal.”
My brows furrow. Of course it is. What else would it be? “My every breath is a marriage proposal to you.” I reply. “The blood pumping through my veins asks you to marry me with every inch it travels. My skin pebbles, goosebumps rising in the hopes that you will make me yours. I do not speak apart from loving you, and I do not love you apart from wanting to spend the rest of my life with you. So it is a marriage proposal, Poem. They all are. Every day until you say yes, I am proposing to you.”
She blinks twice before her face crumples, and I crumple with it. Quickly, I roll us so that I don’t crush her when I bring her back to me, as close as she can be.
“I love you,” I murmur into her hair while she whimpers, sharps claws dragging along my chest as she tries to findpurchase. “I love you so much, and I’m here. I’ll be here. For as long as you’ll let me.”
She doesn’t reply verbally, but her nails finally find a place to rest, piercing my back in a plead to bring me closer. “I love you,” I repeat. “I love you so much.”
I tell her over and over again as she cries, and after, when she falls into a deep, exhausted sleep. “I love you,” I whisper into her slumbering ear. “Will you marry me, Poem? Will you decide I have worth beyond what I can see?” I sigh, closing my eyes and allowing the grip of sleep to take me under, too.
We sleep, her nail marks marring my back while my proposals hang heavy in the air and dried tears redden her skin. Our breaths merge as we rest, singing a song I only have half the lyrics to.
“I love you,” my exhale says.
“Marry me,” my inhale begs.
The rise and fall of her chest is my answer.
And I can only dream that it’s sayingyes.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
?
Parents are embarrassing at any age, I heard.
Poem
The last thing I would have ever expected to happen after my first proposal was for me to burst into tears, try to crawl into my man’s skin, then, when I finally accepted that crawling into a man’s skin isn’t possible on this plane of existence, fall asleep sobbing in his arms instead. The second-to-last thing I would have expected to happen is to be woken up by his parents bursting into his bedroom, taking one look at him shirtless and me disheveled, and backing right back out—after not a small amount of screaming and apologies on his mother’s part.
