"Of course you did."
"I'm a fixer. I fix things. I also figure things out." Her hand is still on my chest. "Were you going to mention it?"
"I was building up to it. Just like you. Trying to make sure."
"Over breakfast?"
"After breakfast. In this room. With visual aids."
She glances at the Costco box. "Those visual aids?"
"Different visual aids."
Her laugh breaks the tension in the room like a crack in a frozen rink.
I set the box on the bed.
I look at her.
"Come to Cedar Falls. Be with me, Jane."
She doesn't answer immediately.
Her eyes search my face.
"There's always going to be a gap," she says. Her voice issteady. Not apologetic. Factual.
"Between your world and mine. Between Prescott money and my spreadsheets. Between the way you grew up and the way I'm still growing up." She doesn't flinch.
"I'm not embarrassed by it. But I need you to see it. All of it. The bucket under the ceiling leak and the four-month emergency fund I'm so proud of I could frame it. If I come here—if I do this—I'm bringing all of that with me."
The room is quiet.
She is looking at me directly while she says this. Not defending herself. Not apologizing. She is handing me the whole picture and asking me to look at it with my eyes open.
"I know," I say.
"You can't—"
"I'm not asking you to stop being who you are."
And I pray she hears everything I can't arrange into sentences.
That I don't want a woman without duct tape and audacity. That my world got sharper and louder and better the day she walked into it with a negative bank balance and volunteered to be my beard.
After a while, something in her expression settles. Like a knot she's been carrying loosened one thread at a time and finally slipped free.
Then, she groans, grabs the back of my neck and pulls me down.
Jane kisses me hard.
Both hands on my jaw. Her mouth finding mine urgently.
And when her hands touch my shoulders, I feel the difference. Possession. She knows what she wants.
The taste of her—coffee, lip balm, something underneath that is justher, the chemical signature I've been craving since Anguilla—hits my bloodstream like a direct line.
I'm done being patient.
