“I want to call you my forever,” he continues. “I want choosing you every day, on purpose. I want a life that doesn’t wobble when things get hard.”
I’m already crying. Absolutely not subtle about it. Whatever. I’ve had worse breakdowns in this place.
“I don’t need a date,” Silas says, calm and sure as though he’s not on one knee in the middle of a packed dance floor. “I don’t need a plan tonight. I just need you to know that this—” He gestures between us. “—this is it for me. It always has been.”
My chest feels too full.
“I love you,” he says. “Will you marry me,hermoso?”
The music keeps pounding, but everything else seems to stall out, as if the room is holding its breath.
“Yes,” I blurt. “Yes. Obviously yes.”
Relief crosses his face so fast it makes my throat ache. Hestands, sliding the ring onto my finger with hands that don’t shake, even though mine absolutely do.
I laugh and cry at the same time and throw myself into his arms, wrapping around him like gravity has temporarily stopped applying to me.
Our friends lose their minds. Eli starts saying something about being the best man, while Micah tells him obviously it’s going to be him.
Silas laughs into my hair, holding me tight.
“I knew you’d say yes,” he murmurs.
“You proposed in Riot,” I sniff. “You absolutely knew.”
“I planned responsibly,” he says, like this is a completely normal thing to say right now.
Three years ago, I thought loving someone meant I had to shrink myself. Now, I know better. Silas presses a kiss to my temple, warm and steady.
“We don’t have to rush,” he says quietly.
I grin, lifting my hand so the ring catches the light. “Good. Because I have exams.”
He chuckles, pulling me close.
We finally stumble through the door sometime after 2 a.m., both of us flushed and laughing, my ring catching every stray light in the hallway as though it’s trying to prove it’s real. Silas kicks the door shut behind us, deadbolts it without looking, then turns and backs me gently against the wall with his body—chest to chest, hips to hips, heat rolling off him in waves.
I’m still buzzing—alcohol, adrenaline, the high ofyesand the way our friends screamed when he slid the ring on. My hands are shaking a little when I reach up to cup his face.
He catches them, brings them to his mouth, kisses each knuckle slow and deliberate, eyes locked on mine.
“You don’t have exams tonight,” he murmurs, voice low and rough, the way it gets when he’s already thinking about how he wants to take me apart. “Or tomorrow.”
My breath hitches. “No. I don’t.”
“Which means…” His lips brush the inside of my wrist, then the pulse point, then up the inside of my forearm—slow, deliberate, mapping every sensitive spot he’s learned by heart over the last three years. “I have all night to help you get rid of the rest of that tension.”
Heat floods me so fast my knees almost buckle.
“Silas—”
He presses closer, thigh sliding between mine, giving me just enough friction to make me gasp. His mouth finds the side of my neck—open, wet kisses that turn into soft bites, then soothing licks. One hand slides under my shirt, palm flat and warm against my stomach, fingers splaying wide like he’s trying to feel every inch of me at once.
“You’ve been wound so tight lately,” he whispers against my skin, voice dark and smooth as velvet. “All those late nights, all that studying, all that pressure… I’ve felt it in the way you tense when you think I’m asleep.”
I whimper when his teeth graze my earlobe.
“Let me take it,” he says. “Let me make you forget everything except how good this feels. How goodwefeel.”
