"No.”
I lean in close until I'm all she can see. "If you don't leave with me right now." I hold her gaze. "I'm going to burn this building down."
Her eyes search my face. "You wouldn't."
"I would."
She believes me. I see it move through her — not because she thinks I'm irrational but because she knows me well enough to know I'm not.
I take a step back and tilt my head toward the door. "Let's go."
She gets into my passenger seat without speaking.
The door closes. I start the engine. She stares straight ahead at the gray Sunday outside the windshield.
"Where are you taking me?"
I pull out of the lot and don't answer.
She sits with her hands in her lap, and her face remains composed, just like her mommy and daddy taught her. She looks out the window, watches the campus disappear behind us, and says nothing else.
Good.
We drive for twenty minutes.
When I pull up and throw the car in park, I turn to look at her.
She won’t look at me.
But I stare at her because she’s the girl I have been in love with since the moment I met her.
And she's not going anywhere.
I knew from the moment I saw her that she would be mine.
Not a feeling. Not a slow realization. A fact.
I was across a room, and she was in a blue dress, saying something that made everyone around her laugh, and she didn't laugh — just watched them with those eyes, completely still, completely unimpressed by her own effect on a room.
I thought: that one.
Two words. Done. No doubt about it.
I have not looked at her since and thought anything different.
She thinks the laptop changes something. She watched those videos and built a case against me the way her father's constituents build cases — with conviction and without all the facts. Those women were transactions. Meaningless. The difference between eating because you're hungry and sitting down to a meal that actually matters.
She is the meal that matters.
She is the only thing in my life I have never been casual about.
She said I want to break up as if the words had weight. Like they were load-bearing, standing in her dorm room with tears on her face, her voice steady, that backbone she grew while I was unconscious, holding her upright.
I almost respected it.
But she's mine. That's not sentiment. That's not love in the way people use that word when they mean something soft and negotiable. It's ownership. Total, decided, non-transferable. I knew it at a party in a blue dress, and I have known it every day since, and I will know it long after she stops fighting it.
I'm going to marry her.
