Despite how amazing it felt, she wanted him to know this wasn’t a joke, not to her. “I’m serious, Deacon. What if one day a switch flips in me and something, I don’t know what, I can’t keep whatever it is under control?” As the words were coming out of her mouth, she heard how irrational they sounded. She’d never heard them out loud before because she’d never voiced them, never even allowed herself to admit them in her own head. Now that she had, it was almost like some of the power was gone.
He didn’t smile, just held her hand. “For the record, I don’t think that will happen. But if it does, then we’ll deal with it.Together. I want to marry you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want to raise our girls together, as sisters. I want to have more babies with you, if you want, or not if you don’t. I want you to be the last thing I see every night before I go to bed and the first thing I see every morning. I want to spend every day thinking of new ways to make your life happier, easier, more fun, and more full.
“I want to sit on the couch, curl up, read books, binge Netflix shows, scroll through our phones, or just do nothing with you. I want to travel with you and the girls and explore the world together. I want to wake up one day, twenty years from now, and realize, somehow, someway, I love you even more than I do today, which at this moment I think is fucking impossible. I want to have the legal right to say that I am Jenna Thomas’s husband or Jenna St. Claire’s husband if you want to take my name, or hell I’ll be Mr. Deacon Thomas, I don’t care. From the moment our eyes met, something inside me just…”
Jenna waited, waited to hear if he’d be able to put intowords what she’d not been able to describe. The phenomenon of what occurred when their eyes met.
“…saw you,reallysaw you, and you saw me. It was different than anything I’d ever felt. And whatever life throws at us, whatever flips, whatever comes—we’ll face it together. I’ll wait a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade, whatever it takes, and if it takes my whole life waiting then it will be a life well spent because I love you, and there’s nothing that matters more than love.”
Deacon pulled out a ring so beautiful it took Jenna’s breath away and started to get down on one knee. It was a solitaire stone on a platinum band. The fairy lights caused a prism to explode.
“Jenna Faline Thomas, will you marry me?”
Jenna felt herself going into fight or flight, and her instinct was to go with flight, but she had Yaya’s words in her head.When is love, don’t think, just yes.
“Yes,” she breathed. The single three letter word came out barely above a whisper.
“Okay, I understand. I will try ag—” He was already standing when he paused. “Wait, did you sayyes?”
She nodded.
“You said yes?” he repeated, his face in shock.
She nodded to give him both visual and auditory confirmation. “Yes.”
He stood, cupped her face, and kissed her with a pent-up passion she didn’t even know existed. The kiss was a wildfire, raw and uncontainable, igniting every nerve and fiber within her body as if setting off a cascade of fireworks, each explosion of sensation more intense and intoxicating than the last. It was a stormy sea, a symphony of harmonizing lips and tongues, a dance of unbridled desire that left them breathless and begging for more.
When he broke the kiss, she could barely breathe. “Ican’t believe we are engaged. I don’t know what I’m going to tell Blake.”
Deacon rested his forehead on Jenna’s. “She’s gonna be bummed we didn’t get to do phases three through six.”
“What?” she asked.
“Oh, right, I should probably tell you, this was Blake’s idea. She and Noah showed up at my house today during their lunch.”
‘What? Oh, the text.” With everything that had happened, Jenna totally forgot it was Blake’s text that got her to come down here. “She told you to propose tome? That’s why you’re proposing?!”
“No, she asked me if I loved you and how I felt about marriage. She told me that you were not the take things slow type of person. She said if I gave you too much time, you’d overthink your way out of a good thing.Shock and awe, was I think how she put it. She said, and I quote, ‘trying to date you would be like trying to ice skate on a pool of Jell-O, destructive, messy, and pointless.’”
“She said that?”
Deacon nodded. “I told you surprises and impresses me every day. We both decided to incorporate Dawson’s Creek. Her first idea was buying you a wall, which apparently is something Pacey does, but I remembered you pointing out the boat when we were at the restaurant, so I suggested this. She was on board, no pun intended.”
“And you just talked to her today at lunch.”
“Yes.”
“And you got this and this in eight hours?” She pointed at the boat and the ring.
He was quiet for a moment. “I got the boat in eight hours because it was docked in San Francisco.”
She looked at the ring. “Was this your late wife’s?—”
“No,” he quickly corrected her. “No, but I didn’t get it today.”
She looked up at him. “When did you get it?”
“The day after we got back from Oregon,” he admitted, almost sheepishly. “Did you see the engraving?”
