"Tucker---"
"Wait." He stands. Comes around the table. Gets down on one knee on the kitchen floor, and the sight of this man---this tall, steady, beautiful man who carried my suitcase and read Ishiguro and drove through a hurricane to keep me safe---kneeling in our kitchen with a sapphire ring and eyes full of everything he's never been able to say easily.
"Kassidy Monroe." His voice is steady, but his hands aren't. The box trembles slightly, and that tremor---that tiny, human imperfection---undoes me completely. "You're bossy. You're competitive. You talk to yourself, you steal the covers, and you play Scrabble like it's a blood sport."
"This is the worst proposal ever."
"I'm not done." He catches my hand. "You're also the bravest person I know. The most passionate, the most honest, the most infuriatingly organized. You outline your feelings and color-code your fears and write love stories that make strangers cry on airplanes. You made me believe in something when I'd forgotten how. You gave me a reason to come home."
The tears are falling. They've been falling since the box opened, and they're not stopping, and my face is a disaster, and I don't care.
"Will you marry me?"
The answer has been living in my chest since the night at the inn. Since the morning after, when I ran. Since the gas station where I cried, and the two weeks of hiding, and the night he showed up with Thai food and saidyou're everything.The answer has been woven into every chapter of every book I've written since the day Tucker Brennan carried my suitcase and I mistook him for the bellhop.
"That is the worst proposal ever," I say, tears streaming. "Yes. Absolutely yes."
TUCKER
She's crying and laughing and calling my proposal terrible, and it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
The ring slides onto her finger---a perfect fit, because I stole her ring size from a jewelry box she doesn't know I opened. (Reconnaissance is a transferable skill.) The sapphire catches the lamplight, and her hand---the hand that types stories and grips Scrabble tiles and holds mine in the dark---looks like it was always meant to wear this ring.
"You're seriously proposing?" she says, staring at her hand.
"You seriously said yes."
"I said 'absolutely yes.' There's a distinction."
"Noted. I'll put it in the report."
She laughs---the full, unguarded laugh that I fell in love with in a library during a hurricane---and pulls me to my feet. Herarms wrap around my neck, and she kisses me with the salt of her tears on both our mouths.
"How long have you had the ring?"
"Two months."
"Two months! Tucker Brennan, you carried a ring for two months and---"
"I was waiting for the right moment."
"And the right moment was me accidentally telling you my fictional hero proposes?"
"You wrote the scene. I just staged it."
"We are co-authoring our lives now. I hope you understand that."
"I wouldn't have it any other way."
She pulls me toward the bedroom by my shirt collar, walking backward, and the sapphire catches the hallway light as her fingers work my buttons. The sight of it---my ring, on her hand, moving against my chest---does something to me that I don't have a tactical term for. Possessive isn't the right word. Neither is tender. It's both, fused together, and it lives somewhere below my ribs and doesn't move.
"Hi, fiancé," she says, and her voice has that low, particular quality it gets when she's done being witty and means every word.
"Hi, fiancée."
She laughs, and then she kisses me, and the laugh dissolves into something that isn't a laugh at all.
We fall onto the bed together---her back hitting the mattress, my weight following, her hands already pulling my shirt free. She's still in the dark blue dress, and I reach for the zipper at her back the way I've reached for it a hundred times by now, but tonight it feels different. Slower. She arches up into my hands, and when the dress slides away she's warm and bare and looking at me like I hung the harbor lights.
