She looked at me for a long moment and then said "She's a lucky woman" in a tone that was no longer amused but something warmer, and took the paper, and told me to come back this morning at eight.
It is now eight thirteen. Livia is sitting at the small outdoor table with her coffee, wearing jeans and one of my sweaters that she has systematically stolen and that hangs on her like a dress. She watches me with the patient, curious expression she wears when she knows I am up to something. I am holding a small white bakery box. My heart is doing something that would concern me greatly if I did not have full contextual awareness that this is the appropriate cardiovascular response to the imminent initiation of a life-altering event.
I sit down. The chair is human-scaled and I do not fit well, but I have stopped apologizing for the physical facts of my existence and simply arrange myself as carefully as possible without commentary. I place the box on the table between us.
"Narod," Livia says.
"I brought you a donut," I say, which is accurate but incomplete.
"You're being weird."
"I am operating within normal parameters."
"You're sitting completely still and staring at a bakery box like it contains a live explosive." She tilts her head, eyes narrowing behind her glasses in the expression that means she is shifting into investigative mode. "What did you do."
"I have not done anything," I say. "Yet."
She looks at me. She looks at the box. She reaches out and lifts the lid with the slow, deliberate caution of someone defusing the theoretical explosive she just mentioned. Inside is a single large raspberry-filled donut, golden and perfect and containing within its gooey structural center a simple round-cut diamond ring that cost me three months salary and several hours of consultation with a jeweler who kept trying to sell me something larger until I explained that Livia would find ostentatious gemwork impractical and possibly audit me for poor financial planning.
She lifts the donut. She is smiling, unsuspecting, and she brings it to her mouth and takes a substantial bite directly through the outer shell and into the filling, and I watch in real-time as her expression shifts from contentment to confusion to wide-eyed choking panic as she encounters the ring.
She makes a muffled sound of alarm. Her hand flies up to her mouth. I half-rise from my chair, my own panic spiking, mentally cataloguing the steps of the Heimlich maneuver, but she holds up her other hand in a stop gesture and chews very, very carefully, and then swallows, and then reaches into her mouth and extracts, with two fingers, a small diamond ring covered in raspberry filling.
She stares at it.
She stares at me.
"Narod," she says.
I abandon the chair entirely and go down on one knee on the sidewalk, which brings me closer to her eye level and also produces an immediate and somewhat overwhelming sense of correctness, the physical position matching the enormity of what I am about to say. My heart is extremely loud. I can hear it in my ears. This is fine. This is the appropriate physiological response.
"Livia Chordas," I say. My voice comes out steady, which surprises me, given the rest of my internal state. "I have spent my entire adult life calculating risk and managing variables and attempting to compress myself into something that would not disrupt the world around me. You have comprehensively dismantled that operational framework. You have made it abundantly clear that you prefer me uncompressed. You havereorganized my filing systems and stolen my clothing and informed me, on multiple occasions, that my risk models were optimizing for the wrong outcome." I look at her face, at the raspberry filling on her thumb and the diamond ring in her palm and the expression she is wearing that I cannot name but can feel in my chest like the drums at the festival. "I am no longer interested in minimizing my impact. I am interested in spending the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me."
It is not phrased as a question. I have checked my work. I know the answer.
She launches herself out of the chair and into my arms with enough velocity that I have to brace to catch her, and she is laughing and possibly crying and saying "yes" into my collar, and I am holding her against my chest with both arms, kneeling on a public sidewalk outside a bakery at eight fifteen on a Thursday morning, and I have never been more certain of a single calculated outcome in my entire life.
"Vegas," she says into my shirt.
I pull back enough to see her face. "What."
"Let's go to Vegas." Her eyes are bright and slightly manic and utterly serious. "Right now. Let's just go and get married and not tell anyone until it's done."
I blink. My internal processing attempts to generate a reasonable objection and finds none. "That is extremely impulsive."
"I know." She grins. "Do you hate it?"
I run the model. It takes approximately zero seconds. "No," I say. "I find it statistically perfect."
We are married fourteen hours later by an Orc drag queen named Nima who performs the ceremony in four-inch heels and a gown covered in purple sequins, and when she pronounces us legally bound she lets out a full Orc battle cry that echoesthrough the tacky chapel, and Livia laughs so hard she nearly drops her bouquet.
The honeymoon suite has a bed large enough to accommodate my dimensions. I carry her over the threshold because she insists and because I find I like the tradition more than I expected. The door closes behind us. The Las Vegas lights bleed neon through the windows. Livia looks at me, her left hand weighted with the ring she didn't take out of her mouth until I cleaned it with my pocket square, and she smiles.
"Hello, husband," she says.
The chest warmth expands until it fills my entire available capacity.
"Hello, wife," I say, and kiss her, and the model holds.
