Hell, they hadn’t even exchanged bonding marks yet. Maybe this was too soon.
I’ll plan something,Aaren decided as he carded his fingers through Hades’ hair.Maybe if I have a fancy enough proposal, he will say yes?
“You look like you’re plotting something,” Hades said when he looked up at Aaren.
Aaren tried to look innocent. “Am I?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not!”
Hades laughed and pressed his face against Aaren’s belly. “Sure. If you say so.”
Emmy hadpickup lines for proposals. Of course he did.
“Here,” he said, brandishing a thick stack of lace-edged paper at Aaren. “Put them in his underwear. You will see results immediately.”
Aaren didn’t think Hades would appreciate having lacy paper suddenly crinkling around his balls. Then again, that was the point: to catch Hades by surprise with something intimate, with a question that Aaren meant with all his heart.
No, the difficult part was picking just one line to tuck into Hades’ underwear.
Aaren straightened his spine and accepted the stack gratefully.
Aaren gothis next bright idea a few weeks later.
Sure, he and Hades had exchanged their ‘I love you’s. And sure, they knew where they stood in each other’s lives.
But they had not exchanged bonding marks. Aaren had assumed that Hades was waiting until they got married, before they put those permanent markings on each other’s skin.
In the meantime, Aaren was moving forward with his plan.
He had bought some things with Hades’ credit card by now—fresh cheese curds all the way from Wisconsin, books, and even some shaving cream when he realized Hades’ was running low.
“You shouldn’t peek at the spending on my card this month,” Aaren said, just like he’d done for the shaving cream because he had wanted it to be a surprise.
“Oh?” Hades raised his eyebrows interestedly. “Are you planning something?”
“Maybe.” Aaren blushed and said no more.
Hades gave him a long look and went back to typing on his laptop. “Okay.”
Since Hades had kept his word about not checking the credit card records last month, Aaren went to the website he’d been lurking on, and placed his order.
“Hey, I have something for you,”Hades said one night when Aaren was twenty weeks along.
“Is it a ring?” Aaren’s mouth said.
Immediately after, he clapped his hands over his face, horrified. “That’s not what I meant! Oh gods. I don’t—It just came out. Like sometimes when you hold in your pee for too long, and a little bit comes out, but instead of clamping those muscles down, your body just lets go and suddenly you’ve pissed a giant lake around yourself.”
Then the reality of those words sank down around him, and Aaren could’ve moaned in humiliation.
“Please pretend that I was not here for the past five minutes,” Aaren whined.
Hades was watching him contemplatively. Then he broke into a smile, and slipped his arm around Aaren’s shoulders. “No, I heard nothing about rings or pee.”
“Oh gods,” Aaren said.
Hades grinned, dropping a kiss on the crown of Aaren’s head. “You’re amazing, sweetheart.”
