"No," she said. "It doesn't."
"I just wanted to say that."
"I know." Her hand moved to my jaw. Held it. "I know, Sawyer."
Bishop whinnied from the shade, impatient with the whole enterprise.
She laughed. I did too.
"We should head back," I said.
“Yeah.” She paused. Ran her thumb across my cheek…hummed when I turned my head to kiss her palm. “We should.”
My eyes met hers again. I wanted very, very badly to ask her something I shouldn't.
But she said it first.
“Marry me,” she whispered.
The breath went out of me.
She held my gaze. Chin slightly lifted, the way it always was when she'd said something bold and was committed to it.
"I know," she went on. "I know what that looks like. My agent is going to lose his mind and the press is going to have a field day and I'm about to be on a billboard and none of that—" She stopped. Swallowed. "None of that actually matters to me as much as I thought it did. That's the thing I figured out in Austin." Her thumb moved against my jaw. "I was sitting in a five-star hotel room after the best table read of my career and all I wanted was to be in a two-hundred-square-foot trailer with you."
I didn't say anything.
"I'm going to be impossible," she said. "I need you to know that going in. I'm going to travel and I'm going to have stretches where I'm Daphne for so long I lose the thread back to myself and I'm going to need—" She stopped. "I'm going to need someone who doesn't ask me to choose."
"I know," I said.
"You say that."
"I mean it." I held her face. "I've been watching you for eight months figure out how to be both things at once. I'm not asking you to stop." My thumb moved against her cheekbone. "That would be asking you to be someone you're not…and I would never, Daniela.Never.”
Her breath came out unsteady.
"That's a really good answer," she said.
"I've had time to think about it."
"Since when?"
"December," I said. "The field. When you walked out of Millie's back door in the dark and came straight to me like you already knew where you were going."
She closed her eyes.
Opened them.
"I did know," she said quietly. "That's been the problem the whole time."
I kissed her.
She kissed me back with her whole self in it—no performance, no management, just Daniela in the afternoon sun with creek water and cedar in the air around us and her hands in my hair and the flannel half off her shoulder and everything she was and everything she was going to be all present at once, all of it hers, none of it going anywhere.
When we finally broke apart she was smiling.
"Yes," I said, into it.
