Page 109 of Sexting My Ex’s Dad

She goes still. I don’t dress it up. I don’t give it a speech. I’m too old and too tired for performance.

“I want mornings,” I tell her. “I want school lunches and bus stops and your hand finding me in the kitchen without thinking about it. I want to be where Ivy forgets to ask if I’m coming back since I already did. And I want you in my bed for reasons both noble and absolutely not noble.”

That blushes Athena beautifully.

Ivy lifts her head slightly from where she’s half-asleep and mutters, “Ew.”

Neither of us laugh until she falls fully asleep again. Then we both do, quietly enough not to wake her.

Athena shifts carefully, easing Ivy’s legs farther onto the recliner while our daughter sleeps through all of it with the heavy trust children reserve for people who haven’t failed them recently. Then she looks back at me, still half smiling from Ivy’s interruption, and the room goes quieter than it already was.

I study her for a second, then glance at Ivy, then back at Athena.

“What?” she asks softly, reading my face too easily.

I don’t answer right away. My hand moves instead, reaching for the plastic drawer built into the side table. There’s nothing romantic about hospital furniture, and the fact that this is happening beside a blood pressure cuff and a half-empty water pitcher should probably bother me more than it does.

Athena’s brows draw together. “Nathan.”

I pull open the drawer and take out the small velvet box I asked Daniel to pick up two days ago after he insulted me for twenty straight minutes and then, being Daniel, went anyway.

Athena goes perfectly still.

For a second neither of us says anything. Ivy sleeps on, one arm flung over her head, oblivious in the way only children can be when adults are about to alter the architecture of their lives.

“You are not,” Athena whispers.

“I am,” I reply.

Her lips part then close. The color in her face shifts, and her eyes start shining before I’ve even opened the box.

“Nathan,” she says again, quieter this time, like the name itself has become fragile.

I flip the box open.

The ring is simple. A clean stone, bright and steady, set in a band I could actually picture on her hand for the rest of our lives. I knew the second I saw it that anything louder would’ve been a lie. Athena isn’t spectacle. She’s warmth with teeth. She’s the hand at the center of a storm.

She stares at it, then at me.

“This is not how I pictured you doing this,” she says, voice trembling around a laugh.

I glance around the room. “You mean the deluxe recovery suite didn’t scream romance.”

That gets the laugh out of her, wet and helpless and beautiful enough to break me open. She presses her fingers to her mouth, then drags them away and shakes her head like she still doesn’t trust what she’s seeing.

“I don’t have a speech,” I tell her. “Not a polished one. I’m bruised, I’m in a hospital bed, and if I try to kneel right now, I’ll probably end up back on morphine. So you’re getting the truth.”

Her eyes lock on mine.

“I love you,” I say. “I love you in all the ways that matter and in several ways that are absolutely not appropriate for this floor. I love your mind, your mouth, your impossible strength, and the way you made a life where there should’ve only been wreckage. I love the child sleeping three feet from us, and I hate every year I missed, but I’m done hating years I can’t get back when I could spend that time building the ones ahead.”

Athena’s chin wobbles once, and she hates that, I can tell. I keep going anyway.

“I want the whole thing,” I say quietly. “I want mornings and school forms and rent or mortgages and bad takeout and old age and whatever fights we survive after this one. I want your hand in mine when nothing is happening, not only when everything is. And if you’ll let me, I want to marry you.”

She stares at me for one long beat, then another.

Her voice, when it comes, is very soft. “You really brought me a ring in a hospital.”