Chapter 39
Chapter Thirty-Nine
HAPPILY EVER DURING
Arden
Is there anything better than a bath? I mean, besides coffee, or finding a parking spot directly in front of your destination in Boston, or the way Will looks when he's concentrating on his crossword puzzle before he tosses it out to me to let me get that hit of crossword dopamine by knowing the answer. But right now, submerged in water hot enough to make my skin bloom pink, I'm voting bath. There's something almost biblical about it, or maybe primordial, this feeling of being wholly embraced by warmth that takes the exact shape of your body's negative space. There’s only one other place I feel so safely surrounded.
I sink deeper until only my head remains above the surface, along with my toes, which grip the opposite end of the porcelain tub. It's dangerously easy to lose track of time in here, which isn't ideal given that we’re supposed to be meeting our friends for dinner later.
Will’s giving some kind of lecture tonight at the museum, it’s going to be a big deal, and he’s been nervous about it for weeks. It’s funny, nerves never really shine through for him, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen it since he’s distanced himself from his parents. And he’s got more nerves about it than you would expect. He hasn’t practiced in front of me, jokingly saying he’d rather I dismantle his career publicly with a challenge than give him any sort of tip off this time. But I’ve seen him pacing around the small space silently practicing in his own mind.
Rosealie has already started texting me a series of increasingly dramatic countdown messages making sure we won't be late.
I'm debating whether I can justify another five minutes when Will appears, settling himself on the bathmat beside the tub. He does this sometimes, comes to sit with me while I bathe. It's not sexual, usually , most of the time he just sits against the tub and listens to me ramble about my day, about the book I'm reading, about how well Barry the Basil is doing since I started feeding him ice cubes for breakfast. To which he always just smiles. But so often when he comes home from work, if I’ve already retreated to the bathtub, he just sits next to me to ask about my day, listening to the most mundane details.
But there's something different in his face today. I've learned to read the microscopic shifts in his expressions over time, the way the corner of his mouth twitches when he's trying not to laugh, how his only one eye narrows when he's skeptical. Right now, there's a look in his eyes I'm not sure I've seen before.
I sit up slightly, squeezing water from my hair.
"Aren't you going to ask me about my day?" I ask as he dips his fingers into the water, creating lazy swirls in the bubbles that brush against my skin.
"I will..." he says, that unfamiliar look still dancing across his features. "But you should ask me about mine first." He flicks water at my face playfully.
"How very dare you," I gasp, wiping bubbles from my nose. "I'm in a vulnerable position here."
"You're in a bathtub, not naked at a talent show." There's still something simmering beneath his usual amusement.
"Fine, how was your day, Will?" I ask with exaggerated patience.
"Terrible," he says, maintaining an impressively stern face despite the way his eyes are practically sparkling with suppressed something.
I sit up straighter, folding my arms on the edge of the tub. You'd think being naked would make this conversation more charged, but we passed that particular threshold of comfort almost immediately. Now it's just another version of us, me in the bath, him perched beside it.
"Is that so?" I prompt. "Did you get splashed by a car on your way to work?"
"Worse."
"Hmm... did you forget everything you know about art and make a total fool of yourself in front of everyone?"
"So, so much worse..."
"Oh, you must have tripped and fallen face-first on your run this morning, and Titian just sat there in his judgemental-dog way and laughed."
"You're not going to believe me, but it's even worse." His sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, the ink on his forearms contrasting the white porcelain as he covers my folded hands with his own.
"I'm on the edge of my seat."
"It started out like most days, but I just knew it wouldn't be. I knew the minute I woke up, it wouldn't be like any other day. But I tried. I kissed you goodbye, headed off to work, but on my way there I had this gut-wrenching feeling..."
There's a shift in his tone now, something serious beneath the playful setup that makes me pay closer attention.
"It was terrible," he continues. "I made it three blocks from home and I realized, I've completely failed here. I don't think there's any way you could possibly know."
"Know what?"
"How much I love you."
I laugh, because of course I do. Once I finally got to the point of admitting it, it became the clearest view. The shift from the black and white days of Kansas, to the technicolor world of Oz. Even on the most normal of days, the ones that will be like any other, they aren’t and they never have been. Most days being up before me, leaving six kisses across my face like a map for him to return home to. And every evening he does. So yes, I know how much he loves me. I know how much I love him. Because I didn’t just fall in love with him, I fell in love with myself when I was with him. Not through his eyes, but my own.
His presence wasn't a mirror, but the way light refracts through glass, revealing colors I'd forgotten were there. In those moments together, I discovered corners of myself that had been waiting quietly in shadow. It wasn't that he showed me who I could be, rather, being with him created a space where I finally recognized who I'd been all along. I didn't need his validation to know my worth, instead, his presence somehow gave me permission to acknowledge what had always been true: I was someone worth knowing, worth being, worth loving. Not because he thought so, but because I finally allowed myself to see it.
But mostly, I know it because even in the moments of painful quiet, when we're both lost in our own thoughts, there's something steady in the air between us. A frequency only we can hear. His love isn't just in the grand gestures or the impassioned speeches. It's in the silences. In the spaces between words. Even in our deepest thoughts, our heaviest moments, there is no silence that would ever make me doubt that again. Because loving each other isn't something we just do, it's something we are.
It’s such a Will thing to build up to. The idea that I might not know.
"Will, I know you love me." I lean in for a kiss that he deliberately dodges with a slight smile.
"No, Arden. How much I love you. You don't. You couldn't possibly. Because it is not possible. And while you of all people could do impossible things..."
For all the places I thought my life would change, I never imagined it would be in our bathroom, but that seems to be our place. Not in the bathroom of a loud bar, and certainly not while I'm naked with my hair dripping onto his rolled-up sleeves. Making the white cotton more translucent to reveal the hidden parts of his tattoos. But the realization that I'm wrong about this, like I've been wrong about so many things when it comes to Will, washes over me along with the lingering bubbles.
"Do you know how much I love you?" he asks, still not looking at me, instead watching his fingers create ripples in the water. His eyes do this sometimes, dancing around the point he's trying to make, like his brain is moving faster than his mouth can keep up with. But they always find their way back to me eventually.
"I think so..." I try again for that kiss, but he shakes his head with a smile that suggests I've walked right into whatever trap he's laying.
"See, that's where I've failed.” His fingers continually creating absent patterns in the water. “Because you don't. Then I realized, you couldn't. It's not possible.” His eyes find mine, holding something more than my gaze.
“I've thought about it. It's immeasurable. It's math I can't comprehend, poetry I could never write, it's space, time, and all the things I never imagined. The problems of the universe I can't solve. And I don't need to measure it, I don't need to know how it works, I just need you to feel it. Like gravity.”
I watch his face as the words fall between us, landing like droplets in the water around me and creating ripples against my skin.
“You need to feel it with every step. Knowing how immensely I love you. In a way that time will only amplify. Our lives and all the moments in them could hang on the walls of any museum. Framed in the most opulent gold for the world to revel at. And it still wouldn't be enough."
I might be completely nude, but as he sits there on our punny ‘get naked’ bath mat, his eyes are on mine in a way that makes me feel more exposed than my actual nakedness ever could. There's an intimacy in every word that strips away everything else.
Language really is a wild thing. We spend years learning words, how to string them together, how to make them dance. But in moments like this, they become something else entirely, they transform into feelings you can actually touch, like electricity in the air before a storm. The same words I've heard my entire life suddenly arrange themselves into a pattern I know I'll never be able to unhear.
I know what he's saying. It is incomprehensible because I feel it too, in a way I fought against for so long, keeping everything at arm's length. Convinced that slower meant safer, that careful meant protected. Too afraid of what it would mean, too scared we wouldn't get this moment, or worse, what would happen when we did. This happily ever after that's written across his face like the ending of a story I never thought I existed.
"I love you," he continues, his voice soft in the steam-hazed bathroom. "I will love you. I have known that I love you longer than makes any sense, and I will continue to love as long as you'll let me, and if the day comes that you decide you don't feel the same, I will love you even beyond that. Let's live our life together, darling. However we want. Please."
Our life. The two words emerge like a prayer to something greater than either one of us. Maybe to just that, a prayer to our life. The one we have been building with each shared grocery list. Every time our heads hit adjacent pillows and it's not close enough. The one where we decided unequivocally, whatever life we will have, will be of our choosing.
That last word 'please' lingers in the moisture-laden air like a held breath. It holds everything we've ever been and everything we could become. Every late night conversation, every shared dream, every moment of doubt transformed into certainty. A lifetime of possibilities wrapped in a single syllable, waiting for my answer.
His free hand appears between us, holding out a ring that catches the bathroom light like it's been waiting for this moment. I laugh, not because it's funny, but because what else do you do when the man you fought so hard against loving proves yet again why fighting was pointless? That he was right. And this very well may be the story we tell our kids one day.
This man who never tried to capture my light for himself or dim it for his comfort, who never tried to fix me or put me back together because he never saw me as broken in the first place
"You really want to marry me?"
"Immeasurably," he says. "But I'm asking you."
"Immeasurably," I echo, and it's the truest thing I've ever said.
He slips the ring on my finger and finally, finally grants me that kiss I've been chasing. It’s not one diamond, but many small rectangular ones lined up like books on a shelf, he explains. Wrapping all the way around the band. For our story. Not your typical engagement ring, but there has never been anything typical about Will Sterling, and for the rest of my life, I hope there never is.
He stands, and strips himself of his work clothes before joining me in our much-too-small-for-two-people tub. The water sloshes dangerously close to the edge as he settles behind me, pulling me back against his chest.
“What about your big lecture, dinner?” I ask suddenly, wondering how much time we have to exist before we have to leave this.
“I had a different plan,” he says as his body takes shape around me, “but this was the moment.”
His arms wrap around me like they were designed for exactly this purpose, one braced under my breasts with his thumb stroking my ribs, the other resting across my collarbones, his palm warm against my shoulder. The way I fit here, have always fit here, makes sense when nothing else has.
"You're going to be my wife," he says it like he's testing out the words.
"You're going to be my husband," I counter, and feel him smile against my shoulder.
"Nothing matters beyond that. Not now, not ever."
"It's that easy, huh?" I whisper, not as much a question as my tone implies, but the revelation he has made so clear.
"Loving you is the easiest thing in the world. Easy as breathing. Even when it's not, and I might forget how, my body remembers."