Chapter 14
SIMONE
The apartment is a mess because I haven't had the energy to care.
Coffee cup on the counter from yesterday. Laptop open on the couch. The Globe follow-up notes spread across my dining table like a crime scene. Yara's leftover containers in my fridge. My grandmother's cast iron on the stove because I washed it yesterday and haven't found the reason to put it away.
Gray walks in behind me and puts his duffel down by the door like he's done it a thousand times.
He looks around.
"This is where you live."
"This is where I live."
"It's you."
"It's a mess."
"It's you."
He crosses to the table. Picks up one of my source lists. Reads it. Puts it down. Runs his hand along the back of the couch. Stops at the window.
The view is nothing. A brick wall of the building next door and a slice of street between.
"You lived here six years."
"Seven."
"Okay."
He doesn't say anything else.
I watch him do the thing he does. The slow read of a space. He's cataloging. Not judging. Just learning the woman he flew across a country for.
I set my keys down. Take my jacket off. My feet are freezing from the sidewalk but I don't want to break the moment by finding socks.
"Gray."
"Yeah."
"Come here."
He comes.
I wrap my arms around his waist and put my cheek to his chest and let him hold me in my own kitchen for the first time. His hand finds the back of my neck. The other one settles low on my back.
"You flew for me."
"Yeah."
"In the middle of the night."
"Yeah."
"Nobody's done that for me."
"Well. Now somebody has."
I feel his heartbeat through his shirt.
"Stay."
"I'm staying."
"In Toronto."
"For however long you need."
"No. I mean. Tonight. Right now. Stay. Don't go to a hotel."
"I was never going to a hotel. I said that for you. I was always going to end up here."
"You're infuriating."
"Yeah."
"I love you."
"Keep saying that."
"I love you."
I feed him.
It's two thirty in the morning and I feed him because my grandmother raised me to feed a man who has traveled for you, and I'm not about to unlearn that on the night my life just changed.
I scramble eggs in the cast iron. Cut up a tomato I bought three days ago that somehow hasn't died.
Toast bread. He sits at my tiny counter on a stool that looks too small for him and watches me cook and does not offer to help and does not ask questions.
He has learned, in six days, that I feed people when my chest is too full for words.
I slide the plate in front of him.
He eats.
I eat standing up, hip against the counter, watching him.
"Good eggs, Baptiste."
"Shut up."
"I mean it."
"You'd eat cardboard right now."
"Yeah, but these aren't cardboard."
I sit on the stool next to him. Our knees touch under the counter. He reaches over and puts his hand on my thigh. Doesn't squeeze. Just rests.
"Talk to me about logistics."
"Right now?"
"Right now while I have you and I'm not going to spook."
"I'm not going to spook, Gray."
"Humor me."
I breathe out. Set my fork down.
"The follow-up is five thousand words. I have three weeks.
I can file it from anywhere. My editor doesn't care where my laptop lives.
I need to be in Toronto maybe twice a month for editorial meetings and for sources who won't take a call.
I have a lease on this apartment through October.
I can sublet. Or keep it if I want a landing pad on this end for a while.
Marcus lives in Vancouver. I'd be closer to him than I am now. "
"Okay."
"The Globe wants me on contract for the long form stuff. They'll take me remote. They already said so when I asked yesterday."
"You asked yesterday."
"I asked yesterday."
"Simone."
"I know."
"You were already planning."
"I was already planning. I just wasn't ready to say it out loud yet because I didn't want to say it over the phone and I didn't want to say it on your porch and not mean it. I wanted to say it tomorrow. In the apartment. With my notes in front of me. Like a proposal."
"You were going to propose me."
"Don't be cute."
"I'm being cute."
"Gray."
"Yeah."
"I'm saying it now instead. I want to come home with you.
To the cabin. To Crimson Hollow. To the Saturday breakfast crew you told me about on the ridge.
To the vineyard that smells like iron and the bookstore with the woman in band tees and the café with the honey cinnamon latte. All of it. I want all of it."
His hand tightens on my thigh.
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"Okay. We go home."
"When."
"Whenever you want."
"Friday."
"Friday."
"After I kill the Ottawa trip and pack two bags."
"Two bags."
"To start."
He picks up my hand. Kisses the knuckles.
"Baptiste."
"Mercer."
"I was going to give you six months."
"Yeah, well. You were wrong."
"I see that."
Friday night at eleven o'clock the cabin comes into view around the last bend and I feel something in my chest unlock that I did not know was locked.
Gray kills the engine.
I sit with my hand on the door and look at the porch.
"It looks different."
"It looks the same."
"It looks like mine."
He turns his head and looks at me and he smiles. Small. The one he does with the corner of his mouth. The one I have been thinking about since Toronto.
"It is yours."
We get my bags inside. He carries three. I carry one. The cast iron is in that one because I'm not an idiot.
The cabin smells like him. Like cedar and woodsmoke and the faint trace of whatever he's been cooking. The leather chair in the office is still in the office because he decided not to ship it. The fire is laid. He must have come up before the airport run and set it.
He lights it.
I stand in the middle of the living room and I watch him kneel at the fireplace and light the kindling, and I know with a certainty I haven't known anything before that this is my life now.
He stands up. Turns. Looks at me.
"Come here."
I come.
He takes my face in his hands.
"I want to give you something."
"Okay."
"Two things, actually."
"Okay."
He reaches into his jacket pocket. Pulls out a small leather box. Not a ring box. Smaller. Flatter.
My heart does a thing.
"Gray."
"Hear me out first."
"Okay."
"I've had this for two days. I bought it Wednesday morning at a jeweler in Vancouver who does custom work. I flew down Thursday to pick it up. That's why I was in Vancouver before I came to Toronto. I didn't tell you because I wanted it to be in my hand when I said it."
"What is it."
"Open it."
I take the box.
I open it.
Inside, on dark velvet, is a fine gold chain. Delicate. A small pendant at the center, a flat gold disc, and on it engraved in a tight careful hand is the word HOME.
Just that.
Home.
My eyes fill.
"Gray."
"It's not a collar in the way you'd wear in the bedroom.
It's not that yet. I'll make that one later if you want one, and we'll negotiate it the way we negotiate everything.
This one is different. This is the one that goes on your neck right now.
That you wear to the grocery store. That you wear to the Globe.
That you wear when you fly to Ottawa for work and when you sit in editorial meetings and when you're on calls with sources.
It's the one that says where you belong to yourself.
Not to me. To yourself. And the word is home because that's what you told me on the porch. "
"Gray."
"Put it on."
He lifts it out of the box. I turn. Lift my braids off my neck.
His fingers on the back of my neck. The cool weight of the chain settling at my throat. The small click of the clasp.
I turn back around.
The disc sits in the hollow of my throat.
"It's perfect."
"Yeah?"
"It's perfect, Gray."
"Good."
"You said two things."
"I did."
"What's the second."
He takes my hand. Walks me to the fireplace. Pulls me down onto the rug in front of it. Sits cross-legged. Pulls me into his lap.
"The second is a question. I'm not asking it yet. I'm telling you I'm going to ask it."
"Okay."
"Not tomorrow. Not next week. Probably not this year. When you're ready. When you trust it. When it's not going to land like a pressure on a woman who just moved her whole life for a man. But I want you to know I'm going to ask. So when I do, you're not surprised."
"Grayson."
"I'm going to ask you to marry me, Simone.
At some point in the next however long. When it feels right.
When you feel it in your chest and not your head.
I just want you to know it's coming. Because I meant what I said on the sidewalk in Toronto.
Home is wherever you take me next. And I want to spend the rest of my life being taken places by you. "
I cry.
Not the ugly kind. The warm kind. The kind that just leaks out because a chest isn't big enough for a feeling.
I put my hand on his face.
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"Okay I will marry you. Ask whenever you want. The answer is already yes. The answer was yes on the porch. The answer was yes in the shack. The answer was probably yes when you told me to keep still and I did."
"Simone."
"I'm not joking."
"I know you're not."
"So ask me whenever."
"I'm still going to do it right."
"I know you are."
He leans up. Kisses me slow. The pendant sits cool between us.
Outside the wind moves through the pines.
Inside the fire catches and warms the room.
I sit in his lap on the rug in front of the fireplace in a cabin that is now my cabin, in a town I have never walked the streets of but already belong to, with a gold disc at my throat that says the one word I needed a man to say out loud before I could believe it.
"Home," I say. Just to say it.
"Yeah," he says back. "Home."