Chapter 15 Building It Together #2
We spend the afternoon doing research. Nathan pulls up VA loan information and walks me through the process.
The zero down payment. The competitive interest rates.
The requirements and the paperwork and the timeline.
He's already looked into all of this, which means he's been thinking about this longer than three weeks.
He's been building toward this conversation the way he builds toward everything: carefully, thoroughly, with all the information gathered before he says a word.
"When would we do this?" I ask.
"When you're ready. Not before."
"My lease ends in seven months."
"That's enough time to get preapproved, find a place, and close. If we start the paperwork now we'd be in good shape by spring."
"Spring," I say. The word feels solid and real and possible.
We talk until dinner. We order food from the Thai place down the road because neither of us wants to cook and we've spent the entire afternoon doing something more important than cooking.
We eat at the kitchen table with the financial documents still visible on the coffee table behind us and somewhere between the pad thai and the spring rolls Nathan reaches across the table and takes my hand.
"I need to tell you something," he says.
"Okay."
His thumb traces a slow line across my knuckles. He looks at our hands together on the table and then he looks at me.
"I love you."
He says it simply. No preamble. No dramatic buildup.
No grand gesture or background music or rehearsed monologue.
Just the words, delivered across a table of Thai food with the same clarity and directness he brings to everything he does.
Three words that contain no embellishment because they don't need any.
It's the first time either of us has said it out loud.
I've known it for a while. I've felt it growing for weeks and weeks, building in the background of every dinner and every conversation and every morning I woke up in his bed and every evening I spent on his couch reading while he read.
But saying it out loud means something different.
Saying it makes it real and permanent and documented in the space between two people.
"I love you too," I say. And the words feel different coming out of my mouth than they used to. They feel earned. They feel chosen. They feel true in a way that I can verify because I've done the work of learning what untrue feels like and this is not that.
His hand tightens around mine. His face does something I've rarely seen: the composure drops completely away and underneath is Nathan, just Nathan, a man who loves a woman and is hearing her say she loves him back and is letting that matter to him openly without any protective distance.
We sit at the kitchen table holding hands across Thai food containers and neither of us says anything else for a long time because the silence is saying it for us.
Three weeks later Nathan proposes.
We're at Clarkson's. Our restaurant. The booth in the back that we've sat in so many times the waiter doesn't bother asking where we'd like to be seated anymore.
He just leads us to the booth and brings our drinks without being asked.
A glass of red for me. A beer for Nathan.
The cloth napkins and the candles and the short menu that Nathan has practically memorized at this point.
It's a Thursday evening. The restaurant is quiet. Only three other tables are occupied. Nathan chose a weekday on purpose, I'll realize later, because he wanted privacy. He didn't want an audience. He wanted this to belong to us.
We order. We eat. We talk about the house search, which has been going well.
We've been looking at listings online every evening, sitting side by side on the couch with his laptop between us, comparing layouts and prices and neighborhoods.
There's a place on the east side of Pinehurst that caught both of our attention.
A three-bedroom bungalow on a quiet street.
Front porch with a railing. A yard with mature oak trees that provide shade in the summer.
The kitchen is small but functional. The bathroom has been updated.
The price falls within the VA loan range.
We drove past it last weekend. We parked across the street and sat in the truck and looked at it. Neither of us said "this is the one." But neither of us has stopped bringing it up in conversation either.
After dinner Nathan reaches into his jacket pocket. His hand moves slowly and deliberately and he pulls out a small velvet box and sets it on the table between our coffee cups.
I look at the box. I look at Nathan. My heart starts beating so hard I can hear it in my ears and my hands go still on the table.
"Before you open it," he says. His voice is steady but I can see a vein in his neck and his jaw is set in a way that tells me he's nervous.
Nathan Johnson is nervous. The man who stayed calm during my Blake confrontation and eats corn in perfect rows and won a trivia game solo is sitting across from me at Clarkson's with his hands folded and his pulse visible in his neck because he's about to ask me a question.
"I want to say something first," he says.
"Okay."
"I'm not going to make promises I can't keep.
I'm not going to tell you that everything will always be perfect or that I'll never make mistakes.
I will make mistakes. I'm human. But I can promise you that I will always be honest with you.
About everything. About money and feelings and fears and the things I want and the things I'm afraid of.
I will never lie to you, Lara. That's the promise I'm making. Not perfection. Honesty."
I'm crying. I'm sitting in a booth at Clarkson's with tears running down my face and I don't care.
"Open it," he says.
I open the box. The ring is simple and beautiful.
A round diamond on a white gold band. It's not ostentatious.
It's not trying to impress anyone. It's exactly the ring I would have chosen for myself, which means Nathan has been paying attention to what I wear and what I like and what suits me in the same quiet, observant way he pays attention to everything.
"Will you marry me?" Nathan says.
"Yes," I say. "Yes. Absolutely yes."
He takes the ring out of the box and reaches across the table and takes my left hand.
His fingers are steady even though I can still see the pulse in his neck.
He slides the ring onto my finger and it fits perfectly because of course it does.
Nathan does not leave things to chance. He researched.
He measured. He planned. He probably consulted Raina, who I will ask about later and who will confirm that Nathan called her three weeks ago to ask about my ring size and preferences and that she told him exactly what to get and made him promise not to propose in public because she knew I'd prefer privacy.
The waiter brings champagne that Nathan ordered in advance and arranged to be delivered at a signal.
We toast. We laugh. We hold hands across the table with the ring between us catching the candlelight.
Nathan looks at me with the full, unguarded expression that I've come to recognize as the real Nathan, the one underneath the composure, the one who reads books and eats corn in rows and fell in love with a woman who was broken when he found her and waited patiently while she put herself back together.
We drive home. The roads are dark and quiet and Nathan drives with one hand on the wheel and the other holding mine across the center console.
The ring is on my finger and it catches the light from passing streetlamps.
Each time the light hits the diamond it sends a small flash across the ceiling of the truck.
We go to my apartment on Birch Street. We walk up the stairs and I unlock the door and we go inside and the apartment is small and warm and familiar and mine.
Nathan closes the door behind us and I turn to face him and he puts his hands on my waist and I put mine on his chest and we stand there for a moment in the dark hallway.
"We're engaged," I say.
"We are."
"Say it again."
"We're engaged."
I pull him toward the bedroom. We don't turn on lights.
We navigate by the streetlight coming through the windows and by the knowledge of the apartment's layout that comes from months of living here.
We lie in bed together and I look at the ring on my finger and it catches the streetlight and the diamond sends a small bright point across the ceiling.
I had a ring before. A different ring on the same finger from a different man in a different life.
That ring was a half-carat on a thin gold band and it represented a promise that was being broken the same week it was made.
Blake proposed at a restaurant and the whole place clapped and I said yes and I wore the ring for fourteen months while he slept with my friend.
That ring left a pale stripe on my finger when I took it off.
The stripe faded eventually. The lesson didn't.
This ring is different. This ring is from a man who showed me his bank statements before he showed me the ring.
Who called my sister to ask about my preferences.
Who chose a quiet Thursday at our restaurant because he knew I'd want privacy.
Who said his promise wasn't perfection but honesty and meant every word.
"Nathan?"
"Yeah?"
"Thank you. For everything. For waiting. For being patient. For doing this the right way."
"There's no other way to do it."
I fall asleep with my hand on his chest and the ring on my finger and the certainty that I am exactly where I'm supposed to be.