30. Juliette #2
“You’re the most ridiculous man I’ve ever met.”
“I know that too.” He cups my face in his hands, thumbs wiping away tears. “But I’m your ridiculous man. If you’ll have me.”
“I’ll have you.”
“Even after everything?”
“Especially after everything.”
He kisses me then, slow and deep, and I taste wine and salt and the beginning of something new.
The wood stove finally warms the cottage around midnight.
We’ve moved to the bedroom by then, the fire in the main room banked low, the window above the bed showing nothing but stars and the distant sweep of the lighthouse beam.
“I want to do this properly,” he says, backing me toward the bed. “No crisis. No adrenaline. No excuse to pretend it didn’t happen.”
“Then do it properly.”
He undresses me slowly, piece by piece, his hands steady and deliberate. Every time I try to hurry things along, he stops me.
The lighthouse beam crosses the window on its long patrol - around, and gone, and around - striping us both in slow silver, and he times nothing to it and I notice it anyway, the way the room keeps offering us metaphors and we keep declining in favor of hands.
“Slow.”
“I don’t want slow.”
“I do.” He kisses my collarbone. “I’ve spent six years rushing past the moments that mattered. I’m not rushing anymore.”
So we don’t rush.
He takes his time with everything. My neck, my shoulders, the curve of my waist. He learns me like a language he’s studied but never spoken aloud, finding phrases and rhythms that make me arch into him, make me gasp his name, make me forget there was ever a time when his touch didn’t feel like coming home.
“Zachary-”
“Not yet.” His mouth moves lower. “I want to hear you say my name at least ten more times before I’m done.”
“That’s ambitious-”
“I’m a Dean.” His smile is wicked against my hip. “Ambition is hereditary.”
He earns every single one.
***
Dawn
Gray light filters through the window, and something is different.
The bed beside me is empty.
I sit up, disoriented, and that’s when I see him.
Zachary is kneeling on the floor beside the bed. One knee down, the other up. Exactly like he was six years ago in a library. Exactly like he tried to be at the tree lighting before I stopped him.
The floorboards must be freezing. He’s in a t-shirt and flannel pants, hair wrecked from my hands, kneeling on hundred-year-old pine in the gray half-light, and the ring box is open on his palm, and the papers are in his other hand, and he has clearly been holding this position for some time, waiting for me to wake up, because he is an idiot, and he is my idiot, and my heart is trying to exit through my ribs.
“What are you doing?”
“Following instructions.” His voice is steady, but his hands are shaking. The ring catches the gray dawn light - a new ring, not the one I left on the dresser in Boston - and the papers rustle in his palm.
The signed divorce petition.
Oh, fuck.
“You said to ask when my ring hand was holding a signed petition.” He holds up both items. “I followed you to the letter. Both signatures are there. The papers are legal and complete. You can file them today if you want.”
“Zachary-”
“Let me finish.” He takes a breath. “Six years ago, I proposed to you in a library with a speech I’d rehearsed for weeks. I had cue cards in my car. I knew exactly what I was going to say, because I’d practiced it until the words felt like truth.”
“I remember.”
“This time, I don’t have cue cards. I don’t have a speech.
I have a ring and a signed divorce petition and a question that I’ve been waiting months to ask.
” He holds them both higher. “Marry me again. Or take the papers and I’ll still spend my life at the end of your lane. Your call. It’s always been your call.”
“The ring,” I say. “It’s different.”
“It’s new.” He glances at it. “I had it made. The stone is from the lighthouse - there’s sea glass on the beach, and I found a piece the color of your eyes.
The band is from the oak scraps, the ones left over from carving the stars.
It’s not worth anything. No pedigree, no insurance value. Just - us. This island. This life.”
“There’s a jeweler in Portland who thought I was unwell.
I brought him a jar of sea glass and a plank of oak from the shop shelving and my grandmother’s setting, and I said, make these into the truth.
” He turns the ring so the gray dawn moves inside the green.
“Sea glass is just something broken that the water refused to give up on. It gets thrown back and thrown back until it comes out softer and better and impossible to cut yourself on. I had six years and one very long autumn to think about why I wanted it instead of a diamond.”
My chest aches.
“That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever done.”
“I know.” He’s almost smiling. “I’m learning.”
I look at the ring. I look at the papers. I look at the man who wrote an email two months after our wedding saying he wasn’t sure about me, and then spent six years falling in love with me in silence, and then spent six months earning the right to say it out loud.
I take both items out of his hands.
His face does the whole stock market - up, down, halt trading - before I lean in and kiss the crease between his brows, once, an installment against the answer.
I set them on the windowsill, side by side. The ring catching the gray dawn light. The papers stark white against the weathered wood.
Then I pull him back into the bed.
“Juliette-”
“I’ll give you my answer at the opening.” I press my mouth to his, feeling him respond despite his confusion. “In front of everyone. You’ve earned the audience.”
“That’s two days away.”
“I know.”
“You’re going to make me wait two days?”
“You made me wait six years.” I smile against his lips. “Two days is nothing.”
“Juliette-”
I silence him the only way I know how.