Epilogue #2
I read the note on the kitchen counter in Colt’s college apartment that he shares with Miranda.
Or at least, he did. Because as of yesterday, we will officially have our very own home on the ranch.
It took about a year to convince Colt to build a house on the ranch and about another year to actually get it built. But it’s done.
Colt doesn’t know that, though.
He’s been so stressed with finishing vet school that he has no idea what’s going on back at home. Which is also why he has no idea I’m in his apartment right now.
It’s been so hard to be long distance over the past couple years. I even took off the slow season and spent some time here. But after about a month, I was bored out of my mind, itching to be back on the ranch.
But this time, he’s mine. He’s going to come home and be mine.
We have his graduation ceremony tomorrow, then we will go home, where all of our friends and families are waiting for us. To celebrate him for his huge accomplishments of becoming Dr. Dawson—not Dr. Thornwood like I would have liked. But that’s something I get to lament forever to him about.
I check the ring box for the thousandth time, making sure the ring is still in there.
It is.
After about thirty minutes of me pacing around his apartment, I finally hear the lock on the door turn and Colt walks through the door, his backpack over one shoulder and his keys in his mouth, eyes on his phone. He makes it three full steps into his own apartment before he sees me.
The keys fall out of his mouth.
“What—” He stares at me, then at the door behind him, like he’s checking to make sure he opened the right one, then back at me. “How did you get in here?”
“Halle.”
A beat. “I’m going to kill her.”
“She said that’s fine. She also said to tell you she’s not fixing the ice machine.”
Something moves across his face. “There was never anything wrong with the ice machine, was there.”
“There was not.”
I had Halle hold him off from coming home by trying to “fix the ice machine” at The Bar for over forty minutes, demanding that he not call her back or do anything until she was done fixing it—a.k.a. when I was successfully in his apartment.
He drops his backpack on the floor and crosses his arms. His hair is longer than it was the last time I saw him—three weeks ago, when I drove down for the weekend.
There are shadows under his eyes that mean he’s been in finals mode, and he’s wearing a Mizzou sweatshirt that he claims is ironic and wears approximately four times a week. I know because of FaceTime.
He looks like everything I want in my future.
“You’re not supposed to be here until tomorrow,” he says.
“I know.”
“It’s Tuesday.”
“I’m aware.”
“Rhett.” He tilts his head. “What are you doing here?”
He watches me cross the apartment toward him, his eyes tracking me and his arms uncrossing.
“Rhett—”
I get down on one knee, in the middle of his apartment, between the textbooks and the empty coffee cups, and I look up at him.
He stares at me.
“Oh my god,” he says.
“I had a speech—I wrote it down and everything. Halle proofread it,” I say.
“Of course she did.”
“I left it in the truck.”
He makes a sound that’s not quite a laugh as his hand comes up to cover his mouth.
“So, I’m going to wing it, which is probably more accurate to us anyway.”
“Rhett—”
“Let me get through this.”
I pull the box out of my jacket pocket and open it.
The ring is black metal with a matte finish—simple and solid, with a small inlay of rose gold that the jeweler in Cedarbrook suggested when I told him what I wanted.
Clean and dark and a little bit country.
I thought it was right. I’ve been second-guessing that thought, though, since the moment I left the jeweler’s shop.
“I had it made. The black is tungsten. The line in the middle is rose gold, and I know that sounds—”
“It’s perfect,” Colt says.
I look up at him.
His eyes are bright, he’s still got his hand over his mouth, and he looks completely undone.
“I drove down here on a Tuesday,” I say, “because I didn’t want to wait until we got back home.
I’ve been waiting for things my whole life and I’m done with it.
” I hold the box up. “I know Cedarbrook is Cedarbrook and it’s always going to be a small town, and people are always going to talk, and I know I spent a long time being someone who would have let all of that be a reason not to do this.
But I’m not that person anymore. I want you to come home to Thornwood Ranch.
I want to argue about where the dog sleeps and whose turn it is to call your mother and whether the truck needs new tires, even though it clearly needs new tires—”
“It clearly needs new tires,” he says.
“I know. I just wanted to hear you say it.” I take a breath.
“Colton Lee Dawson, you have been the most aggravating, the most honest, and the most completely essential person in my life since the second you walked into that bonfire and decided I was your favorite problem to solve. I love you. Will you marry me?”
Silence.
He looks at me for a long moment.
“Your favorite problem to solve?” He tilts his head. “That’s what you went with?”
“It was better in the written version—”
“I’m sure it was.” He crouches down in front of me so we’re eye level and he looks at me for one more second with those eyes that have been inside my head since summer.
He takes the ring out of the box, and puts it on his own finger.
He holds it up, looks at it, then looks at me.
“Yeah, Thornwood. Obviously, yes.”
I grab him by the front of his sweatshirt and kiss him in the middle of his apartment floor. He laughs against my mouth, which is the best thing that has happened today, and today has been a genuinely excellent day.
“You’ve been driving since four in the morning,” he says when I let him breathe.
“Four fifteen.”
“You’re insane.”
“You said yes.”
“I said obviously, yes.” He looks at the ring again, and the corner of his mouth does that thing I love. “It is perfect, by the way—the ring. Don’t fish for it. I know you’re fishing.”
“I wasn’t fishing.”
“You’ve been panicking about that ring for months. Halle told me.”
I stare at him. “She told you.”
“She tells me everything. I just didn’t know it was imminent.” He looks at me with the expression he gets when he’s won something, which is most of the time. “She also told me about the party.”
“Of course she did.”
“Mom and Aria are apparently making cakes—plural. Cakes.” He tilts his head. “Your mom and my aunt are making engagement cakes for us.”
“Tierney has been planning this since approximately February.”
“My dad is going to cry.”
“My dad already cried. When I told him I was proposing he got up, got a beer, came back, and his eyes were doing that thing and he said, and I quote, ‘Well it’s about damn time.’”
Colt laughs and I think the same thing I always think when I hear it—that I’m going to spend the rest of my life earning that sound, and I have never once minded the work.
We sit on his apartment floor for a while, his back against the couch, my shoulder against his, looking at the ring on his hand in the afternoon light coming through the window.
“The house,” he says, looking up at me. “You said we’d have our own house on the ranch. Does that mean it’s—”
“Done,” I say.
He turns to look at me. “What do you mean done? We never even discussed anything.”
“I mean it’s done. Built. Finished. Has a kitchen and everything.”
“Does it have the—”
“Gourmet kitchen? Yes. It does.”
“What’s the house look like?” he asks.
“Halle sent me your mood boards for a house. It’s all there, just like you imagined it.”
“Rhett—”
“You’ll see tomorrow.” I press my mouth to the top of his head. “I want to watch your face when you see it for the first time.”
He makes a sound that’s not quite a complaint. “That’s manipulative.”
“That’s called anticipation. You’ll survive.”
We stay there until the afternoon goes gold and then starts going gray, neither of us in any particular hurry to move. Eventually, Miranda comes home, opens the door, clocks the two of us on the floor and the ring on his hand, and screams loud enough that the neighbor’s dog starts barking.
“FINALLY.” She points at me. “I’ve been keeping secrets for eight months. Eight months, Rhett. Do you know what that does to a person?”
“Halle told him about the party,” I say.
“That’s irrelevant. I kept the important secrets.” She drops onto the couch above us and grabs Colt’s hand, looking at the ring with the expression of a woman who has earned the right to be emotional about this. Her eyes go bright. “It’s perfect.”
“That’s what I said,” Colt tells her.
“Obviously. I have excellent taste.” She squeezes his hand once, gets up, and goes to the kitchen before she comes back with three beers and hands them out.
“Okay. We’re celebrating. And then, tomorrow, we’re going to Cedarbrook because there are apparently cakes—plural—involved, which is the correct response to this situation. ”
Colt looks at me.
I look at him.
“I love you,” I say, because I can. Because I’m not afraid of it anymore. Because I have said it enough times now that it comes easy and will come easy, for the rest of my life.
“I know.” He clinks his beer against mine. “I love you too. Even though you left the speech in the truck.”
“It was a good speech.”
“I’m sure it was.” He takes a drink. “You can read it to me at the party.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Okay, at the wedding then.”