Epilogue #2
We were a little homesick in those first months, though homesick wasn’t precisely the right word for it.
It was more a low-grade awareness that we were far from the people who knew us fully, the ones who had been present for the story and didn’t need anything explained.
Friends, it turned out, were a thing you had to rebuild every time you moved, with the patience of someone who understood the value but felt the labor of it.
The making of new friends had lost whatever ease it might have had when we were eighteen and in college, and when every Friday opened its doors to whoever appeared.
Then one Saturday morning, at a corner table at Neon Nights, I looked up from my notebook to find a couple two tables over sharing a crossword and a silence of long familiarity.
One of them caught my eye and nodded in a friendly manner, and I nodded back, and by the following weekend, we had learned that one was a novelist in the patient middle section of a long project and the other a photographer who made pictures of cities that looked like they were dreaming.
We had dinner the following Saturday, and Taylor talked to Rafael about composition for forty minutes while I talked to Luke about the tyranny of the second act, and we walked home afterward, and neither of us had to say that we had done something good.
Life continued, as it does, with the peculiar combination of speed and specificity that makes you look up from it surprised.
The Meridian piece ran and changed things in the quiet way that the right piece, at the right time, in the right publication, can change things.
Taylor’s promotion changed things, too, in a louder way, and one afternoon, we stood in an empty apartment three floors above where we’d been living and turned slowly in the middle of a bare room while afternoon light came through windows that faced in two directions at once.
The agent had stepped outside to take a phone call, and the apartment was full of the sound of nothing, that particular nothing that an empty room makes when it’s waiting to be inhabited.
Taylor walked to the far wall and pointed.
The sofa would go here, he said, angled toward the windows so the light fell across it properly in the afternoon.
The television on this wall, not that one, because of the glare.
His hands moved through the air, sketching furniture that didn’t exist yet, a life that hadn’t happened yet, and I watched them move, those long, elegant hands I had known for four years now, and I felt the apartment fill up around us in real time, all the versions of ourselves we would be in it, the winter mornings and the summer evenings and the arguments about small things and the agreements about large ones, all of it flooding the empty space and making it a home before a single box had been carried through the door.
He pointed at the corner by the window. “Your writing nook,” he said, “with a pothos hanging above it and good light and a comfy chair you’ll sit in for hours.”
He said it as if it were already true. As if it had always been true.
He said my name before the room and then faced the window, still talking, painting his picture of this life he could already see clearly, and I put my hand into my jacket pocket and felt the small box there, the one I’d been carrying for three weeks, waiting for the right moment with the patience of someone who had once been very afraid of the wrong word at the wrong time and had learned slowly, through the particular education of loving Taylor, that the right moment was rarely the one you planned and almost always the one that arrived without announcement.
I took the box out.
I went down on one knee on the bare floor of the empty room.
He was still talking when he turned around.
He stopped. His hands went still.
I looked up at him and held the box open, and for a moment, the whole room was full of nothing but the sound of his breathing and the distant noise of the city below and every year of our lives laid out between us like a map of somewhere we had always been heading.
“You have been every good thing,” I said.
“Everything I didn’t know I was looking for, and everything I couldn’t have described before I found it.
You walked up to my table on a dare, and you ruined me for anything ordinary, and I have been so glad every single day since.
I love you. I love who you make me. I love who we are together, which is something I couldn’t have invented without you.
” I looked at the ring in the box, then back at his face.
“I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
Taylor looked at me with his eyes very bright.
“Is it a dare?” he asked. His voice was rough at the edges.
“Does it matter?”
His smile broke wide and clear, the one that had no calculation in it, the one I had been trying to describe to myself since the first night I saw it. “No,” he said. “Not one bit.” His voice caught and held. “I’m going to say yes.”
“Will you marry me?”
The yes came out through tears he didn’t bother to hide, and I stood, and I slid the ring onto his finger, and he looked at it for one long moment and then looked at me, and I took his face in my hands and kissed him in the empty room that was already, in every sense that mattered, home.
Thanks for reading Double Dared.
The End.