Chapter 34
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“What’s a tropical fruit with sweet, white flesh and a thin, rough skin?”
I looked up from my book. Gabriel had his pen poised, ready to fill in the answer in the New York Times crossword puzzle.
“Gabriel,” I said, then laughed at my own dumb joke.
He snorted. “Six letters, ends in an E. Third letter is a C.”
I counted it out on my fingers. “Lychee.”
Gabriel nodded and wrote it in. “I should’ve gotten that one.” He lifted my feet out of his lap and stood up from the sofa. “I got you something.” He wandered off to the kitchen, taking the newspaper with him.
“Hang on,” I called after him. “Let me see that puzzle.” I was doing it earlier and didn’t remember seeing that clue.
He returned a few minutes later without the crossword puzzle and set a brown paper bag in my lap. I peeked into the bag and counted seven lychees.
“Why seven?” I asked when he sat next to me and draped his arm across the back of my cushion.
“One for every year since I first saw you. They turned our diner into a fucking Starbucks,” he said, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe they’d do that to us.
It had been a Starbucks for over a year, but Gabriel still wasn’t over it. For him, that diner was a sacred place. It marked the beginning of our story when he first saw me from the window, and he didn’t want a coffee chain ruining the sanctity of his memories.
“Aren’t you going to eat your lychees?” he asked a little while later when I’d gone back to reading.
I closed my book and set it down. “Aren’t you going to feed them to me?” I transferred the bag to his lap.
He picked it up and dumped it back in mine. “I just want to watch you.” I gave him a look. “It’s our first fruit of the month for the new year. Lychees bring good luck and abundance in life.”
“Then we should both eat them.”
“I bought thirteen, so I already had mine.”
“Why thirteen and not twelve?” I asked, peeling the spiky skin off the lychee.
“Because of this.” He touched the ankh, an Egyptian hieroglyphic that looked like a teardrop above the letter T that hung from a leather cord around his neck. It symbolized eternal life. I gave it to him for his 27 th birthday and made him promise to wear it every day.
Call me superstitious but two weeks before Gabriel turned twenty-seven, I had a bad dream. It was so vivid that I woke up sweating and disoriented and shook him awake to make sure he was still alive and well.
In the dream, Gabriel was on stage playing his guitar, but he couldn’t remember the lyrics to any of the songs. I was backstage when he stumbled off and walked right past me, like he didn’t even see me standing there. The dream ended with him driving a car off a cliff.
After that, I became paranoid that Gabriel would become a member of the 27 Club so last year, I put my own career on hold and joined him on tour.
Annika told me I was being ridiculous, but I didn’t care how crazy it sounded. We had a crazy kind of love and we were both really protective of each other. I needed to be there to ensure that he reached his 28 th birthday, which thankfully, he did.
“The ancient Egyptians believed that life was a spiritual journey that unfolded in stages. Twelve in life and the thirteenth was the most transformative when you ascend into the eternal afterlife. Thirteen’s a lucky number,” he said incisively.
“You are a wonder, Gabriel Francis.”
“Now eat your lychees.” His smile was so sexy, so decadent that I rewarded him by moaning my way through the bag of fruit, licking my fingers and doing my best porn star impersonation.
His body shook with silent laughter as I searched the bag for the seventh lychee amid the cast-off peels and stones.
He was cackling now. I shot him a look. “What is so funny?”
Gabriel shook his head. “Only you.”
“Only me what?”
“Only you would make me wait until the very last fucking piece of fruit in the bag.” He dragged his hand down his face and groaned like this was all just too much for him.
I didn’t know what he was going on about. “If you had fed me, we wouldn’t have had this problem.”
I finally found the last lychee and held it up in triumph then looked at it more closely.
It looked as if someone had run a knife around the perimeter of the skin.
“Hey, someone cut into this lychee already…” He was watching me so intently that I immediately suspected foul play.
“Are you playing a trick on me? If there’s a spider in here, I swear to God?—”
“Why would I put a spider in your lychee?” he laughed.
“Uh, because you’re laughing?”
He gave me an adorable boyish smile, the one that made him look like the picture of innocence. Gabriel the choirboy. “Do you trust me?”
I didn’t even have to think about it. “With my life.” I studied the lychee again. “No spiders, right?”
“No spiders.” He crossed his heart. “No insects whatsoever.”
I separated the two halves and then I stared and stared, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. A ruby ring was nestled in the white, fleshy fruit where the pit would normally be.
When I lifted my head to ask Gabriel what was going on, he was down on one knee in front of me.
He plucked the ring from the lychee and held it up.
“I have been loving you all my life. That’s how it feels.
Like you were made especially for me and have been a part of me forever.
In my heart, my soul, my wildest dreams and my secret fantasies.
You are the single best thing that has ever happened to me.
You are my music and my every waking dream.
I love you with everything in me, and when I said that no one can own another person, it was because I hadn’t known a love like this existed yet.
I am yours, and I’m praying like hell that you’ll agree to be mine. Will you marry me, Cleo Babington?”
I was crying so hard I could barely see. I threw my arms around him with so much enthusiasm that I knocked him over and fell on top of him.
“Feels like old times,” he said. “I’m not usually this smooth.”
We laughed and rolled around the floor kissing. We lost our clothes by each other’s hands and he worshipped my body and made love to me so reverently that it felt like a sacred pact. Our bodies connected, our souls united, our hearts beating in sync.
Afterward, we lay side by side, trying to catch our breath. We both had rug burns but neither of us cared.
I looked over at him, at his beautiful face, and his beautiful everything, and I couldn’t believe I got to call him mine. “That’s a yes, by the way.”
“I’d put the ring on your finger if I knew where the hell it was.”
We put our clothes back on and searched for the ring on our hands and knees until we finally found it under the sofa, just out of reach. We had to move the entire sofa to get to it. When Gabriel finally snatched it up, the ring was covered in dust.
After he polished it on his T-shirt, he slid it onto my finger.
It was a perfect fit. I held out my hand to admire it.
The ring was so very me. So very us. The rubies looked like pomegranate seeds around a larger stone in the middle encrusted with milky pearls in a delicate gold setting that looked like the branches of a tree.
“Where did you ever find this? I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s the most beautiful ring…” I covered my face with my hands. I was crying again, but they were happy tears.
Gabriel tugged me into his lap on the sofa and I wrapped my arm around his neck and kissed his jaw, placing my hand over his heart.
He told me he’d collected the rubies on his travels. His bandmates called him the bagman. “I’d show up at hotels looking like a homeless man in my crumpled, secondhand clothes and my messy hair, but little did they know, I was carrying around a paper bag filled with precious gems.”
Oh God. That was priceless. I couldn’t stop laughing.
“You must have hidden them well. I never even noticed. How long has this been going on?”
“I bought the first one as soon as I got the record deal.” He pointed to the largest stone.
“No wonder you were so broke.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t want anything for myself.”
Gabriel still didn’t want anything for himself. Material possessions meant nothing to him. He still wore the same secondhand clothes he’d owned since I met him. Gabriel was more interested in collecting experiences than things.
“So you’ve been carrying these jewels around for three and a half years?”
“Except for the big one,” he said. “I hid that in a sock under the loose floorboard in the bedroom.”
I shook my head. “There is no one like you. You’re one of a kind. I cannot wait to marry you.”
He let out a deep, contented sigh. “I’m so fucking happy to hear that. I wasn’t sure you even believed in marriage. I know I didn’t. Until you, of course.”
“I wouldn’t want to do it with anyone else. It’s not like we need a piece of paper to prove our love.”
“Right,” he said. “I mean, my vow to love you and cherish you is already a sacred pact I made with myself so it’s not like we need to get married.”
“But we want to,” I said.
“We want to.”
We shared a smile.
We went to dinner at John’s of 12 th Street to celebrate. It used to be a splurge, but now that we could afford it, we still reserved it for special occasions.
“Now that you have some time off from touring, we should get back to our apartment hunting,” I said, popping a piece of fried calamari into my mouth. “We’ve outgrown our space.”
“Yeah,” Gabriel said, nodding seriously. “We’ll get right on that.”
We laughed. We would do no such thing. We’d been talking about moving for the past two years. We’d even looked at other apartments, but none of them had felt like home.
“So we’re getting married.” I couldn’t stop looking at the ring on my left hand. The ring he’d had made especially for me.
“We’re getting married.”
We smiled at each other like two loons, our happiness so great it couldn’t be contained. He still gave me butterflies.
“How about June?” I took a sip of my wine. “We just want something small, right?”
He nodded. “Just our close friends.”
“So basically, everyone we called to share the news with before we left for dinner.”
“That should do it,” he said. “May’s good. Or April. Fuck that. Are you free tomorrow?”
“I think that’s short notice,” I laughed. “You have an album to finish, and I have a runway show next month. But we can file for a marriage license first thing tomorrow.”
“First thing,” he agreed.
I felt like the luckiest girl in the world to find a man who was so excited to marry me that he’d do it tomorrow.
A man who let me eat off his plate when his chicken parm arrived and looked just a tad bit better than my pasta dish.
When the waiter walked by, Gabriel ordered another one for himself. So that solved that problem.
“So what’s your view on kids?” Gabriel asked, watching me demolish a tiramisu while he drank his espresso.
Love made me hungry.
“I like them. Big fan.” I set down my fork as the realization dawned on me that this wasn’t a question about kids in general. “Why? Do you want kids?”
“Someday. It would be cool to have one or two little Cleos and Gabriels running around. I’m not ready for any of that yet though. And even if we decide to never have kids, I’m just happy to be with you. I don’t need anything more.”
I felt the same way. I would be happy either way. But now I couldn’t help but think what a great dad he would be.
Growing up, I’d never dreamed about a wedding or a husband or kids or the house we’d live in, and even as I’d gotten older, those things weren’t part of my dreams.
I’d always just wanted to be an artist, to create something original that hadn’t existed before, and to find my person.
Now I had all those things. I’d created the life of my dreams, and I was living it with the man of my dreams.
I had the whole damn cake and I got to eat it too.
I was only twenty-six and Gabriel was only twenty-eight.
We still had plenty of time to do all the things we wanted to do.