Chapter Thirty-Seven
Roughing It
Winnie
The cabin looked better in the photos.
I’m standing in the doorway with my overnight bag and what I hope is an open mind, taking in the exposed wooden beams, the stone fireplace, the general aesthetic of a man chose this, and I think—okay.
Okay, I can do this. I love Banks. I love the outdoors, technically.
I do yoga outside sometimes. This is fine.
“Well?” Banks sets our bags down and looks around with the satisfaction of a man who has delivered something excellent.
“It’s very…” I search for the word. “Rustic.”
“It’s perfect.”
“The shower is outside,” I point out.
He shrugs. “It’s an outdoor shower. That’s a feature.”
“Banks, it’s fifty-eight degrees.”
He puts his arm around me. “I’ll keep you warm, baby.”
I press my lips into a line because the last thing I want is to sound spoiled or ungrateful. He planned a romantic weekend away just for us—just because. It’s the thought that counts, right?
The fireplace works, which saves the first hour.
Banks builds a fire with the focused energy he brings to everything, and I sit on the sofa with a glass of wine and watch him do it and think, fine, this is actually nice.
The wood pops and the light goes warm and golden, and he drops down next to me and pulls me into his side, and I think—I overreacted.
This is romantic. I’m a person who can appreciate simplicity.
Then I go to investigate the kitchen, including the coffee situation for in the morning, and discover there’s no coffee machine.
“There’s a French press,” Banks says from the couch, where he’s reading something on his phone with the total serenity of a man on vacation.
“I see the French press.”
“So—”
“So, I don’t know how to use a French press, Banks.”
He looks up. “You just push the thingy—”
“I know mechanically how it works. I’m saying I’ve never had to.” I look at the French press. It looks back at me, completely unhelpful.
By hour three I’ve made peace with the coffee situation and I’m actually having a good time, mostly because Banks is funny when he relaxes, which he only fully does away from the city.
We take a walk through the woods and he identifies trees by name, which I didn’t know he could do, and I file that away in the growing folder of things that surprise me about him.
He holds my hand over the uneven ground and points out a hawk circling overhead and looks—happy. Genuinely, quietly happy.
I take a photo of him when he’s not looking.
By hour five I discover that the Wi-Fi is, and I cannot stress this enough, theoretical.
“It says I have two bars,” I tell him.
“That’s fine.”
“Banks, two bars means I can receive texts but I can’t actually open them. I tried to look something up and it loaded for four minutes and then gave me an error.”
“We don’t need Wi-Fi.” He’s entirely too calm about this. “That’s the point.”
“I need Wi-Fi. I have to check in with my sub for my Saturday morning class, and I told Tori I’d send her the paint color we picked for the—it doesn’t matter, I just need to send one email.”
“Tomorrow.”
“What if there’s an emergency?”
“There won’t be an emergency.”
“You don’t know that.”
He puts his book down and looks at me with patience, despite everything. “Win. We’ve been here five hours.”
“I know how long we’ve been here.” I know exactly how long we’ve been here.
He picks his book back up.
I sit on the porch with my phone held above my head trying to find a third bar and think about the Four Seasons website I looked at briefly, innocently, purely academically, when Banks first mentioned the cabin two weeks ago.
Indoor plumbing. Complimentary robes. A deep soaking tub that I had immediately closed the tab on because I am a supportive girlfriend who respects her partner’s vision for this getaway.
I open the tab again and pray for it to load.
Hour six is when the spider happens.
I won’t go into detail. What I will say is that it was large, it was in the bathroom, and my response was, in Banks’s words, not proportionate to the threat, which is easy to say when you are six-foot-four and the spider is not your problem. To be fair, he may have thought I was getting murdered.
“I’m not sleeping here,” I tell him.
“Win—”
“I’m not. I can’t. I will lie awake all night thinking about where it went.”
“I removed it.” He shrugs.
“You moved it outside, Banks. Outside, where it lives. It’s going to come back.”
He scrubs a hand over his face, and I watch him do the internal calculation of whether this is a hill worth dying on, and I can see the exact moment he decides it isn’t.
“What do you want to do?” he asks.
I pull up my phone. The Four Seasons tab is already open. “There’s availability tonight. Forty minutes from here. They have a suite with a soaking tub and twenty-four-hour room service, and I already looked up the thread count on the sheets, and Banks, it’s a thousand.”
He stares at me. “You already looked it up.” Raises one eyebrow. “How long ago?”
“…Two weeks.”
He’s quiet for a long second, and then he laughs—this low, genuine laugh that fills the cabin and does what it always does to me, which is make me forget I was ever annoyed about anything. “Get your bag.”
“Really?”
“Get your bag, Win. I want my baby to be happy.”
I have my bag zipped in forty-three seconds.
Banks
The hotel is, I’ll admit, significantly better than the cabin.
I’m not going to say that out loud. What I am going to do is sink into this obscenely comfortable chair and pretend I’m assessing the room with neutrality while Winnie opens every cabinet and drawer like she’s conducting an inventory, narrating her findings.
“There’s a Nespresso machine.” She holds up a pod. “And oat milk pods, Banks. They thought of oat milk.” She looks at me like I’ve personally wronged her by not thinking of oat milk. I had no idea she liked oat milk.
“I’m glad you’re happy.”
“I’m extremely happy.” She disappears into the bathroom and I hear her make a sound I usually only hear in much better circumstances. “Banksy! Come look at this tub.”
The tub is the size of a small vehicle. Deep and white and already being eyed by Winnie the way she eyes the last piece of food on a plate—like she has a plan for it.
“Draw a bath with me,” she says, which is not a question.
Half an hour later we’re in it, her back against my chest, the lights are dimmed low, and I’m looking at the city through the window and thinking about spiders and French presses and the fact that I packed a ring and it’s been in the interior pocket of my bag ever since, waiting for a moment that felt right.
I thought it would be the cabin. The firelight, the quiet, the woods—that was the plan. No distractions. Just us.
But she’s here, warm against me, laughing at something on her phone that she’s reading me out loud, her wet hair pushed over one shoulder, and she looks—she looks like mine.
Completely and entirely mine, in a hotel suite we ended up in because of a spider, in a city we love, in a life I didn’t think I was allowed to want.
The ring is in my bag across the room.
I could get it. Or I could wait until later…
She sets her phone on the edge of the tub and tips her head back against my shoulder. “This was a good idea.”
“The hotel or the bath?”
“Both. The whole weekend, actually. Even the cabin.” She pauses. “Well. The first five hours of the cabin.”
I chuckle. “High praise.”
“The fire was nice.” She turns her face toward mine, her cheek against my jaw. “And the walk. I liked the walk.”
“I know you did.” I press my mouth to her temple. “Stay here.”
She lifts her head. “What?”
“Just—stay here.”
I get out of the tub, grab a towel and wrap it around my hips.
I cross to my bag before she can ask what I’m doing.
The ring box is exactly where I put it, small and certain in my palm.
I stand there for a second holding it, and I’m not nervous, which surprises me.
I thought I’d be nervous. Instead, I just feel—ready.
The way I feel at the start of a game I know we’re going to win.
I turn around.
She’s watching me from the tub with her arms folded on the edge, her chin resting on them, and her expression goes from curious to very still when she sees what’s in my hand.
“Banks—”
“I had a whole plan,” I tell her, crossing back to her, crouching down at the edge of the tub. “The cabin. The fireplace. I had it worked out.”
“You had a plan,” she repeats slowly, like she’s making sure she’s hearing this right.
“The spider ruined it.”
She makes a sound that’s either a laugh or a sob, probably both, her hand coming up to cover her mouth.
“I’ve been carrying this around for six days,” I say, opening the box.
The ring catches the light— simple, clean, exactly what I thought she’d want, though I had Tori verify three times to be sure.
“And I keep waiting for the right moment, but I think—I think any moment with you is the right one.” I look at her.
Her eyes are wet and she’s not even trying to stop it.
“Marry me, Win. I want the house in the suburbs filled with chaos and kids. I want all of it, but only if it’s with you. ”
She’s crying fully now, which I expected, and she’s laughing at the same time, which I didn’t expect.
She reaches out and cups my face in her wet hand, and I lean into it, and she looks at me the way she does sometimes—like I’m a thing she can’t quite believe is real.
“Yes,” she says. “Obviously yes, you idiot.”
I slide the ring onto her finger. She looks at it for a second, then at me, and then she yanks off my towel and pulls me back into the tub, water sloshing everywhere, and I let her because I’d let her do just about anything, and she kisses me like we’ve got all the time in the world.
I guess we do.