40. The Realest Thing
Chapter forty
The Realest Thing
Sienna POV
He's on one knee.
On the floor of my bar.
I stare at him and the world goes a little sideways, because I've seen Atticus Knox in a lot of configurations.
Furious. Controlled. Shirtless on a hotel floor at two in the morning.
In front of a press conference owning every mistake he ever made.
Bleeding and not caring about it. But this, shaking hands, ring box open, face doing something I don't think he has the slightest control over, is the one I didn't know I was waiting for.
"I've been carrying this for two months," he says.
His voice comes out rough at the edges.
"I bought it the week after the cabin. I've been waiting for the right moment and I kept —" He stops. Exhales. "There wasn't a right moment. There were just moments where I was too scared, and I'm done with that."
I should say something. I should have words.
I have nothing.
Because I'm looking at the ring — simple, exactly right, not showy — and thinking about the night years ago when he drove me home in the dark and walked me to my door and told me I was off-limits.
Like it cost him something to say.
He wasn't wrong. He would've been a disaster, then. The kind of person who hurts you without meaning to because they've only ever learned to protect themselves.
But that was then.
That man doesn't live here anymore.
"No PR," Atticus says. Still on one knee.
His eyes haven't left mine. That's the thing about him, the thing that still gets me.
When he looks at you, he actually looks at you.
No scanning the room. No calculating exits.
Just present. Just there. "No cameras. No agreement.
No clause." A small pause. "I want a life that doesn't run from you. "
My throat tightens.
"I want to fight with you in the mornings because you won't let me have the coffee press. I want to be the person you call first." A beat. "I want to learn how to let you see me. I'm working on it."
He looks down at the ring for half a second. Then back up.
"I know it's not a perfect pitch. I don't have a speech. I had a speech, but I had it for the wrong version of this moment and I threw it out in the parking lot."
I make a sound that is entirely not crying. Not even slightly.
"You threw it out in the parking lot."
"It was terrible." His mouth moves. Not quite a smile. The closest thing. "It used the word 'trajectory.' You would have eviscerated me."
"I absolutely would have."
Something in his expression shifts. Opens. All that careful, locked-down control, all those years of being the wall everyone else leaned against, it's still there, still part of him, but the door is open. I can see straight through it.
The man who drove me home in the dark and didn't ask me to explain anything.
The man who resigned a captaincy and went public and said ask me, not her, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
The man on the floor of my bar with shaking hands and no speech and a ring he's been carrying for two months.
"Just you," he says. "If you want this."
I step forward.
The space between us closes to almost nothing. I crouch down so we're level, so I can see his face clearly, so there are no angles between us.
His hands are still shaking.
I put mine over them. Warm and steady, which I did not expect from myself right now, but I feel it. I am completely, absolutely sure about this. The surety of it is something I don't entirely have language for. It's less like a decision and more like recognition.
"You should've asked me sooner," I say.
His eyes search mine.
I let him look. I let him see all of it.
"Yes," I tell him.
He closes his eyes for one second.
Just one.
Then he exhales, long and slow, like he's been holding his breath for months and didn't know it until just now. His hands turn under mine, grip them. I feel the tremor working out of them. I feel the moment it stops.
When he opens his eyes again, something has shifted.
Not dramatically. Not in a way the cameras would catch.
But I see it. I've gotten very good at reading this face.
He stands, takes me with him, and his hands come up to frame mine, ring sliding into place with a small, real, perfectly ordinary click that I'm going to think about for the rest of my life. He holds my hand between both of his and looks down at it for a moment.
Then he looks at me.
"Hi," I say.
His mouth curves. An actual smile. I've collected these like evidence.
"Hi."
I kiss him first.
It's not staged. Not for social media. Not for Delia, not for the team, not for the twelve reporters who've had us trending for three months.
His hands come up to my face the way they always do, like holding something he doesn't want to drop, and I get my fists in the front of his shirt and he makes a sound against my mouth that is low and warm and completely his.
The kiss tips sideways, slower, and I let it.
He presses his forehead to mine after, both of us breathing a little faster than we started.
"I love you," he says. Quiet and flat and certain. The way he says everything he means. "I didn't say that part."
"You said every other part."
"I wanted to be specific."
I laugh. Actually laugh. It bounces off the walls of my bar, warm and too loud and entirely real.
He pulls back to look at me, that particular quality in his eyes, like he's memorizing something, and then he smiles again.
It creases the corner of his eye, and I think about the first time I saw that and didn't know what to do with it.
I know what to do with it now.
"I love you too," I tell him. "I've loved you for an embarrassingly long time and I was extremely resistant about it."
"I know."
"I made it very difficult."
"You did." His thumb traces the curve of my cheekbone, slow and certain. "I didn't mind."
***
Three months later.
The restraining order held.
Calvin's lawyer stopped returning calls when mine started winning. He is somewhere I don't have to think about often, which is the exact distance I asked for and the exact distance I got.
Mason gave a toast at our engagement dinner that lasted eight minutes and made me cry in front of six hockey players, which I will never forgive him for.
He said: you are the two most stubborn people I have ever loved, and I'm extremely glad you're keeping each other.
Then told Atticus to go home. Atticus said it was Sienna's bar.
They argued about it for five minutes while I stood there in my engagement ring thinking: this is the rest of my life.
I want it.
Every loud, ridiculous, overprotective, deeply undignified piece of it.
The bar closes at midnight on Fridays. It always has. I know the sound of it shutting down the way I know my own breathing. The crowd to the staff to the quiet, the lights dropping one by one until it's just the two of us and the last glass on the shelf.
He has a key now.
His key is on my ring, and my jacket is perpetually in his car, and he knows how I take my coffee and I know he pretends the mornings don't exist before nine a.m. except when practice requires otherwise.
He has learned to leave the coffee press alone.
I have learned to tell him when something is wrong instead of making a joke and hoping he doesn't notice.
We are both works in progress.
I kill the last light above the bar. The dark settles in around us, warm and close and mine.
He holds the door for me, his hand light at the small of my back, easy and certain, and the city comes up around us, loud and late and entirely unhelpful the way cities always are.
I step out into the night.
He falls in beside me.
"No more fake," I say.
He takes my hand.
"Good," he says. "Because I'm keeping you."
***
End.
Thank you for reading the Pucking Full Contact