Epilogue
Belle
Opening day makes me feel like I’m five-years-old again on Christmas.
It starts out slow, and Jesse reminds me on more than one occasion not to chew my thumb nail or pace when my anxiety heightens.
By noon people start trickling in. Familiar faces.
Non familiar faces. Friends of friends. Hockey fans who are more than happy to greet Jesse helping me work the counter.
By two o’clock there’s a line that goes down three different store fronts.
We have different samples out for customers to take from our own café and the local eateries near us, along with their information to cross-promote our businesses.
I even struck three different deals with a few other owners to stock their products in my store, offering them majority profit to show them that I want to be part of this community.
Within the first six hours, we run out of half of our pastries and Jesse has to run to the store to get more ice for the coffees I’ve perfected making over the summer.
The raffle baskets go over as well as I thought they would, with hundreds of entries into each of the five options that range from self-care products to jewelry.
It’s safe to say Karen still doesn’t like me, but she’s put her claws away since realizing that she’s in the minority of people who don’t.
When it’s announced only two weeks after our opening that Jesse won’t be returning to the ice, I expect some of the excitement from customers to die down at the store.
I know better than to think some of our customers are only here for books when they usually scope out the store until they catch him either stocking books, checking out someone at the register, or helping serve food behind the café counter.
But when the news comes, it barely dwindles the people who show up to browse our book selection or buy a sweet treat for the ride home.
As the weeks go by, people keep coming. And so do Jesse’s former teammates, who want to help promote the store and tease their old captain who chose to retire from playing professional hockey to sell romance books instead. When they’re not busy during their season, of course.
Thomas Moskins’s fiancée, Winter, even helped me set up a website for the store and planned out different events that the guys could participate in to build a social media following and bring new people in.
She and Honor Hoffman, their coach’s wife, filmed the guys reading snippets from different romances that we’ve been clipping and posting online which gained us nearly thirty-thousand followers in a week. One week.
And when the guys—mostly Richie Head and Jack Dawson, but a few others sprinkled in on occasion—said they’d be down to do in-person readings at the store, it became a monthly event called Read with Me Wednesdays that we had to start ticketing because we were running out of room.
Not long after opening, Core Charge released their ad campaigns, including a giant billboard of me and Jesse looking extra comfy together.
It stirs up the type of comments online that we choose to ignore, not confirming or denying any speculations about our relationship.
We don’t hide that we’re in one, and people who come to the bookstore definitely notice when Jesse touches my hand or kisses my cheek or says how proud of me he is.
We decide that the people we’re close to are the only ones who need to know the details of our personal lives.
Nobody else matters. Not when tabloids get ahold of pictures posted of us at the bookstore or us out together in public getting food or just existing, or when nasty headlines show up in gossip news shows about how inappropriate our relationship is.
Jesse and I refuse to let anybody’s opinions ruin what we’ve known all along about each other. That this love is never ending. It’s ours. And nobody can take that away from us.
On the seven-month anniversary of the store opening, I show up to see Jesse already restocking the books on the shelves that were picked through. He’s even putting new titles that he’s liked listening to on the Jesse’s Recs shelf by the front door. One of the titles is Heated Rivalry, of course.
And when I see him wearing his readers, which he started needing after picking up his new reading habit, I bite my bottom lip.
Jesse Clarkson in skates is one thing, but him in glasses is a whole new image that women around the world quiver at.
I’d know, after posting a photo of him wearing them. The comments did not disappoint.
I smile at him and set my belongings down in their usual spot behind the counter.
Then I see it.
“Jesse?” I ask, although I’m not sure my voice is audible.
I touch the box that’s just…sitting on the counter.
Casually. Like it isn’t square or black or velvet or oddly resembling something that could have a ring inside of it.
Then I look at the bouquet of paper flowers that are made from book pages resting beside the box.
We have a local vendor who helped us decorate our store with flowers made from some of my favorite books.
They’re hanging on the walls and from the rafters, along with vines and fairy lights.
I love everything about the aesthetic inside, and so do the people who come taking photos in the various spots I knew would make great photo opportunities.
Picking up one of the flowers, I read the words to figure out which book it’s from before I suck in a breath.
Then I feel Jesse behind me, his arms moving around me to pick up the box. All he does is open it and set it back down to the flower bouquet, which are made from one of my favorite scenes of all time where a High Lord explains to his mate when he found out who she was to him.
My eyes water when I glance from the flower pages to the ring now shiny and beautiful and on display in front of me.
Jesse’s arm wrap around me, hugging me into him and resting his chin on my shoulder. “You know I love you, Bells. And I don’t really feel like wasting any time here. We’ve wasted enough pretending like this wasn’t inevitable.”
I swallow and shakily pick up the ring.
“Will you marry me?” he asks softly.
A single tear slides down my cheek. This is the same ring I was eyeing at Hardy’s Jewelers when we’d dropped off the winner’s name from the basket raffle.
Not only had they gotten the basket, but Karen said they’d offer them a ten percent discount on any item, so I gave her the information for her to reach out.
When did he have time to pick this up? How did he even know which one I was looking at? He’s been with me every chance he can because of how busy we are all the time.
“I debated on going somewhere else to buy it,” he admits. “But then I remembered that we aren’t like her. We support people the way we support each other, and I could tell you loved this ring.”
I say the only thing I can to that. “Yes.”
His kiss is soft and warm and loving as he slides the ring onto my finger and turns to hug me again until I can barely breathe.
It’s then, with my mouth pressed against his chest, that I whisper, “I’m pregnant.”
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