Epilogue
STELLA
He won’t tell me where we’re going. This is annoying for several reasons. The first being I can’t check the weather conditions for a destination I don’t know. The second, I’ve asked fourteen times, and he’s answered exactly zero of them.
And I counted, too. Fourteen times. No answers. Just that half-smile as he stares straight ahead through the windshield while the highway stretches out in front of us.
“Is it much further?” I try. Maybe if I’m indirect, he’ll work with me.
No such luck. “You already tried that one.”
“You didn’t answer me.”
“Because it would ruin the surprise.”
Unreal. “You know I don’t like surprises. They’re on the list. Not the main list, but the secondary one. The annex.”
“You have an annex now?” He snorts.
“I always have. It’s for things that aren’t full phobias but still make me uncomfortable.” I count them off on my fingers. “Surprises. People who whisper for no reason—I can’t even tell you how that ticks me off. Corn mazes—”
“Corn mazes?” he asks. His eyes cut my way as he smirks.
“You can’t see over the walls. You just have to trust that the corn isn’t plotting something.”
“Totally reasonable.” He might shake his head, but I see the smile he’s still trying to fight. He wears it more and more lately. Like a piece of clothing he’s breaking in—a pair of shoes or a new hat.
The drive takes about an hour. I spend it watching the landscape change.
Suburbs become highway, which becomes smaller roads lined with dune grass and the sort of low, scrubby brush that only grows near the coast. I smell it before I see it.
Salt and something mineral underneath it, blowing through the vents.
My hands tighten in my lap because I know where we’re going now.
My body knows before my brain can confirm it.
He’s taking me to the ocean.
I haven’t been to the beach since I was five years old. Since the day Mom and Dad packed a cooler and drove to the shore, and Mom walked ahead with her sandals in one hand and her red hair blowing sideways.
All this time, I’ve been painting the waves. I’ve painted it from every angle, in every shade. I’ve never once been back to see it in person, though. Painting it from memory instead of facing it was safer.
Now we pull into a small gravel lot at the end of a road that doesn’t seem to lead anywhere else. There are no other cars. The dunes rise up on either side, and beyond them I can hear it. The ocean, steady and enormous. Totally indifferent to the fact that I am terrified.
He kills the engine and looks my way. “You don’t have to do this,” he murmurs. “But I thought... maybe I could help you face it.”
I look down at my hands. Big surprise. They’re shaking. “This is a lot,” I whisper. But then again, my hands shook in the alley, didn’t they? I still pulled the trigger. “What’s the wind?”
“Twelve.” He holds up his phone to show me. He already had the weather app pulled up. Just when I think I can’t love him more.
Twelve. “I think I can handle that,” I decide with a shaky laugh. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Still, I need him to get out of the SUV and come around to my side to help me out.
I might be able to walk on the beach, but opening a car door?
That’s a little more than I’m capable of right now.
Lucky for me, he takes care of it and holds my hand while we walk up the path between the dunes.
The grass whips sideways in the breeze, and I feel it on my face.
That push. The invisible hands. My chest goes tight the way it always does.
But Tristan’s hand is around mine, and the quiet is there, the way it always is when he’s close. It’s enough to help me keep walking.
We come over the top of the dune, and all at once, the ocean opens up in front of me.
At first, I can’t breathe. It’s exactly the way I painted it.
The green is alive in a way no pigment can hold.
Shifting and glowing, lit from inside the way I’ve been trying to capture for months.
The waves roll in and pull back, roll in and pull back.
The sound of them fills every corner of the air.
The salt is on my lips, and the wind is in my hair.
And I’m crying. I wasn’t planning on that, but then how could I have planned for any of this when it was a surprise?
“It’s real,” I whisper, gazing out at the majesty. “It’s actually real.”
He doesn’t say anything. He stands next to me and lets me absorb it without breaking into the moment.
After a while, we walk down to the water.
I kick off my shoes first and feel the sand warm under my bare feet.
The water reaches my toes, and it’s shockingly cold, making me grasp Tristan’s arm and then laugh.
It’s just water, after all. Cold water on top of warm sand and a big, loud ocean that doesn’t care about me at all.
It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I don’t know how long he lets me stand there while the water comes in and goes out. Birds wheel overhead—actual birds, too, real ones. I’m not even afraid. I watch them and there’s no tightening of my chest, no racing of my pulse. Everything stays calm and even.
And I want to tell him. This is all because of him. He has opened the world up to me. He’s made it possible to work through the fear and see what’s on the other side, waiting for me.
But when I turn to him, prepared to pour my heart out, he’s not standing next to me anymore.
He’s on one knee. And there’s a ring in his hand.
“Oh my god,” I whisper. Now my pulse is racing, for sure.
“I had a speech.”
“Oh my god,” I repeat, with my hands crossed over my chest. Sure enough, my heart is pounding away. Please, don’t kill me now. Wouldn’t that be something? Coming all this way, reaching the happiest moment of my life, and having my heart burst out of my chest?
“Like I was saying,” he continues, “I had a speech. I worked on it for a week, and it was good. I even worked in a Godfather quote,” he adds with a smirk.
Then the smirk fades. “But I’m looking at you now, and I don’t remember any of it.” He holds up the ring. It catches the light. Simple and perfect, a single stone on a shiny platinum band. “I only know I want the rest of it. All of it. I even want the annex, Stella. I want everything. All of you.”
“You want the annex?” Apparently, my brain has decided to fixate on that single detail while the rest of me is dissolving in joy.
He barely blinks. “Every item on it.”
“Even corn mazes?”
“Even corn mazes.”
I’m laughing and crying at the same time.
It’s a terrible combination when you’re also trying to say a word.
It’s the easiest word I’ve ever said, but it takes me three tries to get it out because my mouth keeps doing other things, like smiling so wide it hurts and making sounds that aren’t intelligible.
“Yes,” I finally manage. “Yes. Obviously yes. A thousand times yes. Put it on before I spiral.”
He puts it on. It fits perfectly. He probably measured my finger while I was sleeping, because that’s the kind of man he is. He plans for things most people don’t think about and handles the details before you know they exist. That’s one thing that makes him perfect for me. One of so many things.
I look down at my hand, which looks like it belongs to someone else now that it’s wearing a diamond.
Then I tackle him.
He goes down at the water’s edge and the ocean rushes over our feet.
Cold, so cold. I don’t care. He doesn’t seem to care either.
My hands are under his shirt, and his hands are in my hair, and the ocean is right there, pulling at our feet.
I kiss him with salt water on my lips and sand in my hair and twelve miles an hour of wind blowing over us.
His hands find the hem of my shirt and slide underneath, and his warm palms touch my skin at the same time a cool burst of air does. I gasp against his mouth, and he pulls back just enough to look at me. Checking, always checking.
“Off,” he grunts. His voice is dropping into that register. The low, rough one that turns my whole body into a live wire. He pulls the shirt over my head and tosses it somewhere behind us. I genuinely do not care where it lands.
The ocean rushes up again, cold and shocking against my bare skin. I arch into him because he’s warm, so warm. His hands move up my ribs, thumbs tracing the undersides of my breasts. “You’re shaking,” he murmurs against my throat.
“It’s the water,” I whisper before moaning when his thumb strokes my nipple until it goes painfully taut.
“No, it’s not.” His mouth drags down my collarbone—slow, deliberate. Then he moves lower. When he takes my nipple into his mouth, the sound I make is swallowed by the waves. His hands tighten on my waist, pulling me harder against him.
“I’ve got you.” He lifts his head to look at me. His eyes are darker than I’ve ever seen them. “I’m going to take my time with you. Right here. With the ocean and the ring on your finger and nothing else.”
I look at the ring glinting on my hand where it’s fisted in his shirt. Something about seeing it there while his mouth is on my skin makes everything feel more real and more impossible at the same time.
He peels me out of the rest of my clothes with the patience of a man who isn’t rushing anything. Every time I try to speed things up by pulling at his shirt or reaching for his belt, he catches my hands and pins them gently against the sand.
“Not yet,” he says against my ear. The growl in his voice sends heat flooding through my belly. “I need to watch you first.”
“Watch me what?”
“Come apart.” His hand slides between my thighs, and I stop breathing. He chuckles darkly before adding, “Right here on this beach. I want to hear you over the waves.”
I’m already so wound up by the time his fingers find me that the first stroke of my clit makes my hips jerk against his hand. He makes a low sound in his throat. Approval or hunger, maybe. Something possessive that I feel all the way to my toes.