Epilogue #2
Tonight, I think. Not because of Ryan or Calder or Riggs.
Because she's home. Because our home is full of books and light and the sound of her typing.
Because I wake up at 0430 and the silence isn't empty anymore---it's full of her breathing, soft and steady, the sound of someone who trusts me enough to sleep.
Tonight.
KASSIDY
Tucker comes home early, and that's the first sign something is different.
He walks through the door at five instead of seven, and his face has an expression I can't place---calm on the surface, charged underneath, like the ocean before the swell arrives.
"How was Diana?" he asks, hanging his jacket.
"Good. She wants to co-write something. I'm considering it."
"You should."
"How was the event?"
He pauses by the kitchen counter. "The event client was Ryan."
My hands still on the keyboard. "Ryan. My Ryan?"
"He's not your anything. But yes."
"Calder assigned you to---" A laugh escapes. Not bitter. Not anxious. The genuine, full-bodied laugh of a woman who has moved so far past her ex-boyfriend that his existence has become absurd. "Tucker. Was it weird?"
"He called you settling down."
"Of course he did."
"I told him you upgraded."
The laugh deepens. I close the laptop and cross the kitchen to wrap my arms around him. He smells like cologne and the coast, and his arms close around me with the reflexive certainty that still takes my breath away.
"You said that? To his face?"
"To his face."
"I love you."
"I know."
We cook together---or rather, Tucker cooks and I maintain quality control from my spot on the counter, stealing bites of roasted garlic and offering commentary on his technique.
He makes his grandmother's pasta---the real stuff, flour and eggs and strong hands working the dough---and the kitchen fills with the smell of something ancient and good.
"Remember the inn?" he says, rolling the dough with military precision. "When we danced?"
"The jukebox. The vending machine picnic. The worst wine I've ever had in a water glass."
"Best assignment I ever had."
"Better than Kabul?"
"Kabul didn't have Scrabble."
The pasta goes into boiling water, and I pour wine---actual wine, not hurricane rations---and we eat at the table by the window while the harbor turns gold and then violet and then dark.
"Want to know a secret?" I ask, twirling pasta around my fork.
"Always."
"I rewrote that manuscript ending. The one you read at the inn."
"Yeah? How does it end?"
"The hero proposes."
The silence that follows has texture. Tucker sets down his fork.
His hand moves to his pocket---then stops.
His eyes find mine across the table, and the expression on his face is one I've never seen before.
Not calm. Not controlled. Open. Vulnerable.
The face of a man who has been carrying something heavy and is about to set it down.
"Funny," he says. His voice is rough at the edges. "I had the same idea."
He reaches into his pocket and produces a small velvet box.
My heart stops. Actually stops---a full cardiac pause that my brain registers with the clinical detachment of a woman who writes physical reactions for a living. Heart stopped. Breathing suspended. Time dilated.
He opens the box.
The ring is sapphire. Dark blue. The color of the ocean at dusk, the color of my book launch dress, the color of the Tidehaven sky on the night we first danced.
It's perfect---not perfect in the generic, expected way but perfect in the specific, deliberate way that means he paid attention. He listened. He remembered.
"Tucker---"
"Wait." He stands. Comes around the table.
Gets down on one knee on the kitchen floor, and the sight of this man---this tall, steady, beautiful man who carried my suitcase and read Ishiguro and drove through a hurricane to keep me safe---kneeling in our kitchen with a sapphire ring and eyes full of everything he's never been able to say easily.
"Kassidy Monroe." His voice is steady, but his hands aren't. The box trembles slightly, and that tremor---that tiny, human imperfection---undoes me completely. "You're bossy. You're competitive. You talk to yourself, you steal the covers, and you play Scrabble like it's a blood sport."
"This is the worst proposal ever."
"I'm not done." He catches my hand. "You're also the bravest person I know.
The most passionate, the most honest, the most infuriatingly organized.
You outline your feelings and color-code your fears and write love stories that make strangers cry on airplanes.
You made me believe in something when I'd forgotten how. You gave me a reason to come home."
The tears are falling. They've been falling since the box opened, and they're not stopping, and my face is a disaster, and I don't care.
"Will you marry me?"
The answer has been living in my chest since the night at the inn.
Since the morning after, when I ran. Since the gas station where I cried, and the two weeks of hiding, and the night he showed up with Thai food and said you're everything.
The answer has been woven into every chapter of every book I've written since the day Tucker Brennan carried my suitcase and I mistook him for the bellhop.
"That is the worst proposal ever," I say, tears streaming. "Yes. Absolutely yes."
TUCKER
She's crying and laughing and calling my proposal terrible, and it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
The ring slides onto her finger---a perfect fit, because I stole her ring size from a jewelry box she doesn't know I opened.
(Reconnaissance is a transferable skill.) The sapphire catches the lamplight, and her hand---the hand that types stories and grips Scrabble tiles and holds mine in the dark---looks like it was always meant to wear this ring.
"You're seriously proposing?" she says, staring at her hand.
"You seriously said yes."
"I said 'absolutely yes.' There's a distinction."
"Noted. I'll put it in the report."
She laughs---the full, unguarded laugh that I fell in love with in a library during a hurricane---and pulls me to my feet. Her arms wrap around my neck, and she kisses me with the salt of her tears on both our mouths.
"How long have you had the ring?"
"Two months."
"Two months! Tucker Brennan, you carried a ring for two months and---"
"I was waiting for the right moment."
"And the right moment was me accidentally telling you my fictional hero proposes?"
"You wrote the scene. I just staged it."
"We are co-authoring our lives now. I hope you understand that."
"I wouldn't have it any other way."
She pulls me toward the bedroom by my shirt collar, walking backward, and the sapphire catches the hallway light as her fingers work my buttons.
The sight of it---my ring, on her hand, moving against my chest---does something to me that I don't have a tactical term for.
Possessive isn't the right word. Neither is tender.
It's both, fused together, and it lives somewhere below my ribs and doesn't move.
"Hi, fiancé," she says, and her voice has that low, particular quality it gets when she's done being witty and means every word.
"Hi, fiancée."
She laughs, and then she kisses me, and the laugh dissolves into something that isn't a laugh at all.
We fall onto the bed together---her back hitting the mattress, my weight following, her hands already pulling my shirt free.
She's still in the dark blue dress, and I reach for the zipper at her back the way I've reached for it a hundred times by now, but tonight it feels different.
Slower. She arches up into my hands, and when the dress slides away she's warm and bare and looking at me like I hung the harbor lights.
"Stop staring," she says.
"Not a chance."
The ring catches the lamplight when she reaches up to pull me down, and I take her wrist, press my mouth to her palm, feel her breath go shallow. She makes a sound that she'll deny later---low and involuntary---and her free hand grips the back of my neck and pulls.
There's no urgency to it. That's what's different from the inn, from the early months.
This is unhurried in a way that only happens when you've stopped being afraid someone will disappear.
Her fingers trace the scar on my wrist. My mouth finds the curve of her shoulder, the hollow beneath her ear that makes her exhale my name in pieces.
Then I work my way down.
She knows what's coming and her whole body goes still in that way it does---held breath, fingers threading into my hair, waiting.
I press my mouth to the inside of her knee and feel her leg tremble.
Take my time moving up her inner thigh, slow enough that she makes a sound halfway between impatience and please, and by the time I reach her she's already flushed and wanting and her hips lift without her permission.
"Tucker---"
"I've got you."
When my mouth finds her she exhales my name like she's been holding it for hours, and her fingers tighten in my hair hard enough to sting.
I learn what she needs tonight the way I learn everything about her---by paying attention, by cataloguing the sharp intake of breath versus the low moan, the way her thighs press against my shoulders when I slow down versus the way her whole body arches when I don't. She comes apart with her hand pressed over her own mouth, and I feel it move through her in waves, and I stay with her all the way through it until she tugs me up by the hair and pulls me to her mouth.
She tastes like tears and wine when she kisses me. Her hand slides between us, wraps around me, and I drop my forehead to hers and breathe through it because her grip is sure and deliberate and she's watching my face with the focused attention of a woman conducting research.
"Still tactical?" she asks.
"Losing ground fast."
She guides me to her, and the moment I push inside her the teasing is over.
She inhales sharply, hands gripping my back, and I hold still long enough for her to adjust, long enough to look at her face---eyes dark, lips parted, ring glinting at my shoulder where her hand has found purchase.
Then she rolls her hips, unmistakable, and I start to move.
It's not the frantic collision of the inn or the urgent relief of the first weeks.
This is something slower and more devastating.
She meets every movement, her body reading mine the way she reads a manuscript---finding the rhythm, responding to what works, her breath breaking in small sounds that I feel against my neck.
Her legs wrap around me and I go deeper, and the sound she makes is the most honest thing I've ever heard.
"Don't stop," she says, voice wrecked. "Don't you dare stop."
I don't stop.
She comes the second time with her face pressed to my shoulder and my name in her mouth, and I follow her over a few strokes later with my face buried in her hair, breathing her in like she's the only air in the room.
We lie tangled and quiet afterward. She catches the ring glinting in the lamplight and starts crying again, mid-laugh, and I kiss the tears off her cheekbone without comment because I've learned that with Kassidy, the crying and the laughing are the same thing---both mean she's all the way present, no armor, no editing.
She tells me I'm terrible at proposals but excellent at everything else.
I pull her closer and don't argue.
Afterward, tangled and spent and grinning like idiots, we plan.
"Small," she says, tracing circles on my chest. "Intimate. Tidehaven."
"Whatever you want. As long as you're there."
"Diana will insist on giving a speech."
"Diana gives excellent speeches."
"Riggs will try to give a speech."
"Riggs will be intercepted."
She laughs. The sound fills the bedroom like music.
My phone dings on the nightstand. Then again. Then continuously, a cascade of notifications that can only mean one thing.
Riggs: DID HE DO IT?? DID HE PROPOSE??
Riggs: I NEED ANSWERS
Decker: give them space, man.
Riggs: TUCKER brENNAN IF YOU DO NOT CONFIRM WITHIN SIXTY SECONDS I AM DRIVING TO TIDEHAVEN
Calder: Stand down, Riggs.
Riggs: SIR I CANNOT STAND DOWN THIS IS A CRITICAL SITUATION
I pick up the phone. Type three words. Set it back down.
Tucker: She said yes.
The response is instantaneous and deafening---a wall of congratulations, exclamation marks, and Riggs proposing himself as best man with an enthusiasm that borders on aggressive. Decker sends a single thumbs-up emoji, which from him is equivalent to a standing ovation.
Calder: Congratulations, Brennan. You've earned this.
Riggs: I'M PLANNING THE BACHELOR PARTY
Riggs: IT WILL INVOLVE A BOAT
Decker: no boats.
Riggs: A SMALL BOAT
Calder: Brennan. Go be with your fiancée. That's an order.
I set the phone face down. Kassidy is watching me with the expression she gets when she's storing details---the slight tilt of her head, the almost-smile, the way her eyes narrow like she's composing a sentence in real time.
"You're going to write this scene, aren't you?"
"I'm already writing it in my head."
"The proposal? The ring?"
"The phone. The team. The way Riggs types in all caps. It's going in the epilogue."
"Our life is your epilogue."
"Our life is the whole book, Tucker. It always was."
We ignore the phones. They'll still be buzzing in the morning---Riggs alone will generate enough messages to fill a chapter.
But tonight belongs to us. To the quiet cottage on Harbor Street, the harbor lights through the window, the ring on her finger, the future unfolding like a story neither of us outlined but both of us chose.
She curls against me. The ring catches the harbor light---a flash of blue in the dark room.
"Tucker?"
"Yeah?"
"Riggs is going to be unbearable about this."
"Riggs is already unbearable about this."
She laughs, soft and fading, and then she's asleep. Just like that---mid-laugh, mid-sentence, the way she always falls asleep, as if consciousness is a draft she's still revising.
The phone buzzes one last time on the nightstand.
Riggs: I'm going to be the BEST best man.
I set it face down. Pull her closer. Close my eyes.
The quiet doesn't scare me anymore.
Thank you for reading the Tidehaven SEAL Series. If you haven’t, you can start with Rescued by the SEAL by Logan Chance.