47. Aria
ARIA
There is exactly one answer to a man rebuilding a garden gate into an archway with your name carved into it, and it is not a complicated one.
I saw it the second he stepped back to let me look, small letters worked into the crossbeam just above Noah's drawing, ARIA, cut clean into the wood the way you'd cut something you meant to last. I had been standing there with my whole chest cracked open by his speech, and that one detail was the thing that finally broke me the rest of the way.
"You carved my name into it."
"I had help. Deacon's better with a router than I am. I did the sanding."
"Jake."
"I wanted it to still be there in fifty years, whether or not you said yes tonight. I figured a garden ought to remember you lived here even if I got this wrong."
"You didn't get it wrong." My voice came out thick and unsteady, nothing like the answer I meant to give, so I said it again, plainer, so there could be no mistaking it.
"Yes. Obviously yes. I am not getting on a plane and leaving a man who built me a whole archway and put my name on it for the rest of my life to read."
He made a sound that was half laugh and half something rawer, and then his hands were on my face and I was kissing him under lights he'd strung himself, and somewhere behind us I heard Lily shriek with the specific joy of a five-year-old who has just watched her whole world rearrange itself in her favor.
"Does this mean we're getting married?" she demanded, arriving at a full sprint and attaching herself to both our legs at once.
"Noah said maybe. I said obviously."
"Nobody said anything about married, bug."
"You're kissing under an archway with your name on it. That's basically a wedding." She said it with the flat, unimpeachable logic of a child who had clearly given this more thought than either of us had.
Noah arrived a beat behind her, quieter, and handed me the framed drawing off the crossbeam without a word, like he'd already decided it belonged in my hands now instead of hanging over our heads.
Deacon whooped loud enough to startle the goose, which had wandered up from wherever it kept itself these days and was currently inspecting Carol's apple basket with open contempt for its lack of churros.
"Told you the arbor was better than the water tower," he called, already fishing his phone out to document the whole thing for posterity, or possibly blackmail.
"Nobody ever proposed with a banner and meant it. "
"Nobody proposed," Jake said, without taking his eyes off me. "I built a gate and gave a speech."
"Call it whatever you want. I'm putting engagement in the group text either way."
Carol pressed both hands to her mouth and did not bother pretending she wasn't crying, and when I caught her eye over Jake's shoulder she just shook her head and mouthed, finally, like she'd been waiting on this exact outcome since the first casserole she ever carried through our door.
"All right." Carol clapped once, businesslike even through the tears.
"Kids are coming home with me tonight. Don't argue, I already packed a bag for each of them two days ago because I know how this story ends better than either of you apparently did."
"Carol."
"I raised three children and buried a husband, Aria. I know when a couple needs a house to themselves." She was already herding Lily and Noah toward the gate.
"Can we come back tomorrow and see if there's a wedding yet?" Lily called over her shoulder, entirely unbothered by the fact that nobody had answered her the first time.
"We'll see," I called back, and heard Jake laugh under his breath at the exact phrase Lily had spent an entire festival accusing me of using as a synonym for yes.
Deacon fell into step behind Carol with the drawing tucked carefully under one arm like it was something breakable, pausing only to point two fingers at Jake in a gesture that managed to convey both congratulations and a threat about return-of-favor labor on some future roofing job.
Then the gate swung shut behind all four of them, their voices fading down the street, and within a few minutes it was just the two of us standing under the lights with a whole quiet house waiting on either side of the fence.
"She really did pack their bags two days ago."
"She's been planning this longer than I have.
" Jake reached up and touched the letters of my name again, like he still couldn't quite believe they'd worked.
"I want you to know the arbor took four days and the speech took two weeks and I am fairly sure I aged a full year standing here waiting for you to say something. "
"I said yes before you'd even finished the sentence."
"It felt longer."
"Everything feels longer when you've spent two weeks rehearsing in your truck." I slid my arms around his neck, close enough now to feel his heartbeat going hard and fast under my palm, entirely at odds with how steady his voice had sounded through the whole speech.
"You were shaking. This whole time. I could feel it."
"I told you I was terrible at this."
"You were perfect at this."
"I compared us to a house frame in the first draft."
"I love that you did. Cut or not, I'm glad I know it existed." I pulled him down and kissed him again, slower this time, no audience left to perform for, just the two of us and the lights and the tree that had apparently been waiting years for something to lean on and had finally gotten it.
"You know Carol's going to want a full report tomorrow," he said against my mouth. "She's going to ask specific questions."
"Carol can wait."
"She really can't. She's already texted me twice tonight and I haven't even looked."
"Then don't look." I caught the collar of his shirt in one fist and tugged, just enough to make him stumble half a step closer, close enough that I could feel him laughing against my temple. "Take me inside, Jake."
He didn't need to be asked twice.
The walk from the garden to his door took longer than it should have, both of us stopping every few feet to kiss again like teenagers who had never done this before, his hands finding the curve of my waist under my coat, mine finding the collar of his shirt and holding on like I was afraid the whole night might dissolve if I let go.
By the time we made it through the door he had my coat off and his mouth at my throat, and I laughed against his shoulder, breathless, dizzy with how simple it suddenly felt after weeks of feeling nothing simple at all.
"What?" he murmured, not stopping.
"Nothing. Just thinking about a flannel shirt I found in a box a few weeks ago."
"That's a strange thing to think about right now."
"I kept it. For six years. I never once told you that."
He went still for a second, forehead against mine, and I felt something in him loosen the way a held breath finally lets go. "That long."
"Since the summer I met a boy on a dock crew who never once got my name wrong."
"I have never in my life regretted anything the way I regret that storm." His hands slid up under the hem of my shirt, warm and sure, and whatever he meant to say next dissolved into something wordless against my mouth instead.
We made it as far as the couch before either of us cared enough to aim for the bedroom, and after that neither of us cared about direction at all.
He undressed me slowly, like a man handling something he intended to keep, unhurried in a way that undid me faster than urgency ever could have, and I did the same to him, tracing the same forearms I had catalogued without meaning to since the very first day, the scar through one eyebrow, the hands that had built a fence and a treehouse and now an entire archway just to say the thing he'd been too afraid to say out loud.
"Still shaking," I murmured, my palm flat against his chest, feeling his heart going hard and fast under it.
"You have that effect."
"Good. I like knowing I still do."
"You've done it since the first week. I just didn't have the sense to say so." He kissed the words out of my mouth before I could answer, unhurried, thorough, like he had all the time in the world to make up for the two years he'd spent convincing himself he didn't deserve any of it.
Every place his mouth found felt like an answer to a question I hadn't known I was still asking, and by the time we reached the bedroom neither of us had a single word left that wasn't already being said with hands instead.
When he finally settled over me, both of us breathing hard, he stopped just long enough to look at me, really look, the way he had that very first week before either of us had a name for what was happening between the fence posts.
"Aria."
"I'm here."
"I need you to know this isn't just tonight. Whatever happens with the job, however we work out the logistics of it, this is not a one night thing for me. It never was."
"I know." I pulled him down, closer, until there was no more space left for words to fit between us. "Stop talking and build the rest of it with me."
He laughed, low and rough, and then there were no more words for a long while, just his name in my mouth and mine in his, the two of us finally saying with our bodies everything the speech under the arbor hadn't managed to finish.
Afterward we lay tangled in sheets gone cool at the edges, his hand tracing slow circles against my spine, the porch light throwing one thin gold line across the ceiling where the curtains didn't quite meet.
I could hear the house settling around us, the particular quiet of a place that had finally stopped waiting for something to go wrong, and I thought about the flannel still folded on the arm of my own couch two yards and a whole fence away, and the box of unopened moving supplies I would deal with tomorrow, or the day after, or whenever I felt like it, because for the first time in longer than I could remember there was no clock running under any of it.
"What are you thinking about?" he asked, his voice gone rough and slow the way it only got this late.
"That I almost got on a plane instead of doing this."
"I almost let you." His hand stilled against my spine.
"I've been thinking about that too. How close I came to standing here alone, telling myself I'd made the responsible choice."
"You didn't."
"No. I built a gate instead." I felt him smile against my hair. "Turns out that was the responsible choice all along."
I turned in his arms to face him, close enough to see every line of his face in the low light, the same face I could have drawn from memory blind by now, and felt something settle in my chest that had been unsettled for six years without my ever quite noticing the weight of it.
"I love you," he said, quiet, like he'd been saving the sentence for exactly this moment instead of the crowded garden where anyone could have overheard it. "I have loved you since before I had the right to. Probably since before I even had the whole truth to offer you along with it."
"I love you too," I said back, and for once in my life, leaving never once crossed my mind.