32. Ashton
Ashton
Imogen stayed.
Luke got home from his session yesterday and found her still here, and the look on his face was worth every one of the fourteen days I spent not going after her.
We didn’t do much with the rest of the day, and that was the whole point of it.
We made popcorn and burned the first batch, because I burn everything now, it’s turning into my signature move.
Luke beat us both at the board game he swears he isn’t cheating at, but he is, blatantly, and I let him anyway.
We put on some show about deep-sea creatures, his pick, and he talked over the whole thing, naming every fish a beat before the narrator could.
He fell asleep sideways across both our laps somewhere around the anglerfish, and I carried him to bed without waking him, which a year ago I couldn’t have done without him startling at the door.
When I came back out to the living room, half expecting her to have gathered her things, she was still there on the couch, holding the popcorn bowl, waiting on me.
She didn’t leave. We turned off the show and went to bed, my bed, like it was nothing, like she’d always slept there, and I lay awake half the night just listening to her breathe next to me, trying to work out how a man like me got to keep any of this.
Now it’s morning, and she’s asleep in my bed when I slip out from under the covers at seven. I stop in the doorway a second to watch her breathe, because two weeks ago I didn’t know if I’d ever get to stand here and do that again.
She’s got the sheet kicked half off, one of my shirts twisted up around her ribs, her hair wrecked across the pillow, and there’s a mark on her throat I left there last night that has me hard before I’m even fully awake, sun barely up, with something I need to do waiting down the hall.
I make myself get up before I climb back in, because if I climb back in there’s no chance I’m leaving this room before noon.
So I head down the hall in bare feet to wake my partner in crime.
Luke’s already up, cross-legged on his floor in shark pajamas, lining up plastic sea creatures in an order only he understands. He puts a finger to his lips the second I walk in, which is rich, seeing as I’m the one being quiet.
“Is Imogen still here?” he whispers the second I walk in. “I saw the popcorn bowl still out. Is she here or did she go back home?”
“She’s still here, bud. She’s asleep.”
His whole face lights up, relief and victory at the same time. “I knew she’d stay. I knew it!”
I get down onto the floor with him, which puts my knees up around my ears, and keep my voice low.
“I want to ask you something, and I want your honest answer. Not the one you think I want to hear, okay? The real one.”
He sets down the hammerhead and turns to face me, going serious all over, the way he does when he can tell something matters. “Okay.”
“I want to ask Imogen to marry me. To be my wife. That would mean she lives here with us, all the time. Not just visiting, not just tutoring you. Here, for good.” I keep my eyes on his face the whole way through, because if this is wrong for him, then it’s wrong, and that’s the end of it.
“What do you think about that, bud? Honestly.”
He goes quiet, turning it over, the same focus he gives a brand-new fact about some fish that lives way down where there’s no light. Then his whole face breaks open.
“You should’ve done it already!” he says. “What took you so long, Dad?”
“I had some things I needed to fix first.”
“But you fixed them. I was there when you did.” He says it like I’m being slow on purpose. “So when are you going to do it?”
“I don’t know yet. Soon. I’ve got to pick the right day, get a ring, do it the proper way.”
“How about now?”
“Now?”
“She’s here. You’re here. I’m here.” He counts us off on his fingers, completely unimpressed with me. “That’s everybody. Why do you have to wait? If you wait it just gets complicated. You always make stuff complicated, Dad.”
The kid’s got me dead to rights, which is a humbling thing to hear from someone who still can’t tie his own shoes.
“I don’t have a ring,” I tell him. “You can’t ask without a ring. That’s the rule.”
He frowns at this very real, very serious problem. Then he crawls over to his nightstand, hauls the drawer open, and starts digging, past the flashlight, a rock he’s decided is special, a tangle of string, until he comes up with a little plastic box and pops the lid.
Inside is a ring from some toy set, gold-colored, a fat blue plastic gem the size of a grape stuck on crooked.
“You can borrow mine,” he says, holding it up to me like it’s made of real gold. “It came with my pirate costume. But the pirate doesn’t even need it, and you need one, so you can use it.”
I take the box out of his hand and have to clear my throat, because my six-year-old just solved the one problem standing in my way and didn’t think twice about it.
“That’s a serious ring,” I tell him.
“It’s the best ring in the whole house. Don’t lose it, okay? I want it back after you get the real one.” He pushes the drawer shut. “Because the pirate’s going to notice it’s gone.”
“How long has the pirate been without it?”
“Since Halloween.” He’s already on his feet. “He’s fine. He’s got a sword.”
We put the plan together on the floor in whispers. He has opinions, a great many of them. He wants a banner, juice, and many more things that I give to him without a second thought.
By half seven the kitchen’s a disaster zone under his command.
I’ve got the eggs going the right way this time, because Deb didn’t teach a quitter, plus toast, the coffee, and the orange juice Luke swears is a must, on the grounds that, his words, you can’t ask somebody to marry you with no juice.
He’s handling decorations, which means a banner he threw together in about nine minutes and taped crooked across the cabinets, the letters running downhill, MARRY US in green marker with the S facing the wrong way.
There’s a paper chain. There’s one half-dead balloon drifting around the floor like it’s looking for something it lost.
“Is it too much?” he asks, hands on his hips, surveying it like a foreman.
“It’s exactly the right amount of much.”
“I think it needs more balloons.”
“We’re out of balloons, bud.”
“Next time, more balloons.”
“There isn’t going to be a next time. If I do this right, I only get to ask her once.” I look at the crooked banner, the backward S, the one sad balloon. “So this is it. This is the whole show.”
“It’s a good show,” Luke says, nodding at his own work. “Very professional.”
That’s when my bedroom door opens, and Imogen’s bare feet come down the hall. She stops dead in the doorway in my shirt, hair still wrecked, blinking at the banner, the chain, the dying balloon, and the two of us frozen mid-crime like raccoons caught in the good trash.
“Okay.” Her voice is rough with sleep, and the sound of it goes straight through me, a problem I’ll deal with later. “I have questions. First one, why does that banner say marry us, and whose S is that?”
“Mine,” Luke says, glowing. “It’s a hard letter. And Dad has a really, really important question for you, so you should sit down, or maybe don’t sit down, because he needs you standing.”
She looks at me, and the sleepy amusement slides off her face, because she can tell I’m not laughing this one off. Her arms come up around herself, and she waits.
I cross the kitchen and take her hands. They’re cold, but mine aren’t much better.
“Kneel,” Luke stage-whispers from the cabinets, loud enough for the whole floor to hear. “Dad. You kneel for this part. I saw it in the cartoons.”
So I go down on one knee on my own kitchen floor, in front of the woman I spent months being too locked-up to deserve, and I look up at her.
“Start,” Luke prompts. “Start now.”
“It would help,” I tell him, “if you let me say the words.”
He nods, solemn as a judge, mimes zipping his mouth, throws the key over his shoulder, then folds his hands and vibrates in place.
“Imogen.” I take both her hands in mine, my thumbs moving over her knuckles.
“The first night you stayed under this roof, I caught you eating cake straight off the stand in my kitchen at midnight, daring me to say one word about it, and I think I was done for right then. I just spent months refusing to admit it to myself. I’ve never been any good at wanting things I can’t control.
You taught me how, the hard way, on purpose. ”
Her eyes go bright. She presses her lips together and says nothing.
“I’m not a soft man. You know that better than anyone alive.
I run cold, I plan everything into the ground, I once handed you a two-page rulebook with a header on it like a lunatic.
” Her wet laugh breaks loose, but I keep going.
“And you got past all of it anyway. Past the rules, past the ice, past every wall I built on purpose to keep people out. You sat down on my floor and gave my son his laugh back, and somewhere along the way you handed me back a piece of myself I’d given up for good. ”
I let go of one hand to open the little toy box. The fat blue gem catches the light like it’s worth a fortune, and right now it’s worth more to me than anything else in this building.
“I know it’s fast. I don’t care that it’s fast. I’ve spent my whole life checking everything twice, and that’s exactly how I know the difference between a guess and a sure thing.
You’re the surest thing I’ve ever had in my hands.
You, and Luke, and the one on the way, and this loud, half-burnt, ridiculous life we’re building together.
I want all of it out loud, on the record, where nobody can ever make you disappear from it again. ”
I hold up the ring, the pirate’s loaner.
“So. Imogen Spencer. Will you marry me?”
She presses a hand over her mouth, her eyes going from me to the ring to the backward S on the banner, but she doesn’t say a word. The quiet drags out long enough that my pulse starts hammering up in my throat.
“This is the part where you say yes,” Luke whispers to her, every bit of his patience gone. “It’s your turn. You’re supposed to say yes now. That’s how it goes.”
A laugh tears out of her, wet and helpless, and she’s nodding before the word makes it out.
“Yes.” She drops to her knees in front of me so we’re eye to eye on the floor. “Of course it’s yes. You enormous disaster of a man. Yes.”
I slide the little plastic ring onto her finger, the blue gem catching the light for all three of us, and Luke launches himself into the middle of us with a whoop, and the three of us go down in a heap on the floor under a banner that reads MARRY US with the S turned the wrong way.
The half-dead balloon drifts down and lands on top of the pile like it held out all morning for exactly this.
I lie there on my kitchen floor with my son on my back and the woman I love laughing into my shoulder, the balloon deflating slowly against the side of my head, and I don’t move, don’t reach for the phone, don’t count a single thing.
Just this.