Jackson
“Would you mind opening the blanket and making sure her socks didn’t come off?” Blaire asks Rose.
I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling. Impatient little shit.
Rose has been holding Jaxon for all of ten minutes, and that’s already ten minutes longer than Blaire allotted for this part of the plan. I glance at Bennet, who's standing near the foot of the bed doing a much better job of keeping his face neutral than his wife.
We've been planning this for weeks. Going over every detail until I was certain there was no possible way for it to go wrong. The onesie. The blanket. The pocket. Getting it onto Jaxon without Rose seeing it. Making sure everyone knew exactly when to shut the fuck up and let me handle the rest.
Bennet told me at least twice that I was becoming unbearable. I told him excellence requires preparation. He told me to go fuck myself. The only thing we couldn't plan was when Jaxon would be born. My girl decided tonight worked for her.
Rose looks down at the blanket. “Her socks?”
“Yes.” Blaire nods solemnly. “They keep coming off.”
Bullshit. I bet those socks haven’t come off once.
I look away before Rose catches me because the woman can smell a conspiracy from three rooms away, and I didn’t make it this far to blow the whole thing over imaginary sock problems.
“Okay.”
She shifts Jaxon carefully in her arms and finds the edge of the pink blanket covered in tiny elephants. She's still handling the baby like the slightest wrong movement might cause catastrophic structural failure, taking her time as she folds one side of the blanket back.
Then the other.
And stops completely.
Her hand stills against the blanket, and I watch the exact second she reads it. Her breath catches sharp enough that I hear it from where I'm standing.
There, across Jaxon's tiny chest, are the words I had printed weeks ago.
Auntie Rose, will you marry Uncle Jackson?
An arrow points down toward the tiny buttoned pocket sewn just above her belly. The pocket holding Rose's ring.
Nobody says a fucking word. Even Blaire manages it.
The whole room goes so quiet I can hear the faint sounds from the hallway outside, the hum of something behind the bed, Jaxon's tiny little breaths.
Rose still hasn't moved. She's just staring down at the onesie while I stand here trying not to crawl out of my own skin.
Then her head snaps up.
Her eyes find mine.
Fuck.
I've imagined this moment so many times. Planned details so small that Bennet eventually stopped answering my calls about it. I've thought about what I'd say, what Rose might say, whether she'd laugh or cry or call me an asshole before giving me an answer.
I planned for everything.
I did not plan for that look.
Her mouth is slightly open, her eyes already filling with tears, and there is so much fucking love on her face that for the first time tonight, I'm the one who forgets how to breathe.
“Jackson,” she whispers.
I can't help smiling.
“Hi, baby.”
“Hi.” A wet little laugh escapes her.
I walk over and reach for the tiny pocket, carefully unfastening the button. My fingers aren't nearly as steady as I'd like them to be when I pull out the ring.
And suddenly none of this is funny anymore.
Not because I'm afraid she'll say no. I'm not.
I meant what I told her earlier. I know this woman.
I know us. I know exactly where we're going.
But knowing the answer doesn't make asking her mean any less.
If anything, it makes this feel even fucking bigger.
I reach for Jaxon first, carefully lifting her from Rose's arms and placing her back against Blaire's chest. Blaire takes her without a word, but when I glance at her, her eyes are full and she's wearing the biggest smile I've ever seen.
“Go get her,” she whispers.
Yeah. That's the plan.
I turn back to Rose, and she's already shaking her head at me.
"Don't," she says, laughing as she wipes at her cheeks. "Don't look at me like that."
“Like what?”
“You know exactly what you’re doing.”
I do.
For once in my fucking life, I know exactly what I’m doing.
I step in front of her and lower myself onto one knee. Her hand flies to her mouth, and I take the other one between both of mine, looking up at the woman I’ve loved in one way or another for most of my adult life.
“Rosalie Bennett.”
She makes a tiny sound behind her hand.
“Meeting you for the first time rewired my DNA. There hasn’t been a day since that some part of me hasn’t belonged to you.”
Her face crumples.
I squeeze her hand. “I didn’t know that was what happened at the time.
I was too young and way too fucking stupid to understand it.
I just knew there was this girl who got under my skin and stayed there.
No matter how much time passed, no matter where we were or who we were with, somehow there you were. ”
A tear slips down her cheek.
“I spent years thinking I needed to get over you. Then I spent even more years convincing myself I had, which, in hindsight, was a spectacular waste of everybody’s fucking time.
Because through all of it, you were still the person I looked for first. The person I wanted to tell things to.
The person I compared everyone else to without even realizing I was doing it. ”
Her fingers tighten around mine.
“I loved you when you were my best friend’s little sister. I loved you when you became my friend. I loved you when we were both too stupid to admit what we were doing to each other, and I loved you when you spent a year away pretending you didn’t miss me just as much as I missed you.”
“I did miss you,” she whispers.
“I know that now.”
She laughs through her tears.
“I wish we’d figured this shit out sooner. I wish I could go back and save us some of the years we wasted being stubborn and scared and making every possible wrong decision available to two otherwise intelligent people.”
I shake my head.
“But I wouldn’t change what brought us here, because I don’t want some different version of you.
I want this one. The woman standing in front of me right now.
The pain in my ass who argues with me about everything, steals my clothes, calls me on my bullshit and somehow still thinks she’s subtle when she’s trying to get her way. ”
“I am subtle.”
A laugh moves through the room.
I grin up at her. “You’re really fucking not.”
She wipes beneath her eyes with her free hand, and I wait until she’s looking at me again.
“I want the ordinary shit with you, Rose. I want to wake up next to you and argue about what we’re eating for dinner.
I want your shit scattered through our house until I genuinely can’t remember which things belonged to me.
I want holidays and bad days and boring Tuesdays.
I want to sit beside you in hospital waiting rooms while this ridiculous family of ours keeps multiplying faster than any of us can keep track of. ”
Her chin trembles.
“When life is fucking amazing, I want you there. When it hurts, I want you there. When we’re eighty years old and you’re still telling me I’m wrong about shit I know for a fact I’m right about, I want you there too.”
She laughs again, and I bring her hand to my mouth and kiss her knuckles.
“And earlier today, you were very concerned that I hadn’t officially proposed yet.”
Her laugh comes out wet and shaky.
“You’re such an asshole.”
“And you love me.”
“So fucking much.”
“Good.”
I take a breath, and the joking part of me finally quiets because this is the sentence. The actual one.
“Because you were right. I skipped a step.”
I hold the ring up between us.
“So, Rosalie Bennett, I’m correcting my procedural error.”
She laughs hard enough that she has to wipe her face again, and I smile up at her while her eyes lock onto mine.
“Marry me, Rose.”
For a second, she just stares at me.
Then she nods once, twice, and before I can even get the ring onto her finger, she throws her arms around my neck.
I laugh as I catch her, one arm wrapping around her waist while I somehow manage not to launch the ring across the hospital room with the other.
“Use your words, baby.”
“Yes.” She nods against my neck, holding me so tightly I can feel her tears against my skin. “Yes, Jackson. Yes. I’ll marry you.”
I bury my face against her neck and squeeze her tighter, laughing into her skin because if I try to say anything right now, there’s a very real chance I’m going to sound like Michael did when he came through the waiting-room doors.
Behind us, somebody makes a horrible choking sound.
I look over Rose’s shoulder, and Bennet is openly sobbing. Full fucking breakdown.
Rose pulls back laughing, and I finally take her left hand again. My fingers are shaking like hell now, which feels deeply unfair considering I made it through the speech without dropping anything.
“Hold still, dammit.” I slap her hand lightly.
“I am holding still.” She slaps mine right back.
“You’re vibrating.”
“I’m emotional.”
“So am I, and yet I’m trying to perform precision work here.”
She laughs again, and I finally manage to slide the ring onto her finger.
It fits. Thank God.
I’ll never tell her this, but I had this ring made over a year ago.
We were in New York when I snuck off and told her I had a meeting.
Technically, I did. Just not the kind she thought.
I spent an embarrassing amount of time with a jeweler going through designs and rejecting every damn thing he put in front of me because none of it looked like Rose.
Too traditional. Too obvious. Too much like something I'd already seen on somebody else's hand.
I didn't want a ring somebody else could wear.
I wanted Rose's ring.
So I had the whole thing designed from scratch. First of its kind. Delicate without being dainty, romantic without all the sugary bullshit she'd hate, and made for one woman. I walked out of that meeting feeling pretty fucking pleased with myself.
Then Rose left for Catalina before the ring was finished.
It showed up a few weeks later.
That was a fun fucking delivery.
I opened the box, looked at the ring I'd planned to put on the finger of a woman who had just disappeared from my life, closed it again and shoved it into the back of my dresser.
It stayed there untouched for over a year because I couldn't bring myself to get rid of it, but looking at the damn thing wasn't doing me any favors either.
Then she came home.
A few weeks ago, I pulled it back out.
Getting it resized without Rose noticing required stealing one of her rings long enough to have it measured, which somehow proved significantly harder than getting the woman to sign an actual marriage license. She notices everything except, apparently, when I'm actively preparing to marry her.
Rose stares down at it now, turning her hand slightly as the stone catches the hospital lights.
The pale pink oval sits at the center in tiny rose-gold prongs, with slender vines twisting around it instead of a traditional band.
Tiny sculpted roses and leaves wind toward the stone before curling around her finger.
Fuck, it looks good on her.
Better than it ever looked in that box.
I watch her face instead of the ring, waiting for her reaction, and when her eyes finally come back to mine, I can already see that she knows exactly what's coming.
“Do not start with me, Marcus Elliott Jackson.”
I grin. “My fiancée is technically correct now.”
She grabs my face and kisses me before I can say anything else.
I have to keep it chaste considering we are in a hospital room with my best friend, his wife and their newborn daughter approximately four feet away, but fuck.
The second her mouth touches mine, every thought in my head shifts toward getting her home.
Which is deeply inappropriate.
Probably.
I kiss her once more before forcing myself to pull back, and the second she sees my face, her eyes narrow.
“No.”
“I didn't say anything.”
“You didn't have to.”
“I just proposed to you. I'm allowed to look at you.”
“You're looking at me like you want to get me naked.”
“I always look at you like I want to get you naked. That's not new.”
Bennet groans behind us. “Can I have my emotional moment without hearing about you fucking my sister?”
I don't take my eyes off Rose. “No.”