Page 54 of Never Landing

“Yeah, it... didn’t feel right. And I kept trying to come up with ideas for some grand gesture and, just?—”

“None of it felt right?”

He bit his lip against a smile. “Yeah. But this? This is our home. It’s you and me here, making it our own. This is where I got to know you, where I saw you rise to every challenge and fall apart and—and where you gave me that first book and it made sense. Here. Just the two of us.”

He was staring up at me, his eyes shining. “So,” he whispered, “what do you think?”

My chair creaked across the floor as I slid it back from the table. The next moment, I was on the floor with him, kneeling with my hand in my pocket.

I pulled out a little box of my own—the same tiny velvet box I’d been carrying around for weeks. I opened the lid with shaky fingers.

“I think I want to marry you, Mattias Hall. I want to raise our family here and grow our businesses and live our life and it is so fucking wonderful that I’ve been scared to rock the boat and ask you this, even when Jessie told me I was being a scaredy cat.”

“Jessie knew about you too?”

I snorted. “Jessie seems to know everything nowadays. They know how to keep a secret too, huh?”

Maybe it was their time with the fairies or maybe I was just that obvious. In the end, it didn’t matter.

“It scares me,” I admitted, “how much I love you. But it excites me too. You’re who I want, everything I want, for the rest of my life. I’d be honored to be your husband. I—yes, Mattias. Yes, always.”

His lips fell slack. Instead of saying anything, he surged forward, his arms lashing out to twine around my neck and pull me down—down into his lips, his tongue, the hot wet sweetness of his mouth.

And I grinned into his kiss, drawing him closer. My Mattias, my partner and husband.

The man who’d given me the home I’d always wanted.