She wrote it with a question mark, but there was no need for that. No need for her to worry she’d gotten this, gotten him, wrong. No need for the hectic color on her face, unless—
Oh, fuck, was she going to say no? Was that hot flush prompted by embarrassment for him, rather than fear she’d drawn the wrong conclusion?
His hand was shaking too, but he filled in the appropriate spots.
MARR_ ME_
Her teeth had sunk into her lower lip, indenting its plump surface.
Slowly, so slowly, she made her next guess.Y.
If he filled in that letter, all chances of plausible deniability were gone. Not that many five-letter words started with MARR, other than the obvious. So he needed to gather every ounce of his bravery, of his love for the woman beside him, and do it.
MARRY ME_
She was staring at him full-on now, lips parted in a silent gasp, her body twisted away from the speaker and angled toward his. The high color in her cheeks was racing down her neck, spreading over her upper chest, and her eyes were turning glassy.
Tears. Because she was sad to disappoint him?
That consultant might as well have been mouthing his speech. Simon couldn’t hear a thing over the echoing pulse in his ears.
Every stroke of the pen was a struggle, but he got the right words down. Or at least, the words he’d intended. Whether they were right or not, he supposed he’d know soon.
The last blank space isn’t actually a letter. It’s punctuation. Which isn’t in the rules, but I thought you would forgive my lapse. What’s your next guess?
At that, her tears spilled over, and her lips finally—finally—tipped upward.
A smile. A smile that was so shy and tentative and filled with affection, his heart twisted within him once more. Leaning over her notebook, she slowly wrote something in response, and the air was too thin to breathe as he waited.
Whew. I was confused.She paused, and her smile grew as she kept writing.I thought you were demanding I marry Meg, from the music department. Or maybe men, plural, because you’d realized how tempting I find bigamy.
It was funny, that response. What it wasn’t: an answer. Despite the beam she was directing his way, despite the way she was now leaning against him, shoulder to shoulder.
He gazed at her, desperate, his free hand fisted on his thigh.
She continued,You aren’t the exclamation mark type, and you’re too polite to make a demand. So I’ll guess: ?
He bent over his legal pad. And then—
There it was, immortalized in ink, via the absolute worst handwriting of his life.
MARRY ME?
When he forced himself to meet her tear-glazed hazel eyes, he could have sworn he existed outside time, because every second seemed to encompass an entire millennium. Outside his body too, because he couldn’t feel the chair at his back or the tiles under his feet. And, above all, outside the laws of science and reason and even common sense, because—well.
It was preposterous.
There was absolutely no goddamn way he—Simon Clancy Burnham—had just proposed to the woman he loved after less than a year together. In the middle of a fucking faculty meeting. ViaHangman, of all things.
He didn’t even have a fuckingring.
And yet, it seemed…
It seemed he had. There was no other explanation for Poppy’s capable hands on his cheeks, cradling his face so tenderly as she cried and nodded and laughed. If he hadn’t proposed, he couldn’t fathom why his mouth found hers, and her lower lip was soft and slippery between his own, her smile obvious even as they kissed. Under any other circumstances, he would never stroke the warm give of her upper arms and bury his fingers in her hair and haul her close enough to feel her body fit snugly against his own. Not in front of his colleagues, anyway.
“I love you,” he rasped against her mouth. “Iloveyou, Poppy.”
She hiccupped, still beaming. “I love you too, Simon. So much.”
