Cruz turns from the water.
“Omaha to Denver.” I keep my eyes on the horizon because it’s easier to say true things that way, I’ve known this since the beach. “Eight hours and change. Depending on traffic, which is its own variable.” I pause. “I’ve driven longer for worse reasons.”
Complete silence beside me.
“My firm is case-heavy through October,” I continue, in the tone I use when I’m laying out terms that are non-negotiable but fair. “But I have flexibility on Fridays if I’m organized about it, which I am always organized about it, so long weekends are structurally possible.” Another pause. “And there’s a direct flight that’s an hour and fifteen minutes, which frankly is the more intelligent option for anything under three weeks.”
Still nothing.
I finally look at him.
Cruz is staring at me with an expression I haven’t seen before. Completely unguarded. The charm and the ease and even the quiet certainty stripped back to something underneath all of it that is raw and young and real, and his jaw is doing something complicated and his eyes are —
bright, actually— which I’m going to be a professional about.
“Hannah—” His voice comes out rougher than usual.
“I’m not a summer fling person,” I tell him. Straight, clear, the way I say things I mean completely. “I don’t know how to be. I’ve tried to be, this week, I told myself this was a contained thing with a clean ending and that was the reasonable approach and I—” I stop. Start again. “I can’t do the clean ending, Cruz. I don’t have it in me. So if that’s what this is for you, I need to know that now so I can?—”
He kisses me.
Not soft this time, not careful. It’s immediate and certain and both hands in my hair and I feel the whole sentence dissolve somewhere between the intention and the delivery.
When he pulls back he’s breathing like he ran here.
“I have been trying to figure out,” he says, low and deliberate, forehead against mine, “how to tell you that I’m already in love with you without making you run.”
The ocean.
The copper light.
My heart doing something completely unauthorized behind my ribs.
“Cruz.” My voice comes out smaller than I intend.
“I know,” he says. “Five days. I know how it sounds. I know what the rational case against it looks like. You’re a lawyer, you’ve probably already built it, you’ve probably got counterarguments for my counterarguments.” His thumbs move at my jaw. “I don’t care. I’m in love with you and I’ve been in love with you since you handed me back a fire extinguisher like it was a stapler and went back to your book and I have not stopped being in love with you for a single consecutive minute since.”
I laugh.
Actually laugh.
Surprise comes out of me, loud and real. The kind that has no dignity in it.
Cruz pulls back enough to look at my face and his expression shifts into something that is definitely going to undo me if I’m not careful.
“You’re laughing,” he says.
“I’m—” I press a hand to my mouth. “I’m a forty-eight year old woman with two daughters and a law firm and seventeen years of careful, practiced self-sufficiency.” I get it under control. Mostly. “You’re going to have to do significantly better than that to scare me.”
He stares at me for a moment.
Then: “Marry me.”
“Cruz.”
“Too much?”
“Extremely.”
