Nitro doesn’t rush.
He walks toward Marley through the rising swell of Journey’s power ballad like he’s crossing the distance between past and future in real time, each step deliberate, grounded, the room peeling open around him without needing to be told.
Marley’s hand has gone to her mouth. Her glasses slide slightly down her nose, and she doesn’t fix them. She’s staring at him like she’s seeing every version of him at once. The man in the Uber, the man in the business suit, and the man who held her together when she didn’t know how.
The song hits the first chorus.
He stops in front of her.
For a moment, he just looks at her.
Then hedrops to one knee.
The sound that leaves Marley is small and completely unguarded.
Nitro exhales once through his nose like he’s about to jump out of a plane. “The first night I met you…” he says, voice rough but steady, “… you were crying in the back of my Uber because some idiot didn’t know what he had. I didn’t know you either. But I knew two things real fast.”
He gestures lightly toward the speakers. “That song was non-negotiable.” A ripple of soft laughter moves through the room. “And you were going to matter to me.”
Marley shakes her head through tears, already completely undone.
“I didn’t plan to fall in love with you,” he continues. “I didn’t plan to build a whole damn life around the sound of your voice at two in the morning, or the way you sing like you think nobody’s listening, or the way you make this place feel less like war and more like home.”
He reaches into his cut, pulling out a ring, and it catches the light. “My grandmother wore this through forty-three years of marriage to a man who didn’t deserve her half the time but loved her every second. She told me once that the right woman doesn’t make your world smaller, she makes you brave enough to live in it properly.”
His gaze never leaves Marley’s. “You make me braver. You make me better. You make me want a future I used to think wasn’t built for men like me.” The music swells behind him. “I don’t want another day where you’re not mine in every way that matters.”
He lifts the ring. “Marley… will you marry me?”
Marley doesn’t move at first. She’s crying so hard she’s half laughing through it, her hands shaking as she reaches for Nitro like she needs physical confirmation he’s real. “Yes,” she gasps. “Yes, obviously yes, you ridiculous, perfect man.”
He stands before she collides with him, and when his arms wrap around her, the club explodes. Cheers, whistles, chairs scraping, someone already turning the music up like subtlety was never invited to this moment anyway.
Queenie cries openly.
Victoria is sobbing.
Deek yells something deeply inappropriate that somehow sounds like a blessing.
Nitro buries his face in Marley’s hair for one brief second before pulling back just enough to slide the ring onto her finger.
The song keeps playing.
And this time, she sings.
Dad starts a slow, heavy clap that gathers momentum before anyone else joins in, and then everyone does—Koa, Mace, Deek, and Ro, and somewhere behind me, Millie makes a sound against her palms that is half-laughing and entirely cheerful.
I find I am clapping too.
Queenie is still crying, one hand pressed to her heart while the other disappears into her sleeve, producing a tissue that suggests she expected this.
After a moment, the noise settles into something warm and wordless. Marley’s glasses are fogged, her vision blurred, but she doesn’t reach up to clear them. Instead, she laughs softly through the tears, shaking her head like she’s overwhelmed by it.
Nitro keeps his eyes on her, like there’s nothing else in the room worth seeing.
Queenie reaches over and finds my arm. Her hand is small, firm, and deliberate. “Don’t wait as long as he did, dear,” she says.
I look down at her, and she looks back at me with those clear, certain eyes, smiling through the last of her tears.
