"Preferably one that does not start a fight."
"Bogdan," she offered. "After nobody. I just want to yell it."
"Absolutely not."
"Okay, you go."
"Yuri."
"He'll be beaten up by lunch. Next."
"For a girl," I said, "Marisol."
Ruby went quiet, then, in a different way, and I felt her smile against my shoulder. "My grandmother will pretend she hates it and then cry into the masa for a week."
"Galina will demand a Russian middle name."
"Galina can fight Marisol for it. We'll sell tickets." She tipped her head up. "What about the terrible ones? Get them out of your system."
"Vladlen."
"Disqualified."
"Engelbert."
"Now you're just describing a man I would have to divorce."
"One more. Boy or girl, your call."
"Hear me out. Ruby Junior."
"You wish to name our child after yourself?"
"I want to find out whether you can still tell me no about anything at all."
"No."
"There he is." She grinned into my shoulder. "Welcome home."
I laughed then, actually laughed, a thing that still surprises me coming out of my own chest, and she watched me do it like it was the best trick she had taught me. And in the warm wreckage of that bed, with the worst names in two languages still hanging in the air, I decided it was time.
I carried the ring for weeks like a live round. Then I gave it the right way: one knee, no exits planned.
I got up, ignoring her question, found the small box where I had kept it hidden in the one drawer she never searched, and I came back around to her side of the bed and went down on one knee on the cold floor, in nothing but the dark and my own skin, which is not how the magazines stage it.
"Kolya. I already said yes. In a hospital, remember? With conditions."
"You said yes to a man in a bed who could not stand, with no ring and no knee and an exit mapped behind every word, because that is the only way I had ever known how to ask for anything." I opened the box. "You deserved the version with no exits. So. Ruby. Marry me. I am not deciding it. I am asking, on the floor, with both hands empty and nothing behind me."
She was crying and trying very hard to pretend otherwise, a thing her face has never once managed to pull off.
"Yes," she said. "Still yes. Get up here before you ruin your knees, old man. You're going to need them."
I slid the ring onto her finger, and it fit, because I had measured it months ago off a glove she left at my place and never once told her, and then I climbed up beside her, where she hadwanted me all along, and pulled the blanket over the two and a half of us, and for the first time in a life built entirely on what came next, I wanted nothing at all except exactly this, exactly now, going on as long as it was allowed to.
39
RUBY
