Page 221 of I’m The Worst

Then another.

“Wolff. We don’t have to do this.”

His eyes stay fixed on the house.

“We can leave. Right now. We can drive somewhere else. Get terrible coffee. Let Jackal puke in your back seat again.”

Jackal lifts his head at his name, then immediately drops it back down.

“We can⁠—”

“Marry me.”

For a second, I genuinely think I heard him wrong. “What?”

His grip tightens on the steering wheel. “This isn’t how I wanted to ask.”

My heart stutters.

He still isn’t looking at me. His face is pale in a way I’ve only seen a handful of times. Not from blood loss. Not from pain.

Fear.

“I had… I had this whole fucking thing planned… Dinner, candles. Jackal had a bowtie; he hated it.”

My mouth falls open, in awe and shock. His eyes finally cut to mine, and whatever I see there steals the breath from my lungs.

“I can’t walk in there…I can’t face them, my past, the kid they remember…” He drags in a breath. “Not unless I know I have you in my future.”

“Wolff…” I whisper.

“You deserve better than being asked in a fucking car outside a six-year-old’s birthday party.” He reaches into his jacket pocket with an unsteady hand and pulls out a small black velvet pouch. “And if you want something else, I’ll get it. Anything. Diamonds. Bigger. Fancier. Whatever the fuck people are supposed to buy for this.”

He opens the pouch and drops two gold rings into his palm. The entire world stills around us. It can’t be—I reach for the smaller of the two with shaking fingers, barely touching the metal.

“That’s…”

“Our rings from Russia,” he says.

Our fake marriage. Our fucked-up cover. The thing I threw away because I couldn’t stand looking at it. The thing that belonged to the worst and most impossible parts of us.

“How did you…”

“I went back and found it.”

After I threw it away.

After I thought I was throwing him away with it.

“Didn’t know why. Hated myself for it.” His thumb rubs over the edge of the band. “Still couldn’t get rid of it.”

A tear slides down my cheek.

“I know it started as a lie,” he says. “I know it came from hell. But it was the first thing that ever made me think about having a life with you, and I couldn’t… I couldn’t let it be only that.”

Shifting in my seat, I can’t wait a second longer. I grab the front of his shirt and kiss him.

He makes a rough sound against my mouth, one hand sliding into my hair, the other closing carefully around the rings so he doesn’t drop them. When I pull back, I’m crying and smiling and probably look like a disaster.