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Jules scoffed. “I’m not being literal. Christ. I’m…Fuck. I don’t know how people do this.”
“Do what?” Shiloh asked. Real and actual fear started to build in his stomach. “Mate, are you dying or something? How worried should I be?”
“Not at all. Or maybe the most worried you’ve ever been. I want to…Fuuuuck.” He saw movement, then heard the sound of Jules slapping himself in the face. “Alright. The thing is, I’d like to ask Sarah to marry me at her costume party, and I wanted to get your…blessing, I think.”
Shiloh froze. “You…want my blessing?” he repeated.
“Well, Sarah hasn’t got a dad, has she? And her mum…” Jules trailed off and didn’t need to finish his sentence because they all knew about Sarah’s mum and the reason why Sarah had lived with Shiloh and his dad while they were in upper sixth. They didn’t talk about her often. Or at all.
Shiloh quickly shook his head. “It’s not that I’m not flattered, though honestly, if you wanted to ask someone, my dad’s probably the one. But also, you do know that she’s going to literally gut you like a fish if she finds out you tried to ask for someone’s blessing to propose to her, don’t you?”
And then the reality hit.
After eleven bloody years, he was finally going to ask. Nearly everyone had become convinced that Sarah and Jules were never going to get married. And whenever someone brought it up, Sarah would go on a long-winded rant about marriage being an antifeminist tax scam. Not that Shiloh understood it, but he respected it, and he thought Jules was on the same page.
“Mate?”
“Yeah?” Jules said.
“What changed? Last time I heard, marriage was on the hell-no list.”
Jules laughed quietly. “It still is. But…I don’t know. I just love her so bloody much I can’t function sometimes. This isn’t for something legal or official,” Jules said, and Shiloh breathed a little easier because he was pretty sure if that were the case, Sarah would throw the ring in his face and tell him to fuck off straight into the sea. “I just want the entire world to know how much I love her. And since I can’t actually give her that, I can at least declare it in front of all our friends and family.”
Shiloh was both melting inside and turning green with envy because he wanted that. And not just with anyone. With one particular person that he would never get over. But his life was not a weekend BBC special about lifelong friends finally finding love together or whatever.
“Well, you’ve got mysupport,” Shiloh said, careful with his words because he didn’t want Sarah to gut him. “She’s my best friend, and you’re as good as since you come as a package deal.”
“High praise,” Jules said flatly.
Shiloh laughed. “We’ve known each other half our lives, mate. You and Sarah kept me sane all through uni.”
“Pretty sure that was Dom and his biweekly care packages,” Jules said.
Shiloh flushed but hoped he could play it off as the heat coming in through the windows. “Have you talked to Sarah about all this? Is it going to be a surprise?”
“Well…a bit. She doesn’t know the when. Or the where. Or the how,” Jules said.
Shiloh rubbed at his eyes, wishing everything wasn’t completely washed out. His head was starting to pound, and they had hours to go. “Sounds solid. So long as she doesn’t throw you out on your arse for assuming.”
“I think she’s looking forward to it,” he answered, then paused. “You alright, man?”
“Headache,” Shiloh confessed.
Shiloh heard him stand up and a few seconds later, the bright light in the room faded into something dusky and soft. His vision didn’t return right away, but as he slipped his glasses over the bridge of his nose, things started to clear up.
Instead of a fuzzy shadow, there was Jules with an almost bashful grin on his face. Shiloh understood what Sarah saw in him. He was one of the first people who understood how to be soft with her and her trauma.
Shiloh and Dom didn’t really get it. Not the way Jules did. They understood love couldn’t fix the way she’d been mistreated and then abandoned on the side of the road. Literally.
They understood that Shiloh’s dad, in spite of loving Sarah like she was his own, couldn’t fill all the holes her parents had left behind. They got that loving her wasn’t enough to repair anything from before, and that her sharp edges weren’t ever going to be softer.
But no one empathized with her. No one let her be herself without walking on eggshells. No one ever made her feel safe until Jules had come along.
Shiloh had worried for a long time that eventually Sarah’s acerbic nature and almost cruel rejection of public affection and attention would drive Jules away, but it only seemed to make him more devoted to her. Eventually, he’d come to realize that Jules just loved her for who she was, not in spite of it or for a person she might become.
He just…loved her.
It was yet one more tick in the column of things Shiloh desperately wished he had and never would. Dom loved him of course. They’d formed a bond of misfit outcasts that could never be broken. Dom didn’t think Shiloh was fragile because of his shit health growing up and his wobbling eyes that would only ever see the world in washed out shades of grey. The first time Dom saw his white cane, instead of getting weird about it, he asked Shiloh if it was strong enough to leave a welt if he swung it hard enough.
