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My parents are standing there, Mom’s hands over her mouth, Dad’s eyes shining.
Oh, my God.
This is real. Will Lotham is proposing to me at the Dance and Dairy festival on our town common.
In front of the whole community. My town.
Our town.
Love pours out of those handsome eyes, so pure, so true. He’s looking up at me, on one knee like a gentleman, a champion, a knight kneeling before his queen. For the last year, I’ve lived a fairy tale, but one rooted firmly in reality. He’s become my new best friend, my hot lover, my smart business colleague, and now–
–my husband?
The word yes sticks in my mouth, like honey, like too much taffy, a jar of Fluff, like all the peanut butter in the world and none of the water. Yes, I want to say, elongating the word until it stretches back fifteen years to the first day of ninth grade, when I met Will Lotham in homeroom and realized my life would never be the same.
And I was right.
It wouldn’t. It would never, ever be the same.
It would be so, so much better.
Green and blue speckled eyes meet mine, staring up at me with sweet love that glistens, Will’s chest rising and falling as if the very air he breathes is produced by my answer. As if I alone make his reality.
Never in my life have I actually held fate in my hands. My mind reaches out to the speech center of my brain for an offering, waits for my mouth to take those signals and form a response.
Wind blows as the music, intense and dramatic now, punctuates my state.
“Yes,” I whisper, bending down to accept the ring, Will standing up to take my face in his hands and kiss me until he breathes in my air, as if the answer can only be truly understood by infusion.
“Yes.” The ring is cold as he slips it on my finger, its heaviness contrasting with the helium that fills my heart, his arms around me, his boisterous laugh bordering on incredulous.
“MALLORY!” Mom screams, jumping up and down, Dad’s hands on her shoulders, his expression pure joy. Helen and Larry are hugging, her face buried in her husband’s chest, Larry giving us a thumb’s up.
The audience bursts into spontaneous applause as Will kisses me blind, the sound deafening, pushing out every other noise in the world, until all I hear is his heartbeat, all I feel are Will’s hands and mouth.
“You said yes,” he murmurs, throat clicking as he swallows, my eyes closed. I just want to breathe once more, twice–no, three times, with my eyes closed, sensing who Will is in the space I create.
“Of course I did. You’re making all my dreams come true, Will.”
“Same here, Mal.”
“You didn’t have a crush on me for four years.”
Will kisses me. The crowd goes nuts.
He ignores them and whispers,
“No. But I will for the next sixty or so.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Epilogue.
Or stinger.
You decide.
Three months later
