Page 106 of Sugarlips

Huh. It was empty.

“Looking for this?” A deep voice said behind me.

When I swiveled around, I found Liam down on one knee. A diamond winked at me as a beam of the rising sun streamed into the kitchen window, catching an edge of the solitary engagement ring he held in his hands.

Tears. So many tears flooded my eyes that I could barely see him through the rippling sheen. He hadn’t even asked me yet, and I was already a mess.

Liam sniffled and tugged the hem of his t-shirt to dab at the corner of his eye. “Fuck, Chloe… don’t start that. I’ll never get through this.”

My sob morphed into a laugh and I covered my mouth, falling to my knees to kneel in front of him. I covered his hands with mine, the diamond pressing into my palm as I squeezed his hands.

“Then we’ll have to do it together.”

He smiled, shifting our hands so that he was gripping mine gently while we knelt nose to nose. “I had to ask myself a year ago when we first got together,How do you show someone that they’re your whole world? Because I had no idea. We’ve spent a year watching romantic comedies together and I studied them… or rather, I studied your reaction to them. Were you the kind of girl who wanted to be led into a dark room, only to discover I’d taken you to Tiffany’s in the middle of the night? Should I write a song and sing it to you on an airplane through the intercom? Should I hold a boombox over my head and play it outside of our bedroom window?”

Tears streamed down my face, but my lungs trembled as I held my breath to keep myself from sobbing. I pressed my palms to Liam’s damp cheeks, swiping his tears away.

“But every movie we watched, you had something to say about the proposals. They were too cheesy, too showy, or too generic.” His lips twitched into a smile. “No matter the scenario, you had strong feelings about proposals… usually negative.”

I laughed and wiped my sleeve beneath my eyes. “Because none of those proposals wereyouproposing tome.”

“So, what do you say?” Liam lifted the ring higher in the air, but I hardly looked at it. The ring itself didn’t matter at all.

“Towhat?” I arched my brow. “You haven’taskedme anything yet.”

His adorably boyish grin spread wider as he leaned over and hit play on his phone. The song,In Your Eyesfilled the kitchen.

“I’m just a boy, kneeling in front of a girl… asking her to marry him. Even though there’s no perfectly timed snow or fated random book with my number scribbled in it. There’s no surprise party planned with all our friends waiting beyond a curtain, or original song composed just for you. I realized there was no way to make this proposal anything like a movie. Because thisisn’tour happily ever after… This is our happily just beginning.”

He paused, taking my hand and slid the ring halfway to my knuckle. “Chloe Dyker, will you marry me?”

Still kneeling, I leaned forward, sliding the ring all the way onto my finger and wrapped my arms around his neck, whispering, “As you wish.”