Page 83 of Deviant
He looks at me for a long moment.
“Your favorite problem to solve?” He tilts his head. “That’s what you went with?”
“It was better in the written version?—”
“I’m sure it was.” He crouches down in front of me so we’re eye level and he looks at me for one more second with those eyes that have been inside my head since summer.
He takes the ring out of the box, and puts it on his own finger.
He holds it up, looks at it, then looks at me.
“Yeah, Thornwood. Obviously, yes.”
I grab him by the front of his sweatshirt and kiss him in the middle of his apartment floor. He laughs against my mouth,which is the best thing that has happened today, and today has been a genuinely excellent day.
“You’ve been driving since four in the morning,” he says when I let him breathe.
“Four fifteen.”
“You’re insane.”
“You said yes.”
“I saidobviously, yes.” He looks at the ring again, and the corner of his mouth does that thing I love. “It is perfect, by the way—the ring. Don’t fish for it. I know you’re fishing.”
“I wasn’t fishing.”
“You’ve been panicking about that ring for months. Halle told me.”
I stare at him. “She told you.”
“She tells me everything. I just didn’t know it was imminent.” He looks at me with the expression he gets when he’s won something, which is most of the time. “She also told me about the party.”
“Of course she did.”
“Mom and Aria are apparently making cakes—plural.Cakes.” He tilts his head. “Your mom and my aunt are making engagement cakes for us.”
“Tierney has been planning this since approximately February.”
“My dad is going to cry.”
“My dad already cried. When I told him I was proposing he got up, got a beer, came back, and his eyes were doing that thing and he said, and I quote, ‘Well it’s about damn time.’”
Colt laughs and I think the same thing I always think when I hear it—that I’m going to spend the rest of my life earning that sound, and I have never once minded the work.
We sit on his apartment floor for a while, his back against the couch, my shoulder against his, looking at the ring on his hand in the afternoon light coming through the window.
“The house,” he says, looking up at me. “You said we’d have our own house on the ranch. Does that mean it’s?—”
“Done,” I say.
He turns to look at me. “What do you mean done? We never even discussed anything.”
“I mean it’s done. Built. Finished. Has a kitchen and everything.”
“Does it have the?—”
“Gourmet kitchen? Yes. It does.”
