Page 17 of Arrested By the Deputy
"Misdemeanor, technically. Earl looked it up." She grins, unbothered. "C'mon, Officer Sutton. Aren't you even a little sentimental about it?"
I look at her standing there in the same spot where I found her a few months ago, thinking about everything that's happened between then and now. The apology dinner. The kiss on her doorstep. The week she pulled away and the way my chest damn near caved in until I finally walked into her kitchen and told her the truth. Charcuterie on the back porch with Biscuit snoring at our feet. The post I finally worked up the nerve to write, and the way this whole town, the same one that spent years calling me Deputy Doody, ended up rallying behind us instead of tearing us apart.
I am, in fact, sentimental about every single bit of it.
Tiffany's still filming, phone steady, clearly not planning on missing a second of whatever's about to happen, and somethingin me decides, right here in this room, that there's no better place and no better moment than exactly this one.
"Hazel," I say, and something in my voice must shift, because her smile falters just slightly, replaced by something more curious.
"Yeah?"
I reach into my pocket, fingers closing around the small box I've been carrying around for the better part of two weeks now, waiting for the right moment, half convinced I was overthinking the whole thing. Turns out the right moment was exactly this ridiculous, and I drop down onto one knee right there on Earl's grocery floor.
Hazel's hand flies to her mouth. "Cal. I didn’t do this for that. I just missed you and wanted to play a prank.”
"I know. You broke into this grocery store a few months ago, and it was without a doubt the most annoying, most complicated night of my career." I open the box, and even in the dim light of my flashlight propped against a shelf, the ring catches enough light to make her eyes go glassy. "But it's also the night I got the chance to finally know you the way I always wanted to, back in high school, too scared to say a word. You've changed my whole life these past few months, Hazel Monroe. I don't want to spend one more day without you being mine, officially, for good. So, marry me?"
She's crying now, laughing through it, that same unrepentant grin still tugging at her mouth even with tears sliding down her cheeks. "You're proposing to me in a grocery store stockroom. During a fake burglary. I love you so much."
"I love you too, this seemed fitting."
"It's perfect," she says, and drops down to her knees in front of me, careless of the dusty floor, cupping my face in both hands. "Yes. Obviously, yes."
I slide the ring onto her finger, hands not quite steady, and she kisses me right there on the floor of the grocery store, laughing against my mouth, and somewhere behind us I hear Tiffany let out a whoop loud enough to wake up half of Main Street.
"This is going straight in the group," Tiffany announces, still filming, voice thick with her own tears now. "Oh my God, everybody is going to lose their minds."
She's not wrong. Within the hour, the video's already up, already climbing toward more shares and comments than I've ever seen on a single post in Spotted in Whispering Pines. Deputy Doody proposing to Hazel Monroe in the very grocery store where their whole story started, complete with a butter-stick cameo, and by morning it feels like the entire town's commented, half of them crying, all of them thrilled.
But none of that matters half as much as Hazel sitting beside me on the tailgate of my truck a little after two in the morning, ring catching the streetlight, leaning her head against my shoulder while Earl himself comes out, laughing so hard he has to lean against the doorframe when we tell him what happened.
"Only you two," he wheezes, shaking his head. "Only you two would manage this."
"Guess we're just that kind of story," Hazel says, threading her fingers through mine, and I think, sitting there under a sky full of stars with the woman I've loved for longer than I ever let myself admit, that she's exactly right.
