Page 74 of He Has Pluck

“No. She said it wasn’t his business, that you were her baby, not his.” I still don’t know what to think as he scrolls through his texts to find the string he’s looking for between him and Mom. Then he hands me his phone.

I take it reluctantly, my hand shaking. I’m failing to stay cool because I’m out of practice. It’s hard to keep cool when I melt down in his arms every night, night after night, ever since hockey season ended two months ago. Staring at the texts, I try to focus and read. About halfway down, the words start to blur, and I quickly swipe my eye before the tear falls. Shit.

He folds me into his strong arms, and no matter how much I try, no matter that I remind myself that this isn’t my plan, that anything could happen in the future, that there’s no way he can make me this promise and no way I can promise myself to him—not for the rest of my life.

“You bastard,” I say as I lean into his solid hockey player body because I’m a sucker for all that muscle, a sucker for him, his warmth, his teasing, his lovemaking.

He softly chuckles and kisses my temple. Then he forces me to look at his face with a gentle nudge of my chin. “Marry me, Juliette.”

My tears pop, and there’s nothing I can do about it. “Why? How? Why rush things?”

“Because I want you to commit to me,” he says. “I need you to be there for me, with me, in the future, not just now.” He takes a deep breath. “I need you to put me first.”

“Are you going to put me first?” My voice rises in panic. We both know what that means to him because he pretends he’s his father’s double when he’s clearly not.

He takes a visible gulp. I see his fucking Adam’s apple bob, and that makes me mad but determined because he presented me with a dream I didn’t know I had, a different kind of life than I imagined, something close to the kind of happiness I had as a kid when I felt loved no matter what.

“You know what?” I say. “Don’t answer that. So what if you don’t put me first all the time? Your mom needed to be first in your dad’s life all the time, but I’m not your mom. I don’t need you to do that. I have my own identity, my own life, my documentary career. Someday, I want to go from filming to producing and directing, and I have big ideas and ambitions. Maybe I want to be the next Ken Burns, only better and bigger.”

“What about kids?” His voice is quiet.

“I have no plans for a family.” It’s my automatic response. His face turns from concerned into a mask. I add, “But that doesn’t mean I want to be alone.”

“Hell, Sullivan, maybe you don’t have time for me in your life. Maybe I don’t want to be second to filming.”

“Don’t lie to me, Hockey Boy.” I wave a finger at him. “It’s too late. You committed when you proposed.” I know what that means to him, putting each other first, but I swallow down a small lump of fear as I hold my breath, waiting to see his fucking one-dimpled smile to confirm that he’s not taking his proposal back.

His face remains serious as he pulls something from his pocket and holds out his hand to me. He opens it, and sitting in the palm of his hand is a gorgeous sparkling diamond ring, a big fat round one.

The sinful dimple I love pops, lighting his face with his smile and taking better aim at my heart than a quiver full of Cupid’s arrows. All my long-forgotten and dusty girlhood fantasies and imaginings flash in front of my eyes, including the proposal from Derek at the International School in Nigeria when I was in fourth grade. I snatch the ring from his palm and shove it on my finger. It’s stupid, I know, but I…can’t imagine life without him.

“I’ll marry you, but only because there’s no way I want another woman to ever lay a hand on you.” I take a breath. “Most importantly, I can’t stand the thought of you ever touching another woman.”

He hugs me close. “Don’t worry. I won’t.” He pauses and gulps again, a bigger bob of his Adam’s apple than before. I freeze, instinctively preparing myself for the worst. He says, “How could I touch anyone else when I’m so in love with you?”

I suck in a breath, and a wave of dizziness hits me. Love? Other than my mother, no one’s ever talked to me about love. I resurrect the protective barrier around my heart as if it wasn’t already compromised beyond retrieval, as if my heart wasn’t already all his.

“How?” I say, stubbornly holding onto the shreds of my self-preservation instincts. “You wouldn’t know love if it hit you in the head. You have no experience, no—”

He shuts me up with a kiss, holding the back of my head so I can’t escape, branding me with his hot mouth. As I sink into the sensual overload of him, the taste of him, the heat, the ardent caring that could be love, I might be persuaded to concede the point, to allow the feelings in me that I’ve been alternately basking in and suppressing, to fully bloom.

His breathing starts to turn ragged, and he lifts his mouth from mine, but just barely.

“Tell me you love me, too.”

“I love you, too, Hockey Boy.”

I gaze at the diamond I shoved on my ring finger at the end of the arm wrapped around his neck and smile. Then I start laughing, and the laughter mixes with tears, but I know they’re tears of joy, those unicorn tears I never believed in until now.

He swipes my cheeks and kisses my eyes with the kind of reverence that sends a trillion waves of butterflies flapping through my belly like fans doing a wave at a hockey game.

“What would you say if I told you I’m crying tears of joy on the inside?” he says.

“I’d call you a wiseass.”

He takes my hand and inspects the diamond, straightening it, and then it hits me.

“The diamond—you didn’t?” My eyes open wide, and all the implications crowd in or try to.