Page 78 of Hushed

“Do you? Really?” He drops his hands and stares at me. “Because from where I’m standing, you just took advantage of a bad situation. You get an automatic yes without having to put in the work. Félicitations. Bravo.”

I knew this was coming, but it still feels like a slap.

“Okay,” I say. “I get it. So let me make it right.”

“How? I publicly declared. My mother is driving down from Québec. To see me get married!”

“A lot of people get engaged and don’t make it up the aisle.”

“Yes, but then they have longer than seven days to figure that out. Next week started two hours ago. You have informed the family, and my colleagues, that we are rushing to the altar at any time in the next fucking seven days.”

“I’m not letting you get away from me!” I shout at him. “Not again. I almost lost you. I can’t take that risk.”

“Then at least trust me to make the decision for my goddamned self!”

“I’m sorry, Bastien. You’re right. We can call them and tell them we decided against it. You deserve to have a choice.”

I lower myself to one knee, trying to brush the shards away before I commit weight.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” He stares down at me. “Get up. It’s two in the morning.”

I take his left hand. “You can say no. And we’ll figure it out. You can say whatever you like to whoever you want. But this is your proposal. The real one. Please say yes.”

“How?” He searches my face. “You don’t know me.”

“So? We’ll have decades to figure it out.”

“What if you do something and I think, oh, my God, this is going to be for the rest of my life?”

I sigh. It’s not the delighted, tear-stained yes I was hoping for. “Can I stand up?”

He nods. I rise and put my hands on his biceps. “Then you look at me just like I’m looking at you, and you say, ‘Kitten, I love you, but I don’t love this.’ And we talk it through. We fix it. Every day, if we have to.”

“Let’s just sit down.” He gestures to the tiny kitchen table and sighs. There is a puddle on the tiles that I am itching to mop up, but he waves it away. “What do you want, Levi?” he finally asks.

“Aside from you? And to mop up this floor before my CO writes me up?”

He glances at me. “When did you decide that you were going to marry me? Because that was clearly a thing that happened while I was looking elsewhere.”

“Well, let me think. The first time I kissed you, you said, and I quote, ‘Oh, Canada!’ That was the moment some part of me said, This one. I did warn you.”

“How did you warn me?”

“I said that if you kept ticking all the boxes, I wouldn’t let you get away. I told you that I would identify husband material immediately and lock him down by date three. I said that.”

“That wasn’t a warning! That was a bit!”

“And then the first time we made love, we finished and you laughed. You had just made me feel like a sex god and you were laughing. And I thought, let me keep him just one more day. And so we had that one more day, and I made a wish just to keep you.”

Bastien sighs and wraps his arms around himself. “I should have seen this. I asked you after you ran off my ex if this was who you were, and you actually told me that it was too late. This is my fault. I did this to myself.” He squinches his eyes shut. His tears come out.

“I’ll be a good husband to you.”

He opens his eyes and looks at the ceiling. “Oh, will you?”

“I promise.”

“Anything else I need to know?”