EMBER
I swatted the tear away angrily. How did this even qualify as a proposal? I’d fantasized about this exact moment since I was a freshman in high school drawing doodles with his name.
This was more like a nightmare.
“You don’t want to marry me?” he whispered.
“What? All I have ever wanted is to marry you, to be your always, to wake up knowing that I’m yours and you’re mine.” How could he even think that?
He tucked his thumbs in his pockets and rolled his shoulders. “That’s what I thought this was about. You and me, forever.”
“Really? Because you just proposed like I’m some tag-chaser you picked up in a random bar, and you’re offering me free health care so you can make more money on a deployment, and we’d better hurry up and sign those papers before you ship out.”
His head snapped back like I’d slapped him. “I guess I didn’t think you wanted some over-the-top proposal. Isn’t that what you always alluded to? I have the ring upstairs, I can get it—”
“I don’t want a fucking ring!” My voice broke. “I just want your heart.”
“God, baby. You have it. I love you more than my own life.” His eyes squeezed shut. “I probably should have led with that.”
“The whole love thing might have helped,” I bit out. “Or even something as trite as ‘will you marry me?’ may have sufficed.”
“Then let me start over,” he begged, meeting my eyes. “There is nothing more important to me than you, December.”
“No.” I shook my head. “Not now. Not ten days before you deploy, and not because you’re deploying.”
“I just want to—”
“Protect me?” I finished for him when he couldn’t.
“Yeah.”
“Josh, if something happens to you, a wedding ring isn’t going to save my sanity or salvage my heart. The army has dictated everything about my life since I was born. Where I lived, when I moved, when I lost my friends…when I lost my father. I’ll be damned if I give it a say in when I become your wife. Only we get that say.” I pulled the blanket around my shoulders, trying to ward off the chill I knew had nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with the loss of Josh’s warmth.
“I don’t want to wait another year. I want you to be my wife, and I thought…” He laced his fingers and rested them on the top of his head. “I don’t care how I marry you, December. In a huge, crowded church, on a deserted beach, in the fucking janitor closet of city hall. I don’t care as long as it makes you my wife, and I guess I thought you felt the same way.”
“How I feel? I want you to want to marry me. I want you to marry me because I’m the only possible future for you, because I’m the one you can’t live without, and not because you think you have to. Not because Jagger and Paisley did it.”
“Look how happy they are!”
“Happy? For fuck’s sake! Did you even ask when their baby is due?”
He blinked. “No.”
“October ninth.”
He paused midshrug, finally clicking with what I was trying to tell him. “Yeah. You guys will most likely still be gone. She will go through this entire pregnancy, and probably the birth, on her own. Jagger is about to miss out on almost all of their first year of marriage and watching over Paisley’s pregnancy. Do you think that makes him happy? Is that what you want? For our first year of marriage to happen over Skype calls, wondering if we’ll ever make it to a first anniversary? Because that’s why you’re doing this, right? To protect me if you don’t come back?”
The muscles in his jaw flexed. “That’s not fair.”
“No. None of this is.” We stood in silence, staring at each other across this giant sinkhole in our relationship.
“I think you’re a pompous asshole who wouldn’t know love if it was delivered naked to you on a fucking platter!” Morgan’s voice carried from the field behind us.
Guess we’re not the only ones awake and arguing.
“One, I’m well aware of what love is, and two, what the hell do you expect from me, Morgan? I’m leaving!” Will shouted as Morgan arrived at the nearly dead fire.
“Oh look, a functioning military couple,” Morgan said, waving to Josh and me.