told him it fit his sunny disposition. “Because you were like the sun to me. You made my days better. You were my warmth and my happiness. And I wanted to remember that the baby was as much you as he was me. That we were in it together, even if we weren’t together.”
His heart stopped. His breath fled his chest. His life narrowed to a before and an after. To that moment in time. It marked the man he was, and the man he was becoming. The man he could be for her. That second, those words became the epicenter of his life. “I never knew how far and deep it went when you said I was like the sun to you.”
She ran her fingertip over his sunburst, her touch electrifying him, even in the intensity of this kind of admission. “You were all my sunny days, Brent. You were always so happy, and so upbeat, and you never let anything get you down. And you gave all that to me. You turned my days around when I met you.”
He closed his eyes and swayed closer to her, trying to take that all in, to digest the enormity of what she was saying. Of how she’d never let go of him through all the years. Of how she’d included him in her life, the good and the bad, even when he’d had no clue where she was and vice versa.
“I thought you hated me,” he said softly, trying to process this.
She shrugged, happily. “I thought I did, too. But I never stopped loving you.”
“I never stopped either. Not once. Not once through all the years.”
Then it hit him, with the clarity of a thousand suns. There was life and death, and the thinnest thread separated the two, by the edge of a razor. Life was for the living, and for the loving.
He dropped down to one knee for the second time ever. He had no ring. No plan. No speech. He grasped her hand in his. “Marry me.”
She blinked, a look of utter disbelief on her face. “Are you proposing to me in a cemetery?”
“I am,” he said. Hoping. Praying. Wanting that yes.
“You’re crazy,” she said, but she was grinning wildly.
“Am I?”
“You might be. You did put your phone in a dishwasher. Was it dirty?”
“Yes. It was full of my filthy, dirty messages to you. It was about to combust from the hotness.”
She laughed loudly, clasping her free hand on her belly. “Brent, you’re ridiculous.”
“And that’s what you always say when I make you laugh. You say I’m ridiculous. That’s another reason why you should marry me now. Because I make you laugh, and I always will. Because I make you happy, and I promise to make that my greatest mission for the rest of my life. Because you make me so damn happy. Loving you is the best thing I’ve ever done. I love everything about you—your body, your heart, and your mind. I have been in love with you for more than a decade and I’ve barely spent any of those years with you. Let’s pick up where we left off and spend our whole lives together. Let's do what we were supposed to do ten years ago. Let's do it now.”
“Now?”
His eyes lit up with mischief. “Vegas, baby.”
She arched an eyebrow.
“Think about it,” he urged. “Everyone comes here to get married. We live here. This is our town, babe. This is our place. Let’s make it ours.”
She held out her hand and tugged him up. “Vegas, baby.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
There were no flowers. There were no rings. And the bride didn’t wear white.
Neither one of them changed from what they already had on—her green dress, his blue shirt and jeans. It was a hell of a lot more fun to race over to the marriage license bureau and snag the paperwork. The bureau was open until midnight every day, and plunking down IDs was nothing short of thrilling.
He pulled up in her car to a drive-thru chapel, its orange neon sign lit and flashing. The officiant came to the window. Brent had called earlier to book a quickie ceremony, and that’s exactly what they got. No Elvis impersonator, no Johnny Cash stand-in, no Vegas theme package of mobsters, or starlets, or showgirls. At the end of the two-minute ceremony, the officiant said the words Brent had longed to hear years ago. “I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride.”