candles all over the floor.
A brief concern regarding fire hazards blitzed through my thoughts, but when I looked at Kash, my worry fell away. Nothing bad could happen when he smiled like that.
He took my hand and guided me toward the arch.
“What is all this?” I asked, eyes above me as we stepped beneath the curve.
“This,” he started, drawing my gaze, “is forever.”
Kash glanced above us, his smile fond as he looked over the flowers he’d likely grown, knowing each by name.
“Arches and doorways have their own magic, their own mystery. Moving through them, standing beneath them, we are in the in-between, the twilight, the passage. There’s an unspoken danger, the threat of being lost or forgotten. It’s why a husband carries his bride over the threshold—so he can protect her from any harm, any pain. It’s all I want—to shelter you from harm, to give you the happiness you’ve given me. I want to step into that life with you. Because together, we can survive anything. I promise to carry you through life, to comfort and protect you. To keep you safe. You asked me once what my passion was, and I’ve finally found it. It’s you.” He lowered to one knee, stopping my heart. “Will you marry me, Lila?”
He opened a small velvet box, his face alight with hope and a tremor of fear. Candlelight caught the diamond, and it winked and twinkled, beckoning me.
But that ring wasn’t the offering. The offering was his heart.
Breathlessly, I nodded. “Yes,” I whispered, that word that belonged to him.
With shaking hands, he slid that ring on the finger tied to my heart, and when he stood, it was to pull me into his arms and kiss me like I was his, truly and forever.
But I already had been. I’d been waiting for him my whole life, it seemed, as if every step and every choice had brought me closer to him. To this moment. To all the moments ahead of us.
Because of all the dreams and wishes I had, he was the greatest of all.
Mum’s The Word
Coming Spring 2020
MARCUS
A peal of thunder split the sky open.
Rain fell in a sheet of fat drops, the deluge too sudden for a single person on Fifth Avenue to even reach for their umbrella, never mind open one. With a swear, I held my attache over my head in a useless attempt to protect my suit from the torrent as the foot traffic scattered like ants after the mound had been kicked in a scrambling, tumbling blitzkrieg for cover.
But I trucked on, winding my way through the erratic crowd, which required all of my attention to navigate. My gaze scanned the sidewalk ahead of me, calculating the fastest path to the subway station with the trajectory of the flow of people laid out before me like a map. The lady with the stroller running obliquely for a coffee shop up ahead. A businessman still on his phone, squinting through the rain as he beelined for a newspaper stand. A pack of kids playing hooky, trotting and laughing and horsing around.
I was so busy looking in front of me, I didn’t have a chance to dodge the small body before we collided.
We spun from the impact, a whirl of arms and hands. My briefcase hit the ground—abandoned so I could grab her—and her newspaper, which she’d been using for an umbrella, flew into the air and opened like a soggy bird with a broken wing before spiraling to the sidewalk.
They say it’s adrenaline that speeds up your brain in moments like these, a rapid firing of neurons to catalog every detail looking for danger. But I was too stupid to be afraid.
She was soft and small, the sound of her surprise striking some chord of recognition in me. I felt every flex and release of her arms beneath my palms, felt the curves of her body against mine, felt the shift of her legs in perfect time with mine, like we were caught in the tango and not in a matter of physics and force. But it was the scent of her that slipped over me like that incessant rain—delicate, velvety gardenia so perfectly feminine, I found myself momentarily lost in the luxury of it.
I stopped us with a well-placed bracing of my foot that once again mimicked the tango, her body flush with mine and my hands—now somehow around her waist—pressing her against me, holding her still.
But when she looked up, a thunderbolt split my