“Speaking of choice,” he said as he moved away and collected something else from the bag. I was too content to watch what he was doing, stretching lazily across the cashmere blanket to feather my fingers through the cool, damp grass. “There’s been a decision that’s weighed on me for a long time now. A decision I should’a made a long fuckin’ time ago.”
“Mmm?” I asked, eyes trained on the meeting of sun and sea as gold began to seep across the water, heralding the sunrise.
King leaned into my side, one hand braced on the other side of my bottom, the other suddenly pressing something faintly wet against my skin. I started to rise, startled by the sensation, but he hushed me and pressed me back down.
“Still remember the first day I met you. How could I not? Even remember what I ate for breakfast, how the hot air, waxy and chemical from the asphalt and the heat, felt against my face. Of course, it was the most important day of my fuckin’ life. A man doesn’t forget shit like that. Not ever.”
He continued to move that wet tip against the delicate skin of my back, only now I realized what he was doing. King was often lightning struck with inspiration, grabbing a receipt, a napkin, the leg of his jeans to use as a canvas for the felt pen he always kept on his person and the poem that rushed to his brain like a spring river bursting its banks.
He was doing that now, using me as a blank page to carry his beautiful words. I already carried one of his poems on my ribcage, but I loved this spontaneity, loved feeling like both his muse and his art simultaneously.
“There are only two days, as I see it, that could ever top that,” he continued, and I closed my eyes to better feel the texture of his lovely voice on my skin. “The day you become my wife, and the day you give me our babies.”
My body went stiff, overly starched from the shock of his words. We’d spoken idly about marriage and babies, but nothing like this, nothing like he was opening a new door in our relationship.
A hand stroked down my side while he continued to write, as if he was soothing a spooked horse. Accordingly, his voice gentled.
“Wanna get married at our house, babe. In the clearin’ through the trees so when you come to me in your wedding dress it’ll look like just as much as a dream as it’ll feel to me gettin’ to marry a woman like you.”
“Okay,” I whispered, afraid to break the tenuous sanctity of the conversation by speaking any louder. “I’ve thought about that too.”
I could hear the answering smile in his voice. “’Course you have, because my girl gets me.”
“Are you asking me to marry you?” I ventured because my heart was a rabid animal trying to break through my chest and asking was the only way to appease it.
King chuckled lowly as he manhandled me until I was seated on his lap, knees on either side of him, and his hands were framing my face. I was naked, and he was completely clothed, but the discrepancy felt right somehow. I’d only ever wanted to be bare and vulnerable with this man because he was the only person I knew who saw everything I was as a gift.
“Babe, for the past four years, that question has been branded on the edge of my tongue, and every time I look at you, I get a little more tempted to say it.”
“So why wait?” I tipped my forehead against his and twisted my fingers in his hair while one of his hand found and cupped the back of my neck to hold me to him.
“’Cause you’d only just found the kinda woman you wanted to be and the kinda life you wanted to live. Didn’t want to make either of those all about me, not before you got a chance to live ’em for you.”
“I don’t think you understand.” And I was shocked that he didn’t. “But it was through the prism of your love that I found myself and my life in the first place.”
“Yeah, I’m gettin’ that now,” he murmured through a wry smile.
“Not like you to be so slow,” I teased, nipping at his lower lip.
“No, so why don’t we rectify that right fuckin’ now,” he suggested.
I shivered as he moved the hand on my neck down my back to trace the words he’d written on my skin as he spoke them to me.
“She was a queen
Raised to sit on a golden throne
In a kingdom of crystal and ice
* * *
All I had to offer was my sword of smoke and world of gasoline
With soldiers shielded by leather and coated in tatts