“Lynn?” I pushed. “Lynn-Teague? Teague-Lynn? Tea-Lynn? League?”
She laughed.
“Not the last one!”
“So, there’s another reason to get married,” I concluded.
“You are assuming I’d take your last name,” Tria said. “What the heck is a Teague, anyway?”
She snickered, and I tickled her sides until she begged me to stop.
“Say you’ll take my last name!” I insisted as I trailed the backs of my fingers over her sides again.
Tria squirmed and laughed.
“Fine!” she cried. “I’ll be Tria Teague!”
I ceased with the tickling and pulled her close to me again.
“Is that a yes, then?”
“It’s a maybe,” she said.
“So what, you’re just going to change your name without getting married? Isn’t that a little odd?”
Tria let out a long, slow breath and then looked over at me.
“Why would I say yes when you’ve already admitted you wouldn’t be asking under other circumstances?”
“I want us to be a family,” I said. “I want us all tied together in every way possible, including legally.”
“But you don’t really want to marry me.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I replied with a sigh. “I wouldn’t be suggesting it now. I would have wanted you to finish school first—figure out where you want to go and what you want to do with your life before asking you if you wanted to settle around here.”
“And it’s different now,” she said.
“Yeah, very different.”
“I still want to finish school.”
“Of course,” I said. “You will. I’ll do whatever I can to make sure you finish school. And then if you want to move away somewhere, we will. I’d go wherever you got a job or wanted to live.”
“Which you might not have done if we didn’t have a child together?”
“I would have wanted to give you the option,” I said quietly. “I’ve never lived anywhere but here, though.”
“And I’m a country girl,” Tria said with a smile.
“You ain’t no city girl, that’s for sure!”
“I think I like the city better,” Tria said. “I can’t even say exactly why, especially since I haven’t exactly been in the nicest areas. I like all the options, though. It gives me more opportunity to see how economics impacts the different areas of town.”
“You have weird hobbies,” I said with a smile.
“It’s what interests me,” she said with a shrug. “I could probably use your experience as part of my thesis, you know. Going from all of this”—she waved a hand in the air—“to the slums.”
“Yeah, I suck at interviews, though.”