Say You Swear

My tears fall in heavy streaks down my cheeks, but I don’t even want to blink. I don’t want to miss a single expression on his face.

“I want to give you everything you could ever want, and then I want to give you even more. But first.” He opens his palm, and then that heart that was around my neck is opened, and a small, silver band falls out, right into my hands.

I gasp, having had no idea it was a locket. “Noah...”

“First,” he repeats, his knuckles lifting my chin, calling my eyes to his. “First, I want to marry you.”

A cry slips past my lips, my hand coming to cover my mouth.

“Marry me, Juliet. We can wait until you’re done with school, or we can drive to a chapel right now, I don’t care. Marry me.”

I’m nodding before he’s even done speaking, my lips smashing with his as I pull him as close as I can get him, and it’s not close enough.

It will never be close enough.

But forever is a damn good start.

“You will?” he rasps.

“Of course I will.”

His palms shake as he grips my cheeks, his eyes piercing mine. “Say you swear?”

Placing my palm over his tattoo, I recite its meaning.

“Fear not the fall, but the life that comes from having never leaped at all.” I smile through my tears. “I’ll always leap if the jump leads me to you, Noah Riley. Always.”

“And forever.”

“I swear.”

He kisses me, and I get lost in the man before me.

My Romeo.

My fiancé.

My everything.