Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 115198 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 576(@200wpm)___ 461(@250wpm)___ 384(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 115198 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 576(@200wpm)___ 461(@250wpm)___ 384(@300wpm)
My heart pounds against my rib cage when I meet his eyes. I know Liam loves me; it’s always there, barely contained beneath the surface. It’s visible in everything he does; it’s obvious just by the way he looks at me. But he’s never said the words.
Never wanted to push me, I know.
“So do I,” I say now.
His gaze drops to my lips. “Are you saying you love me, Anna Green?”
“I’m saying I love you madly, West Weston.”
Liam stands from his chair, unconcerned with the tables of people around us as he pulls me into his arms, just like the man in the painting. “I love you, too,” he says against my cheek. “I have been aching to say it for so long.”
* * *
ONLY A MONTH LATER, September tiptoes in and we’re too busy banging each other on a Labor Day weekend getaway in Cambria to realize what it means: Liam has gained full access to his trust. Surprising no one, the We Can Safely Divorce date comes and goes and there is zero talk of divorce. Divorce would feel like breaking up, and I have a hard enough time saying goodbye at airports; no way would I let this man say goodbye on paper.
But I guess that means there’s also no talk of marriage, either, even though we both know that, hello, we are very much still legally married. I took off my ring and gave it back to him on the flight back from Singapore all those months ago; Liam never wore one. So when he climbs out of my bed one Saturday night in October, digs in his suitcase, and then sets the iconic turquoise box on my rumpled bed between us, I feel unprepared for the complicated emotions that smack me right in the face.
“What is this?” I ask carefully.
“It isn’t what you think,” he says, taking my hand. “I mean it is—it’s your ring—but I’m not asking you to put it back on.”
“Is this you admitting that the nipple-sized diamond is real?”
Liam laughs. “Yeah. It’s real.”
“Fuck me,” I say on an awed exhale.
Smiling, he looks down at our joined hands. “This ring is yours, Anna. It’s yours whenever you want it. Or we can sell it and get a different ring, a more Anna-appropriate ring, a ring a Muppet would wear, with gemstones of every color or a chain of diamond daisies. Whatever engagement ring you want is yours. As is my grandmother’s wedding band. I can’t tell you how happy it would make me to put that on your finger.”
He takes a breath, puffing out his cheeks as he exhales, as if he’s not getting this quite right. He’s so fucking cute I want to lick his face.
“I know it’s soon,” he says more earnestly, meeting my eyes. “I know we’ve been married for five years but only together for five months. I know our lives are complicated and we don’t live near each other, and we’re still figuring out what we each want. But I love you. So much. I can’t fathom wanting someone else, anything else, the way I want you. There’s a ring in that box for me, too, when you’re ready for me to wear it. Whether it’s a month from now, a year. Shit, I’ll put it on tonight if you tell me to.” He frowns. “ ‘Never’ wouldn’t be my preferred answer, but I’d take that, too.” He winces at his sweet rambling. “When you’re ready—if you’re ever ready to be my wife for real, I’ll be here, ready to be your husband for real.”
I was joking on the plane months ago when I talked about the proposal of my dreams because to be honest, I never thought much about how that might look. The world tells girls we should want romantic, flashy grand gestures, and those can be great. But if I had given it deeper thought, I know I’d have dreamed up something just like this—an offer given with honesty and communication and mutual respect—over anything showy. So I kiss him. I keep kissing him until we’re both lost in it and push him back and sink down on him and tell him over and over as I move that I love him. I know someday I’ll be ready to wear a ring again, but right now, what we are is perfect.
The ring box goes in my dresser drawer for the time being, but the man and his love stay right at my side.
* * *
BY JANUARY, DR. WILLIAM Weston is no longer the only professor in this relationship!
Well, technically, I’m an instructor, and it is at a local city college, but it is a dream job. Teaching art to college kids on the path to figuring out what they want to do is amazing, as is being able to speak to that fear in them that they’ve chosen something impossible and elusive and will end up homeless eating apple cores out of the public garbage cans. I love, too, the older adults returning to school—the mom of newly graduated triplets finally finding time for herself, and the thirty-five-year-old dude raised by a shithead dad, who’s only now realizing that loving art won’t make him weak. My favorites are the two women in their seventies who met in a research lab years ago at Caltech and have a bet over which is the worse painter, so they took a class to find out.