“You are.” I exhale a sharp, nervous breath. “I’m usually quicker than that, though. Sorry. Uh, seriously. I have an offer.”
“Okay. I’m all ears.”
I’ve convinced teams to take risks on players they thought twice, three, four times about signing. I’ve persuaded brands to pay twice what they intended in a matter of one meeting, but I can’t come up with the words to convince Banner Morales to marry me? This is the most important pitch of my life.
“So, we have a lot, right?” I ask.
“I think we have everything we need.” She laces her fingers into the short hair at my neck.
“Not everything,” I say, taking advantage of the opening. “A wise woman once said I should be unafraid to want it all.”
“Technically, I was addressing a roomful of women who average about a third of their male counterparts’ salaries, and you’re a rich, white American male,” she teases. “So you have just about everything, but you were saying?”
I let out a short laugh.
“Did you just rich white male me?”
“I did just rich white male you,” she chuckles unrepentantly.
“I’ll let you get away with it just this once.” I shake my head at her and try to remember where I was. “So like I was saying, I want it all.”
I reach into her hair and find one of the pins anchoring it, taking it out. A thick dark lock spills over her shoulder.
“Jared!” she touches the hair still pulled up.
“I want to wake up with you every morning.” I steal another pin, freeing another section of hair.
“Which you already do.” She gives up and just angles a look up at me that is part deep love, part perennial exasperation.
“I want to kiss you every day.” Another pin gone. More hair falls. “Make love to you every day.”
“Also, what you already do . . . every day. Sometimes a few times a day. No complaining. I’m totally here for that.”
I grasp the final pin, slide it free, and watch the last of her thick hair fall around her shoulders. Enough of her makeup has worn off that I see her freckles. She looks so much like my girl from the laundromat.
“I want my ring on your finger.”
Even over the mariachi band still going strong inside, I hear her gasp. I feel her shock. She doesn’t speak, but just stares at me with wide eyes.
“I want four kids with you,” I continue, but hastily modify. “Though if that number is negotiable, I could go down. Like way down.”
“Uh, no, Jared, I—”
“Okay, four then. Whatever,” I concede with a frown, rushing on before she can tell me no, or not now, or I’ll think about it. Or any shit that isn’t what I want her to say. “Look, I know I’m a risk. I’m not . . .”
Him.
“I’m not Zo,” I continue softly, looking from the terrace floor back up to her shell-shocked face. “Or August or my dad. I’m not nice and selfless and considerate. I know how to charm people but can’t figure out how to like them. I get it.”
I regret all the times I told her I had no moral compass, nothing to anchor my conscience, because who in their right mind marries a guy who admits that?
“I know I said my compass spins.” Emotion makes it hard to get the words out. “But not with you.”
I push the hair I’ve freed back from her face.
“Banner, I’m set on you,” I continue. “And if you’ll have me, I promise you won’t regret it. I’ll love you every day for the rest of my life.”
That’s all I got. I just gave her more of myself than any other person on the planet has. I hold my breath and wait to see what she does with it.
She licks her lips and tucks a chunk of hair behind her ear before looking back to me. She cried for Zo earlier, but there’s no comparison to what I see standing in her eyes right now. The love, the devotion and unconditional acceptance I feel for her, looking in her eyes, I see it returned under a sheen of tears.
“That’s some offer,” she says, her voice deepened with the emotion redolent in her eyes. “And I have your answer.”
She reaches up and cups my face between trembling hands and, in the dying light of the golden hour, has never been more beautiful to me.
“I don’t deserve you, Jared Foster,” she says, softly, surely. “But I’m going to have you anyway.”