Page 38 of Italian’s Christmas Acquisition

“Eternal expansion suits them, of course.”

“Right.”

“I was content to continue putting marriage off. I am only thirty.”

“Ah right, and sperm is everlasting. You could put it off until you were eighty.”

He laughed. “I never had the inclination to do that. But I have been caught between two things all this time. The desire to be free from this excessive expansion my mother has commanded, and the desire to not yet marry. Neither option truly exists. But only when I met you did I see marriage as the more... Peaceful option. Why shouldn’t I be a father? I would, after all, do better at it than my own mother. My own father being nonexistent, it would be impossible to do worse.”

“Well, I don’t think that’s true. I think sometimes presence can be worse than absence. Depending precisely on how the presence manifests itself.”

“Indeed.” He thought of his mother again. Of the darkness of the house. The fetid smell. Of how she loved her things more than she had ever loved him. She could name the price of each one of them, where they had come from, the date they had been bought. She never even remembered his birthday.

“Will you wear my ring?”

She looked at him. “This ring exists so that you have a good story to tell. So that when your picture is taken as we get off the plane people will know that you fell in love with the innkeeper you were trapped on the mountain with.”

“Yes. That is exactly why it exists.”

She looked around. “I think this is the kind of thing I might’ve thought was romantic under different circumstances. I mean, if you had gotten down on one knee, and my family was here. If my dad wasn’t gone. Oh, yeah, if we were in love.”

She looked wounded, and what he didn’t want was for her to have second thoughts, because now that he was set on this plan, he was convinced that it was the best way forward. No question.

He didn’t want to continue on the way he had been. It felt like a life continually out of his control whereas...

One with her felt like it might, perhaps, be a path to a life that was much more his own.

Both were his mother’s grand design, and he could not readily articulate why one felt better than the other.

Perhaps, it was Noelle.

“Would you like me to get down on one knee?”

“No. I don’t need you to do that. Thanks, though. That’s...”

He could see that he was losing her. He could see that she was afraid. That she was questioning things. He knew what connection they had. Where it was strongest. He cupped the back of her head and leaned down, claiming her mouth. He kissed her, deep and long until he lost himself entirely. Until he couldn’t remember what he had been trying to do. Until there was nothing but her. Her softness. His need for her. Her lips, her sighs. Everything.

He was consumed by it, just as much as she was. He was caught in his own trap. It was a hell of a thing. It was unlike anything he had ever experienced before.

He did not know if he wished to drown in it, or turn away from it, never to touch it again. When he moved away from her, her eyes were still closed. She was breathing hard. So was he.

“It is not all a story,” he said. “It is not all terribly unromantic.”

Her eyes fluttered open.

“Yes,” she said.

She put her hand out, and he took the ring carefully from the box, sliding it onto her finger. It glittered there. A promise of something.

And it was one of the few times he could honestly say that the addition of something made it better, and not simply more cluttered. Not worse.

On her, the ring was beautiful.

“Let’s go,” he said, gesturing toward the car.

“Okay,” she said, turning to look back at the bed-and-breakfast.

“You will be back,” he said.

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