Page 73 of Property of Thrasher
My breath caught, not because I hadn’t expected a positive reaction but because he said it like a vow and a joke and a map. I honestly had no expectations, but this was going well.
“Before we do that,” he added, and his hand left my jaw to go into his pocket, casual as a man about to toss me a coin, “I want my ring on your finger and you to have my last name.”
He pulled something small and black from his pocket—one of those soft leather pouches he used for screws and coins—and shook a ring into his palm. The lighting found it first. It gave off a glimmer like it had been waiting to be seen. The band was thick with a stone sitting low and set like it meant to stay. Not diamond either. Something deeper, smoky, the gray of a storm rolling off the ocean. He’d chosen a stone that looked like the sky on a day when weather had opinions.
I didn’t realize I was shaking until he caught my left hand and steadied it with his. I got a breath just in time for him to slide the ring onto my finger. It fit like it had been measured by a man who’d counted my knuckles in the dark.
He didn’t make a speech. He didn’t drop to one knee. He didn’t ask.
He claimed.
My brain decided to sputter back to life on a technicality. I blinked up at him. “Umm… a proposal is a request. A question with an answer.”
He smirked, the corner of his mouth going crooked in that way that made things in me curl like paper in a flame. “Told you, baby. My world, my rules. I don’t ask, I instruct.” His fingers wrapped around my hand so that the ring pressed cool against his palm. “You’re mine. And you want babies—I’m gonna give them to you—but you’re gonna be my wife regardless.”
I was laughing and crying at the same time before I knew which one I’d chosen. I wiped at my face with my wrist and failed at both. “You can’t just?—”
“I can and I did.”
“What if I said no?”
“You didn’t. You wouldn’t. You won’t.”
I opened my mouth to argue and closed it because he was right and also because the thing in my pocket warmed like a brand. Fear and joy both came in hot. I took two breaths and tasted the future in both of them.
I turned his palm up and set the folded paper towel there, small as a secret and twice as heavy. He looked down at it, then at me, eyes narrowing in that way that meant he’d already read what mattered in my face. He unfolded the paper with his thick careful fingers, like he was unwrapping a fuse he intended to honor.
The little plastic stick lay in the middle, pink lines bright as candy. The kind of thing you use in a bathroom with the door locked and the window open to let the world in just a crack. My hands had trembled not because I feared it, but because sometimes even the wanted things arrive with thunder.
“You already gave me a baby,” I shared, and it came out soft, steady.
For a half-second he didn’t move. Then the stillness broke. He exhaled like he’d been holding a breath for years and set the test on the table as if it could bruise. His eyes shone and he blinked once, twice, the lashes wet. He did not pretend he wasn’t lit up. He wouldn’t give me the lie.
“Mine,” he said, like a man staking a claim. He reached for me, tugged me into his lap and caged me safely in with his arms. One hand slid to the small of my back, the other flattened over my stomach—gentle, tentative—and the tremor that went through him found the same note in me. “Ours.”
I nodded, tears fresh, laughter messy in the middle of it. “Ours.”
He pressed his mouth to my temple, then to the corner of my eye, then to my cheekbone, like he was giving the news to every part of my face. He rested his forehead against mine and closed his eyes. When he spoke again, his voice had changed. Softer. Lower. It had a new kind of gravity.
“Okay,” he murmured. “Listen to me. We do this how you need it, but I’m thinking. Doctor first. Then Elaina. Then your mom. I’ll make calls for the rest. The club will handle what the world tries to throw at us. We’ll make this place ready. I’ll add on that room you said would be nice ‘someday’ because someday has moved up. I’ll set cameras and motion lights and a gate on the road that only opens for family. I’ll repaint the porch because it bugs me, and I’ll build a crib that’ll hold until a kid is three and thinks safety is a suggestion. I’ll do all of it twice.”
His hand still rested over my belly, warm and earnest.
I covered it with my own. “You don’t have to fix the world.”
“I know.” He cracked a smile. “Only our corner.” He sobered. “I missed things with Elaina. Not because I wanted to. Because the life was messy and I was young and dumb. I used service as a way out and then I thought wearing the patch would be enough to satisfy everyone. I’m a man whose gonna do better. I’m gonna be there.”
“You are there,” I explained, and watched the way that landed. He took the compliment the way a man like him takes any soft thing—awkward at the edges, grateful at the center.
“What do you want?” he genuinely asked. “Right now. With the ring and the baby both on the table.”
“I want your name,” I said, surprising myself with how easy that was. The word name used to sit like a hand around my throat. It didn’t anymore. “I want it because it’s yours and because it’ll match the baby’s. I want it so when I sign things at the doctor’s office and they ask who to call, they call a part of you that became a part of me. I want it because this is where I belong. In your arms forever.”
He kissed me, long and wet. When he let me breathe, his smile had sharpened. “You’re still my old lady,” he said. “Don’t think the ring cancels anything.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
He pulled the test back into his hand, studied it like it was a mission brief. “How far?”
