Page 76 of Your Only Fan
Epilogue
4 Months Later
“Nervous?” I ask Isaac. My Isaac. Forever mine.
He takes a deep breath, nostrils flaring, chest puffing, and he smiles.
“Yes. But the good kind,” he replies.
I kiss the tip of his nose and he closes his eyes, drinking in the moment.
I know exactly how he feels. I feel it myself. The tingles stretching through my limbs, the heart palpitations, the tightness in the stomach. What we’re about to do is no small feat. And even though we’ve been preparing for so many weeks, it’s still scary, almost terrifying.
“Okay. Let’s do this,” I whisper to him and bring our lips together for a tame kiss. There’s definitely no need for anything more than that. Not before we’re done here.
I take his hand in mine. He squeezes it and smiles. Again. Always smiling. Because that’s the only look I want to see on his face. Just happiness. And it’s been that since the day we got together—with the small exception of little fights here and there.
“Doyoufeel ready?” he asks me.
After all, this is his territory, not mine. So even though I look after him, he looks after me, too. A perfect partnership beyond my wildest dreams.
I was starting to give up on love before I met him. Started to give up on finding a person who could handle me and my past. And even though all my friends kept telling me I was still young and that I had plenty of time, I didn’t care. I wanted my special someone, and I kept falling short. Turns out I was just waiting for Isaac.
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I say, and we walk toward the stage.
The stage manager is there behind the curtains, headset on, clipboard in hand, and more flustered than either of us. You’d think he was the one about to perform for a hundred people.
We give him the go ahead, and he speaks on his headset. The lights on the stage come down, and we walk out. There’s a buzz in the air. The presence and energy of a hundred audience members waiting, watching, holding their breath for the spectacle we’re about to give them. And boy is there a show for them to take in.
The lights come on and with them, the tingles on my extremities vanish, suppress, quieten down, as if they know they can’t get in the way. They can only strengthen what I’m supposed to be doing.
Isaac and I have been working on this show for months.
Shortly after we got together, I quit my page. I posted a goodbye video, offered my subscribers a package to purchase all the content on my page—that was over three hundred videos and photos—and took a break to figure out what I wanted to do.
It wasn’t hard, as it turns out. There was a reason why I chose to study Performance and that was because I loved performing. So once Isaac started sharing some of his ideas and projects he wanted to work on over the next few years, I had a lightbulb moment and… here we are now. Three months later with our very own theater company and the first official show of the Beauty and the Teach.
The name was his idea, not mine. I would hardly choose beauty to describe myself and our company, and Isaac is definitely more than just a teacher.
He’s an actor, a director, an artist. He’s a caring, considerate man with lots of romantic bones in his body and sweet insecurities that I love mending one day at a time.
He’s also my soulmate, my man. My one and only. My happily ever after. And I’m his biggest fan.
Which is why when the lights come on after the show and the crowd erupts in an applause, I let go of his hand, drop to my knees, and search for his eyes.
He doesn’t notice me for a second, but when he comes up from his bow, the crowd coos and he turns his head. His eyes grow bigger, his lips part, and I laugh. He’s so fucking adorable when he’s shocked like that. He looks younger than his age, and damn it if he doesn’t look sexy in that warpaint across his body and the burlap sack covering his bits.
“Isaac,” I say. “Baby. I know it’s way too soon and probably a huge shock, but the last four months have been nothing but a fairy tale. I can’t imagine anything coming between us anymore. So I don’t see a reason to postpone this any longer.”
I glance at the side of the stage, and the stage manager smirks, running over with the ring box I asked him to safekeep until the end of our premiere.
What better time to propose to the love of your life than after your first show?
“Ezra, what-are you sure? When-how?”
I love him when he’s lost for words. It means he’s truly surprised, which is just how I wanted things to go. I wasn’t sure if he’d suspected anything, but his fumbling is proof he hadn’t.
There are few cat calls from the crowd. I’m pretty confident that would be Harry, Freddy, and Julian. And possibly our producer, Linc. Of course they wouldn’t miss our premiere, so they were front and center. As were Isaac’s parents. They’d taken a break from their retirement vacation to come and watch our show, and I found the perfect opportunity to ask his parents for his hand.
