Page 92 of The Biting Bargain

I think it's happiness.

That she's here.

"Do you want me to move in here?" she asks.

"Do you want to?" I ask back.

"I don't know." She contorts her small mouth into a crooked smile. "You have horrible taste in decor."

"Excuse me?" The corners of my mouth are twitching upward. "What's wrong with a classic style?"

"Oh, come on, old man, Your entire house looks like a 19th century interior designer went nuts."

Now I have to chuckle, too. A few weeks ago, I would have been appalled. Me, the corporate boogeyman bantering with a girl — and feeling comfortable?

Well, I’ll be damned.

I pull her closer, and she snuggles into the crook of my arm.

"We don't have to decide anything now, you know," I say after a while as the couple on the TV screen spins across the dance floor, slowly and dreamily, as if they don't know exactly where to go either.

"But is that what you really want?" asks Polly, looking at me with wide eyes. "To be with me?"

I nod.

"I'm terribly annoying," she says.

"Not true."

"I am a mess."

"Debatable."

"You're going to live to be five-thousand years old, and I'm going to die someday."

I grit my teeth and stare at the screen in front of me. She is just stating the obvious. But I don't like this obvious at all.

Up to this point, I had little to lose but my reputation. Now the stakes are suddenly much higher. And I have no answer to this objection. Except the one that annoys me beyond belief, but which is the only option for every other normal couple on the planet.

"We figure it out," I say after a while. And there' s something about the way she sighs and snuggles closer to me that gives me another one of those new feelings. Something I haven't felt or needed before.

A sense of reassurance.

"We figure it out," I repeat. "Together."

She straightens up and looks at me.

"Promise?"

I nod. "Promise."

She kisses me. And our conversation stops for a long while, as the movie rolls on, unnoticed.

This is not yet the end of our story. But only the beginning.

Epilogue

Ten Months Later

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