“I’m sure you do. But that doesn’t mean…it was right for me to ask you to marry me when you had your head in a cupboard.”

“I confess,” he confessed, “I was caught a little off guard.”

“Yeah. So. Um.” I fumbled in my pocket for the ominous box, couldn’t find it, fumbled in a different pocket, dropped to one knee a bit too hastily so it just looked like I’d fallen off the sofa, which had happened more than once, and then finished up with, “Ow. I mean—”

“Are you all right?” A very concerned Oliver got to his feet to help me up and then stared, with a non-flattering amount of confusion, at the velvet box of doom I was shakily holding out to him.

“Well, I banged my leg but, um, Oliver David Blackwood, now that you’re not in a cupboard, will you marry me?”

Oliver went through a range of expressions, none of which I could readily identify and at least some of which I was pretty sure were positive. “I thought I’d already agreed to that when I was in the cupboard. I assumed you were trying to call it off.”

“What? No.” I gazed at him in mounting horror, with the moderately affordable ring hovering between us. “Why did you think that?”

“Several reasons, Lucien. It was quite an impulsive thing to do in the first place, we’ve barely spoken about it since, and you literally just said you’d made a mistake.”

I cringed. “Okay, I can retrospectively see how that might have given you the wrong impression. But”—I took a deep breath—“when I said I made a mistake, I meant that I didn’t propose in a very romantic way or in a way that expressed how…how great you are and how…like…feelings you make me.”

Looking only a little bit as if I’d offered him a live snake, Oliver took the box and opened it. For a moment he stared at the distinctly average ring. Then, “It’s beautiful,” he said. “Thank you.” And then slipped it on his finger and—

“Oh my God,” I cried. “It fits.”

Oliver looked down at his hand, half-rapt, as though he almost didn’t recognise it. “Yes, yes it does.”

“And,” I added, “it doesn’t look awful.”

He gave a little blink. “No. No, it looks wonderful.”

It did kind of look…wonderful, and he looked wonderful wearing it. Because it was like this little piece of Oliver Blackwood was very visibly mine.

Eventually we noticed that I was still on one knee, and Oliver was still standing, and it created a weird dynamic. So Oliver sat down on the sofa and I sat down beside him, my eyes flicking every now and again to—

“Nice ring,” I said.