“I do,” he growled. “I love you so fucking much. I love you, and I lust you and want you. I love you as the person I want to be with forever. I just . . . Macy? Will you marry me?”

Time stopped. Planets aligned and then shifted apart. Years passed. The voices and music and clinking of glasses all around me faded to nothing and all I could hear was the echo of his blurted proposal.

I stuttered through several sounds before I was able to speak.

Unfortunately, “What?” was the first thing to come out coherently.

“Shit,” he groaned. “Shit, I just totally messed that up.”

“Elliot . . . ?”

His voice came out muffled when he said, “Will you come see me? I want to ask you to marry me. In person.”

I looked around the room, my heart a blazing thunderbolt in my chest. “I . . . Ell . . . I’m not sure I can come up tonight. This is huge.”

“It is huge. But it’s real.”

“Okay. I hear you,” I said, pinching my eyes closed. He told me he loved me and asked me to marry him in one conversation. Over the phone. “It’s just . . . there is no way Dad would let me get on the road with all the drunk people.”

He was silent for so long that I looked down at my phone to make sure I hadn’t lost the call.

“Elliot?”

“Do you love me?”

I exhaled, blinked away tears. This wasn’t how I wanted this conversation—how I wanted to discuss our future—but here it was, in my face, demanding to happen like this. “You know I do. I don’t want to do this over the phone.”

“I know you don’t, but do you know what I mean? Do you want to marry me? Do you want to make this forever? At Goat Rock, and the library, and walking everywhere, and traveling. Do you want to touch me and be with me and wake up with my mouth on you and do you want me to be the one to give you orgasms or . . . fuck, watch you have them or whatever? Do you think about a life with me or marrying me?”

“Ell—”

“I do,” he said in a breathless rush. “All the time I do, Macy.”

I almost couldn’t speak, my pulse was firing so heavily. “You know I do, too.”

“Come to me tonight, please, Macy, please.”

Noisemakers started blowing and confetti fell from invisible containers somewhere high above my head, but all I heard was the crackle of the line.

“I’ll come next weekend, okay?”

He sighed: a universe of weight buried in the sound. “Do you promise?”

“Of course I promise.” I looked across the room and saw Dad walking toward me, a rare wide smile lighting up his face. Noise filled the other end of the phone and I could hardly hear Elliot anymore.

“Macy? I can’t hear you! It’s super loud here.”