“I can’t wait to marry you,” I said quietly, there in my favorite place in the world. “I know my proposal kind of sucked, and I’ll do it right when I have a ring.” I brushed little pieces of hair away from her cheeks. “But I want to marry you. I want to live together and pay the same bills and wake up with you in the morning, and get you takeout when I know you barely have time to stop and eat. I want to make sure you’re getting enough rest and let you patch me up when I do stupid shit like try to slide during softball practice. I want to come home to you after a shitty day and know that everything will be better as soon as I walk into our house.”

Sarai was smiling gently at me, but her eyes were watery like she was fighting back tears.

“And at some point,” I said, my voice starting to wobble. “I want to have babies with you. Little tan babies with dark-brown eyes and your smile. My eyelashes, because we both know mine are better.”

Sarai laughed. “They are,” she choked out.

“I want to get old and fat with you,” I said plainly. “Because I want to be in a place with you that none of the outward stuff matters. You’ll spend entire weekends with no makeup on your face, and I’ll get a little bit of a gut because I know that you’ll still ride me like there’s no tomorrow even if you can’t see my washboard abs.”

“I’d do that now,” Sarai said. “We don’t have to be married for you to let yourself go.”

I smiled at her joke. “I want to know the minute you change your shampoo just by the smell of your hair, and I want to see your feet swell up because you’ve been on them all day.”

“That doesn’t sound very fun,” she whispered.

“In forty years, I want to be looking at you the way Mr. K still looks at Mrs. K.”

A tear rolled down Sarai’s cheek, and I brushed it away with my fingertip.

“I don’t need another proposal,” Sarai said, her voice hoarse. “This one was pretty good.”

“I didn’t even get down on one knee,” I argued.

“We’ll pretend you did.”

I let out a mock sigh of relief. “Thank God, because my knee is throbbing from our hike out here.”

My knee hadn’t been bothering me much lately, but I still wore the brace. Sometimes, when I twisted just so, the thing still gave me trouble. I couldn’t wait for it to start feeling normal again.

“Then you’d better sit,” Sarai said seriously.