“Good.” John scooped her up, bridal-style. “I don’t want to get it now, because we have other stuff to do.”

“Of course I’m going to marry you,” she said, wrapping her arms around his neck.

John dropped her on the bed gently. He crawled over her, running his hands, hot and insistent, under her robe. She stilled.

“What?” He frowned.

“Did you hit save on your script?”

“Oh shit.” John fumbled, scrambling off the bed. He leaned over his laptop and carefully hit the save button. The morning sunlight streamed through the window behind him. He turned around, hands on hips.

Anna raised herself up on her elbows. “I love you.”

“I know, babe,” John said, walking over to the bed. He lay down next her and pulled her into his arms. “But I still like to hear you say it.”

#

SHE TOLD HIM MANY, many times. She told him when they went to the Oscars. She told him when he won and she lost. She told him when he had writer’s block and he built a coffee table out of a hunk of wood in the middle of their small cottage, where they could hear the waves on the beach.

“Um, John, it’s really big.”

He glared at her.

“But it’s great. This is a great place for you to build something with your bare hands, and I can watch you.”

“Good answer.”

She told him when she left for a movie shoot without him, a period drama with women in hoopskirts and men in breeches. She wished he were going with her, but he stayed to finish the script he had finally started.

“Are we just going to leave it there?” she asked, gesturing to the half-formed lump of wood.

He shrugged. “I might need it again.”

She told him when they sneaked upstairs at her mom’s house after he had eaten Gloria’s preserves.

“I don’t know why this is a turn-on for you,” he said, wide-eyed as she forced him into the sewing room.

“I don’t know either, and I don’t want to think about it.”

“Babe, I’m not complaining.”

She told him through tears when she won an Oscar. He might as well have been the only person in the room.

He kissed her later, after the after-parties and her dress change and him rolling up his shirtsleeves while he leaned against the bar, at which point she looked for a closet.

In the limo during the long, winding drive back to their small house at the beach, he kissed her, chaste and thoughtful like a man wearing breeches, but that wasn’t what she wanted. She moved his hand under her skirt.

“You sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“I thought it meant I was growing as a person, that I wasn’t groping you in the back seat after you won an Oscar.”