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“Nigel? What the fuck is this?”
He’s in the other room. I can hear him making a mess in the kitchen. He drops something at the sound of my voice, there’s a clang of metal and the slosh of liquid. “Darling?” he calls back, and I try not to bristle. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to all the pet names. “Shit, I didn’t think you’d be home so early!”
I’m late, actually. Nigel must look at the clock and come to the same conclusion, because he follows up with “Or I lost track of time. Guess that’s also a possibility.”
He pokes his head into the living room, flashes a crooked grin at me. He looks nervous, and a wave of dread and exhaustion knocks into me so hard that I nearly fall on my ass. “How was your day?” he asks.
I sigh, shrugging my way out of my jacket and tossing it into my armchair. “Long,” I answer, and scrub a weary palm down my face. “To be honest with you, I’m really fucking tired tonight. So can you please just tell me what’s going on?”
Nigel just shrugs, playing dumb. “Why do you think something’s going on?”
As an answer, I gesture around the living room. Nigel cleaned while I was at work, the apartment is fucking spotless. The lights are all off, and every shelf and table in sight is lined with little flickering candles. Most damning of all, there’s a bouquet of flowers on the table. Orange roses, tiger lilies. A Gerber daisy or two. It makes bile rise in my throat, knowing that he remembered to get orange flowers specifically. Looking at them gives me the sense that I’m about to receive bad news.
Nigel’s expression softens. He crosses the room, cups my cheeks in his broad, worn hands. “Iepuraș,” he coos, and my chest seizes up uncomfortably. “You worry too much. I wanted to give you a romantic evening, is that so hard to believe?”
Yes, my insecurity rushes to say, but I swallow it down. “Fine,” I mutter, and I try to shake off my unease even though I can still see that glint of fear in Nigel’s eyes. I sit on the sofa with a soft grunt, observing the cheerful little flowers. They seem to glow in the candle light, and I smile in spite of myself. “These for me?” I tease, and Nigel smirks.
“Do you like them?”
“I don’t think I even own a vase,” I say in lieu of a direct reply. He knows damn well that I like them, he doesn’t need me to say it.
Nigel preens a little. Message received. “I was planning on spreading out the petals on the bed for you,” he informs me with a waggle of his brows. “Or floating them in the tub.”
“I guess it’s better than just watching them die.”
He leans down in front of me, presses a kiss to my temple. I don’t flinch. “Sit here and relax. Dinner’s almost finished— you want a beer?”
It’s not until he mentions it that I realize the apartment smells like food. “You cooked?” I ask, and as if on cue my stomach growls, loudly informing the both of us that I haven’t eaten all day.
Nigel laughs, rough and loud, and it makes my stomach feel almost uncomfortably warm. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he warns. Funny. I’m telling myself the same thing.
As nice as it feels to finally be off my feet, I stand, following him into the kitchen. “What did you make?”
I can hear the grin on his face when he says “My brother always told me not to ask.”
“Yeah, well your brother’s not here right now. What is it?”
My mouth starts watering as soon as I enter the kitchen. I look to Nigel, my eyes wide with something between pleased shock and abject horror. He didn’t, did he?
“Fettuccine Alfredo, with garlic shrimp,” he explains with a slight huff. I’ve ruined the pageantry of it all, spoiled some of the surprise.
I turn prickly with suspicion, eyeing the pan on the stove top. “That’s my favorite meal,” I point out, even though I know he’s doing this shit on purpose. Nigel smirks to himself.
“I went to that shop uptown, too,” he tells me, all puffed-up and pleased with himself. “Bought you some of those bigass chocolate-covered strawberries you like.”
That’s it. “Nigel, will you just cut the bullshit and tell me what happened?”
He gives me another carefully blank look. I want so badly to smack it off of him. “Did something fall through at the club?” I ask. “Is one of us dying? Do you have to go back to Romania? Whatever it is—“
Nigel has the gall to roll his eyes. “Baby, I already told you, nothing’s going on.”
“You’re not fucking subtle!” I insist. “The house, the candles, the strawberries— You’re obviously up to…”
The energy behind my ranting fizzles out like a dud firework. Halfway through my sentence, Nigel huffs in irritation, and drops heavily to one knee. I stare at him, the gears in my head grinding to a halt so abruptly that it makes my head spin.
He looks back at me, smiles a bit shyly. I’m not used to seeing him shy. “You’re not gonna let this go until I stop stalling and do it, are you?” he asks with faux annoyance, and a lump lodges itself into my throat as he reaches into his pocket. I want to say something. I want to say ‘Hell, you’ve lost your mind,’ or ‘Get the fuck up, Nigel Banyai, before I walk right out that door’. Nothing comes. I think my tongue has gone on strike.
The tiny red box in his hands has me caught between laughing in his face and bursting into tears. “Now, I know what you’re thinking,” he tells me, showing me a palm like he’s gentling a skittish horse. “You’re thinking that we’ve both been through enough of that ‘marriage’ bullshit to last us ten fucking lifetimes. So why the hell would I ever want to do that again?”
I have to let my mouth flounder a little before I can produce a weak “That’s exactly what I’m thinking, yeah.”
He laughs, softly. “You wanna know something, Bobby?”
I can’t do this. The thought starts out tiny, only gets bigger by the second. No, I can’t fucking do this again. Nigel’s looking at me with this awful, besotted look on his face, and all I want to do is run.
Maybe he was right to treat me like a flight risk, because I nearly bolt when he reaches up and takes my hand in his own. He stokes his thumb over my knuckles, speaks in a voice thick like honey.
“You are, without a god damned doubt… the most stubborn—“ A startled laugh bursts out of me, and his mouth curls into a smile as he continues. “Most difficult, downright bitchy person I’ve ever fucking loved.”
I can’t look him in the face, so I stare at our joined hands. His skin feels good against mine. He’s always felt good, to me.
“I don’t say shit I don’t mean, darling, you know that by now. I love waking up next to you in the morning. You’re funny, you’re smart, you’re fucking beautiful— don’t make that fucking face, iepuraș, I mean it.”
My face turns hot, and there’s nowhere for me to hide. Not from Nigel. “Okay,” I mutter, because I can’t begin to think of anything better to say.
Nigel squeezes my hand. I swallow my embarrassment, force myself to look him in the face. Son of a bitch, he’s tearing up. I blink, hard, and my own vision blurs behind a film of moisture. Damn it.
“I wanna try again,” Nigel whispers, and it snaps something in my chest clean in half. “With you. Marry me, Bobby. We’ll do better this time, yeah?”
It’s my instinct to give him the cold shoulder. To cook up some snide remark, throw it right in his handsome face. But all that comes out is
“Yeah.”
I swallow, trying to dislodge the weirdness clinging to my vocal chords. “Yeah, fucking… sure, why not?”
My own voice sounds painfully soft in my ears, and Nigel laughs. I’m laughing too, suddenly, weepy chuckles that move strangely through my chest. He heaves himself back onto his feet, gathers me up in a victorious kiss. He refuses to pull away, either, even as his hands fumble to blindly push the ring onto my finger. It’s a perfect fit, and I really don’t know how he managed that when I don’t even know my ring size. But that’s just how Nigel is, I guess. He knows me.