Page 82 of Loco's Last
I traced the edge of the ring on my finger, still not used to its weight.Not the gold, the promise.The way it grounded me without anchoring me down.The way it didn’t ask me to become smaller to fit beside him.
I thought about the woman I was in DC.Sharp.Driven.Alone in ways I pretended were choices.
I loved my work.Still do.But somewhere along the line, I confused isolation with independence.I wore distance like armor and called it professionalism.I thought loving someone meant giving them leverage over you.
Dante never leveraged my love.
He met it.
In North Carolina, I found something I didn’t know I had been missing—space to exhale.The town didn’t demand explanations.The people didn’t measure my worth by my résumé.They saw what mattered in the quiet ways, how you showed up, how you kept your word, how you stood when things got hard.
The club scared me at first, not because they were dangerous, but because they were loyal in a way I hadn’t seen before.Fierce.Unapologetic.They didn’t pretend the world was fair.They just refused to let it take more than it deserved.
I fit here better than I expected.
Not because I changed who I was, but because I stopped fighting the idea that I couldn’t belong in more than one place.
Dante worried about bringing me into his world.I worried about losing myself in it.
We were both wrong.What we built together didn’t erase our edges.It honored them.
My work shifted, evolved.I found a way to keep fighting without standing in the line of fire every day.I found balance, not the kind you schedule, but the kind that settles into your bones when you stop running.
And Dante, he learned how to rest.
Not because the world stopped being dangerous, but because he stopped believing he had to face it alone.He let me see the parts of him that still carried old ghosts.Let me hold the weight instead of pretending it didn’t exist.
The night he proposed, I didn’t think about the future in terms of sacrifice or compromise.
I thought about mornings.
About coffee and shared silence.About arguments that ended in understanding instead of distance.About a man who crossed state lines to save me, and stayed because I asked him to.
I said yes because I didn’t feel trapped.I said yes because I felt free.
Love didn’t weaken me.It steadied me.
And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t choosing between who I was and who I loved.
I was choosing both.
Together.
The end
