Page 180 of 10 Rings I Hate About You
“We did it!” I said. “Full approval. We’ll have the paperwork Monday.”
Theo stood silently. Then he made a noise I’d never heard him make before—not quite a laugh, not quite a cry, but a mix of the two.
I caught him as he reached for me. We stood there in the middle of the fundraiser hugging each other. He believed in the shelter and what it could become before anyone else had, and I saw his vision. On the day he’d come to me with the first grant application, he told me he had a dream to train shelter animals as therapy dogs, to have the money to hire permanent staff, to make more space for more animals, and to create an end-of-life care center for the animals that might never find a forever home. And I’d said yes because Theo had never asked for something that wasn’t worth fighting for.
“We did it,” he said, his voice muffled against my shoulder.
“You did it,” I said. “I just helped.”
He pulled back. His eyes were wet, and he didn’t care. Neither did I.
Before he turned back to the family he’d been speaking to, he gave me a loud thunk on my back. “You should go tell Delaney.”
I nodded.
Not surprisingly, I found her by the yoga demonstration area with Cheryl, cleaning up.
She looked at me as I came close and must have read my face because a huge smile lit up hers. She screamed as she ran at me. “Marc!”
I grabbed her by the waist and yanked her tight to me. “Full approval.” I grinned. “They’ve been watching the livestream all day.”
She slid her arms up and around my neck. “You did it.”
“We did it,” I said. “I love you so damn much.”
She pulled back. Her eyes were bright. Her hair was coming loose from the messy bun she’d pulled it up into this morning … and once again I was hit with a deep-rooted certainty that all of her was everything I didn’t know I needed and now couldn’t live without.
“I love you, too.”
I cupped her cheek. My thumb brushed over her lips. “I love who you were, who you are now, and who you’ll become. I love every piece of what makes you, you.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Marc Kingsley, stop making me cry.”
“I’ve loved you for longer than I was ready to admit. And I will love you for the rest of eternity if you’ll let me,” I promised her.
She sniffed. “I love you so much. The man you are now and that little boy that I didn’t completely understand. And as much as I wish things had been different so we could’ve started this journey earlier, I know what advice my aunt would give. She’d say that everything happens in its own time. That if things didn’t go exactly as they were meant to go, you might lose out on something extraordinary. And you and me … we’re extraordinary.”
I pressed my lips to hers, ready to figure out what our forever was going to be.
We turned at the sound of Chaos bleating, conveying his anger that he wasn’t part of the lovefest, and I swear, as the sun dipped down over the horizon, the river turned crimson. For the barest of seconds. And according to the Ruby River legend, when a ruby hue touched the water, a couple fell into that forever kind of love.
And in our case, the legend was right. Because Delaney and I had found the love that our hearts had been waiting for. Even though it took us a while to get there.
Epilogue
MARC
Two weeks later
I stood between the two grills on my back deck, flipping burgers and hot dogs with one hand and checking skewers with the other. The heat licked up my forearms as I mentally managed all the tasks. Normally, I’d have everything timed down to the second—what came off when, what needed to be at a particular angle to cook perfectly—but today I was mostly winging it. Instead of using my phone timer, I was going off instinct.
My gaze drifted past the smoke curling into the late afternoon air and landed where it always did.
Delaney.
She stood barefoot in the grass, a drink in one hand she’d clearly forgotten about, laughing at something Cheryl had said while Theo nodded along like whatever the woman declared was a universal truth in his world. Immediately, a sense of quiet shifted within me, one that said all was right in our world.
This. This was mine. No—ours.
