Page 168 of IRL: In Real Life
Tears rose before I had the dignity to stop them.
I searched his face, his beautiful dark brown eyes, the steadiness in them, the love in them, the truth I had spent months learning how to trust because he kept giving me the same man every time.
“Yes, baby,” I whispered.
He smiled in a tender way that nearly broke me open before anything else happened.
Then he let go of one of my hands.
And knelt.
The sound that left me did not belong to a woman trying to hold herself together in public. It belonged to a woman whose whole heart had just been lifted into view in front of her.
Micah reached into his pocket and pulled out a ring that caught the last of the sunset and the first of the moonlight at once.
This was a rock.
The kind of diamond that did not enter a room quietly and had no reason to. It sat on a delicate band that only made thecenter stone look more outrageous, more intentional, more like a man had gone looking for something beautiful enough to hold the weight of what he meant.
My breath left me.
Because I knew that ring.
Months ago, when Kendra and I had fallen into one of those luxury jewelry stores after I’d spent an irresponsible amount of money at Ross Park and pretended it was emotional regulation, I had stood over a glass case and pointed at a ring I would never in my life buy for myself.
I had laughed and said, “If a man ever asks me for something, I want it to look like he knew I was worth being unreasonable about.”
Kendra, traitor that she was, had clearly carried that line straight to the enemy.
I put one hand over my mouth and cried immediately.
Not pretty tears, but the real kind.
Because this man had listened to me even when I wasn’t speaking to him directly. Because he had loved me enough to ask the women around me what I would never have thought he was paying attention to. Because the ring in his hand looked like intention, desire, and permanence all at once.
Micah looked up at me from one knee, his own face softer than I had ever seen it, and when he spoke, his voice shook just enough to tell me this was moving him too.
“Talia,” he said, “you changed my real life. Not the surface of it. Not the parts people clap at. The real part. The mornings. The quiet. The peace in me.” He swallowed once. “You made me braver. You made me honest. You made me stop hiding from the best thing I’ve ever had standing in front of me.”
My tears were falling full now.
I nodded once, helplessly, because I could not do anything else.
He kept going.
“I love you. I know what it is to choose you now, in public and in private, in rooms and outside them, on good days and hard ones, for the rest of my life.” He took one breath, then another. “Will you marry me?”
I was already nodding.
Could barely see him through the tears.
Could barely trust my own mouth not to break open around the feeling.
“Yes,” I whispered.
Then stronger, because he deserved to hear it clear.
“Yes.”
