Page 107 of Bearly Out Loud

“I keep meaning it.”

His hand found her knee. Squeezed once. She put her hand over his and turned back to the stage where Priya was introducing the animation team, and the bond hummed warm between them, and three hundred people were still clapping, and her grandfather’s story was alive, and she had given it her voice, and it was enough. It was more than enough. It was everything she had been working toward since the day she’d sat in a kitchen and listened to a man who loved words explain why they mattered.

FIFTY-SIX

DOJIN

He told her he had a meeting on the rooftop.

She’d looked at him with narrowed eyes and said, “At eleven o’clock? After a premiere?” and he’d said, “Bear business. Won’t take long,” and she’d said, “You’re a terrible liar and I love you,” and followed him to the elevator without further interrogation, which meant she knew exactly what was happening and was choosing to let him have it, which was the most generous thing anyone had ever done for him and she didn’t even know it.

The rooftop was ready.

He’d asked Reo to handle the setup because Reo handled everything, and Reo had delivered with his usual ruthless efficiency—job description: “security operations,” actual function: “making sure Dojin’s life works.” String lights woven through the garden’s frame. The beehives glowing amber in the warm light. Honey from every season arranged on the tasting board—the same board from their first date, Stellan’s handiwork, nicked and polished and holding wildflower and lavender and buckwheat and the clover honey she’d tasted with her eyes closed and made a sound that had restructured his entire understanding of desire.

The evening was warm. Spring had opened the city—the retractable panels let the sky through, and the sky was doing its best, scattered clouds lit from below by Manhattan’s glow. The bees were settled for the night, a low hum from the hives, the soundtrack of every important moment in his life on this rooftop: first date, mate conversation, the night she’d said yes to a creative partnership and he’d carried her through a door and they’d never made it to the bed.

He stood at the railing. The box was in his pocket.

Stellan had carved it. Small, cherry wood, the lid fitted so precisely it, opened with a whisper. Inside: a ring. Not a diamond—a golden amber stone set in a band of brushed gold that caught light the way honey caught sun. He’d chosen it because it reminded him of her: warm, luminous, a color that existed between brown and gold and defied easy categorization.

He’d carried the box for three days. Through the premiere prep, the final meetings with Priya’s team, the last call with James confirming every legal protection was locked. He’d carried it during her speech—her voice filling the theater, her shoulders back, her grandfather’s legacy pouring out of her in sentences so clean and fierce that three hundred people had forgotten to breathe.

He’d sat in the dark with the box pressing against his thigh and his bear so quiet, it was barely there, and he had known with the certainty that bears know things—not with logic, not with strategy, but with the deep, cellular understanding that a den is right and a mate is true—that he was going to ask her tonight.

The elevator chimed. She walked out.

Still in the gown. Heels in one hand—she’d kicked them off in the elevator, because Nari Wixx wore heels for the public and barefoot for the people she loved. Her hair was coming loose from its updo. The crescent at her shoulder caught the string light and glowed like a second moon.

She saw the setup. The lights. The honey board. The rooftop transformed into the place where everything between them had started and deepened and burned.

“Bear business.”

“Technically accurate.”

“You are the worst liar in the northeastern United States.” She dropped her heels by the elevator door. Walked to him. Barefoot on the rooftop garden, the concrete warm from a day of sun, and he watched her come toward him with the same look he’d worn since the first day in the studio—like she was the only moving thing in a still world.

She stopped in front of him. Her face was tilted up. Her eyes were bright and dark and knowing. She was smiling—the private smile, the one that predated the sarcasm and existed beneath it, the smile she’d been giving him since the night on the recording studio floor when he’d sat beside her in a four-thousand-dollar suit and she’d decided he was worth trusting.

He took the box from his pocket.

Her eyes tracked it. The carved lid. Cherry wood. Stellan’s hand in every groove. She pressed her lips together.

He opened it.

The amber stone caught the string light and burned gold.

“Marry me.” His voice was steady. The steadiness cost him nothing—there was no uncertainty to manage, no doubt to suppress. He had been certain about her since the day she’d walked into his studio and turned a stolen character into a living thing, and the certainty had only deepened, through crisis and combat and claiming and a creative partnership that had given him a purpose beyond the business he’d inherited. “Be loud about it.”

“Yes.”

“That wasn’t very loud.”

Her face cracked. The armor she’d held through the premiere, through the speech, through the carpet and the cameras and the three hundred strangers—it broke apart like ice in spring, and underneath it: joy. Messy, uncontrolled, radiant.

“I’m working up to it.”

She breathed in. Looked at the ring. Looked at him. Looked at the bees and the garden and the honey board and the city glittering forty stories below and the sky above and the man standing in front of her holding a small carved box his father had made, offering her a ring the color of honey on a rooftop where he kept bees because he was a bear and bears built sweetness in unexpected places.