Instead I shook my head and pushed him away from me.
We sat on my bed, our backs against the wall, our legs hanging off the edge.
I said, “How would I know that you wouldn’t do it again? How would I be able to trust that?”
He got up. For a second I thought he was leaving, and my heart nearly stopped.
But then he got down on one knee, right in front of me. Very softly, he said, “You could marry me.”
At first I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. But then he said it again, this time louder. “Marry me.”
He reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a ring.
A silver ring with a little diamond in the center. “This would just be for starters, until I could afford to pay for a ring myself—with my money, not my dad’s.”
I couldn’t feel my body. He was still talking, and I couldn’t even hear. All I could do was stare at the ring in his hand.
“I love you so much. These past couple of days have been hell for me without you.” He took a breath. “I’m so sorry for hurting you, Bells. What I did—was unforgiv-able. I know that I hurt us, that I’m going to have to work really hard to get you to trust me again. I’ll do whatever it takes if you’ll let me. Would you … be willing to let me try?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered.
He swallowed, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “I’ll try so hard, I swear to you. We’ll get an 56 · jenny han
apartment off campus, we can fix it up nice. I’ll do the laundry. I’ll learn how to cook stuff other than ramen and cereal.”
“Putting cereal in a bowl isn’t really cooking,” I said, looking away from him because this picture he was putting in my head, it was too much. I could see it too. How sweet it could be. The two of us, just starting out, in our own place.
Jeremiah grabbed my hands, and I snatched them away from him. He said, “Don’t you see, Belly? It’s been our story all along. Yours and mine. Nobody else’s.”
I closed my eyes, trying to clear my head. Opening them, I said, “You just want to erase what you did by marrying me.”
“No. That’s not what this is. What happened the other night”—he hesitated—“it made me realize something. I don’t ever want to be without you. Ever.
You are the only girl for me. I’ve always known it. In this whole world, I will never love another girl the way I love you.”
He took my hand again, and this time I didn’t pull away from him. “Do you still love me?” he asked.
I swallowed. “Yeah.”
“Then please, marry me.”
I said, “You can’t ever hurt me like that again.” It was half warning, half plea.
“I won’t,” he said, and I knew he meant it.
He looked at me so determinedly, so earnestly. I knew his face well, maybe better than anybody now. Every line, every curve. The little bump on his nose from when he broke it surfing, the almost-faded scar on his forehead from the time he and Conrad were wrestling in the rec room and they knocked a plant over. I was there for those moments. Maybe I knew his face even better than my own—the hours I’d spent staring at it while he slept, tracing my finger along his cheekbone. Maybe he’d done the same things to me.
I didn’t want to see a mark on his face one day and not know how it got there. I wanted to be with him. His was the face I loved.
Wordlessly, I slipped my left hand out of his, and Jeremiah’s face slackened. Then I held out my hand for him, and his eyes lit up. The joy I felt in that moment—
I couldn’t even put it into words. His hand shook as he placed the ring on my finger.
He asked, “Isabel Conklin, will you marry me?” in as serious a voice as I’d ever heard him use.
“Yes, I’ll marry you,” I said.
He put his arms around me, and we held on to each other, clinging like we were the other’s safe harbor. All I could think was, if we just get through this storm, we will make it. He’d made mistakes, I had too. But we loved each other, and that was what mattered.
We made plans all night—where we would live, how we would tell our parents. The past few days felt like another lifetime ago. That day, without another word about it, we decided to leave the past in the past. The future was where we were headed.
Chapter Twelve
That night I dreamed of Conrad. I was the same age I was now, but he was younger, ten or eleven maybe. I think he might even have been wearing overalls. We played outside my house until it got dark, just running around the yard.
I said, “Susannah will be wondering where you are. You should go home.” He said, “I can’t. I don’t know how.
Will you help me?” And then I was sad, because I didn’t know how either. We weren’t at my house anymore, and it was so dark. We were in the woods. We were lost.
When I woke up, I was crying and Jeremiah was asleep next to me. I sat up in the bed. It was dark, the only light in the room was my alarm clock. It read 4:57. I lay back down.
I wiped my eyes, and then I breathed in Jeremiah’s scent, the sweetness of his face, the way his chest rose and fell as he breathed. He was there. He was solid and real and next to me, crammed in close the way you have to be when you are sleeping in a dorm-room bed. We were that close now. The past three days felt like a lifetime ago.
In the morning, when I woke up, I didn’t remember right away. The dream was there in the back of my head, in a place I couldn’t get to. It was fading fast, almost all the way, but not quite, not yet. I had to think hard and fast to piece it all together, to hold on to it.
I started to sit up, but Jeremiah pulled me back toward him and said, “Five more minutes.” He was the big spoon, and I was the little spoon tucked into my spot in his arms.
I closed my eyes, willing myself to remember before it was gone. Like those last few seconds before the sun sets—going, going, and then gone. Remember, remember, or the dream will slip away forever.
Jeremiah started to say something about breakfast, and I covered his mouth and said, “Shh. One sec.”
And then I had it. Conrad, and how funny he looked in his denim overalls. The two of us playing outside for hours. I let out a sigh. I felt so relieved.
“What were you saying?” I asked Jeremiah.
“Breakfast,” he said, planting a kiss on my palm.
Snuggling in closer to him, I said, “Five more minutes.
Chapter Thirteen
I wanted to tell everyone face-to-face, all at once. In a weird way, it would be perfect timing. Our families would be together in Cousins in a week. A battered-women’s shelter that Susannah had volunteered at and fund-raised for had planted a garden in her honor, and there was going to be a little ceremony next Saturday. We were all going—me, Jere, my mom, his dad, Steven. Conrad.
