She nodded, but she inwardly braced herself.
“I don’t really care to write about the war,” he said. “Of course, I’ll do it because the Inkridden Tribune is paying me to, but I would much rather that your articles live on the front page. I would much rather read what you write. Even if they aren’t letters to me.” He paused, rolling his lips together as if he was uncertain. “That first day you were gone. My first day as columnist. It was horrible. I realized I was becoming someone I didn’t want to be, and it woke me up, to see your desk empty. My father has had my life planned for me, ever since I could remember. It was my ‘duty’ to follow his will, and I tried to adhere to it, even if it was killing me. Even if it meant I couldn’t buy your sandwich at lunch, which I still think about to this day and despise myself for.”
“Kitt,” Iris whispered. She tightened her hold on his hand.
“But the moment you walked away,” Roman rushed on, “I knew I felt something for you, which I had been denying for weeks. The moment you wrote me and said you were six hundred kilometers away from Oath … I thought my heart had stopped. To know that you would still want to write to me, but also that you were so far away. And as our letters progressed, I finally acknowledged that I was in love with you, and I wanted you to know who I was. That’s when I decided I would follow you. I didn’t want the life my father had planned for me—a life where I could never be with you.”
Iris opened her mouth, but she was so full and overwhelmed that she said nothing at all. Roman intently watched her, his cheeks red and his eyes wide, as if he was waiting to hit the ground and shatter.
“Are you…” she began, blinking. “Are you saying you want a life with me?”
“Yes,” he said.
And because her heart was melting, Iris smiled and teased, “Is this a proposal?”
He continued to hold their stare, deadly serious. “If I asked you, would you say yes?”
Iris was quiet, but her mind was racing, full of golden thoughts.
Once, not long ago, in her life before the front lines, she would have thought this was ridiculous. She would have said no, I have other plans right now. But that was before, a time that was gilded by a different slant of light, and this present moment was now limned in the blue tinge of after. She had seen the fragility of life. How one could wake to a sunrise and die by sunset. She had run through the smoke and the fire and the agony with Roman, his hand in hers. They had both tasted Death, brushed shoulders with it. They had scars on their skin and on their souls from that fractured moment, and now Iris saw more than she had before. She saw the light, but she also saw the shadows.
Time was precious here. If she wanted this with Roman, then why shouldn’t she grasp it, claim it with both hands?
“I suppose you’ll have to ask me and find out,” she said.
And just when she thought she couldn’t be surprised by anything else, Roman began to kneel. Right there in the center of the street, halfway up the hill. He was about to ask her. He was truly about to ask her to be his wife, and Iris gasped.
He winced as his knee found the cobblestones, a glint of pain in his eyes.
Iris glanced down, beyond their linked hands. Blood was seeping through the right leg of his jumpsuit.
“Kitt!” she cried, urging him to stand again. “You’re bleeding!”
“It’s nothing, Winnow,” he said, but he was beginning to look pale. “I must have pulled a stitch.”
“Here, sit down.”
“In the road?”
“No, over here on this crate.” Iris guided him to the closest front yard. It must have been the O’Briens’ property, because there were multiple cats sunbathing on the dead grass, and she remembered Marisol talking about how most of Avalon Bluff worried those felines would get them all bombed one day.
“I must have failed to mention that I’m allergic to cats,” Roman said, frowning as Iris forced him to sit on the overturned milk crate. “And I’m more than capable of walking back to Marisol’s.”
“No, you’re not,” Iris argued. “The cats will leave you alone, I’m sure. Wait here for me, Kitt. Don’t you dare move.” She began to step away, but he snagged her hand, dragging her back to him.
“You’re leaving me here?” He made it sound as if she were abandoning him. Her heart rose in her throat when she recalled how she had left him in the trenches. She wondered if that day haunted him the way it did her. Every night when she lay in the dark, remembering.
You and I … we need to stay together. We’re better this way.
“Only for a moment,” Iris said, squeezing his fingers. “I’ll run and fetch Peter. He has a lorry, and he can give us a ride to the infirmary, so a doctor can look at your—”
“I’m not going back to the infirmary, Iris,” Roman stated. “They’re overworked and there’s no room for me with something as minor as a pulled stitch. I can fix it myself, if Marisol has a needle and thread.”
Iris sighed. “All right. I’ll take you to the B and B, so long as you don’t move while I’m gone.”
Roman relented with a nod. He relinquished her hand, albeit slowly, and Iris broke into a run, flying down the street and around the bend at a breakneck pace. She thankfully found Peter at home, next door to the B and B, and he agreed to drive up the bluff to give Roman a lift.
Iris stood in the back of the lorry beside a hay bale, holding on to the wooden side panel as the truck rumbled through the streets. She didn’t understand why her breath continued to skip, as if her heart believed she was still running. She didn’t understand why her blood was coursing, and why she was suddenly afraid.
She half expected for them to ascend the hill only to find Roman was gone. It felt like she was caught up in the pages of a strange fairy tale, and she shouldn’t be foolish but shrewd, preparing for something horrible to thwart her. Because good things never lasted for long in her life. She thought about all the people who had been close to her, the threads of their lives weaving with hers—Nan, Forest, her mother—and how they had all left, either by choice or by fate.
He was about to ask me, Iris told herself, closing her eyes as they began to lurch up the hill. Roman Kitt wants to marry me.
She remembered the words she had written to herself, nights ago. She reminded herself that even though she had been left, time and time again, by the people she loved, Roman had come to her.
He was choosing her.
The lorry began to slow as Peter downshifted. There was a pop of backfire, and Iris jumped. It sounded so much like a gun firing, and her pulse spiked. She winced, fighting the urge to cower, choosing instead to open her eyes.
Roman was sitting on the milk crate just as she left him, with a scowl on his face. And a cat curled up in his lap.
Dear Kitt,
Now that your stitches are set and you’ve recovered from your encounter with the cat, it’s time to settle two very pressing matters between us, as they both keep me up at night. Don’t you agree?
—I.W.