“Winter Reed, will you make me the happiest man in the world and marry me?”
“I … I love you,” she whispers, as she closes the distance between us. She stares down at me with her wide tear-filled eyes. “I love you so much, Wayne. I was scared to say it. It seems silly now, but I thought it might freak you out.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I say. “All that matters is us. Our future.”
“Y-yes,” she stammers, as though struggling to get the words out. “Yes, yes, a thousand, a million, a gazillion times yes, Wayne. Of course I’ll marry you, you giant, handsome lug.”
“Hey,” I laugh, sliding the ring onto her finger where it settles perfectly, a slice of winter for my Winter. “Is that really how you want to address your fiancé?”
She throws her head back and giggles, and then squeals in delight when I jump up and sweep her clean off her feet. I cradle her to my chest, holding her the same way I did that first afternoon we met, when I would’ve dreamt up any reason to have her pressed close to me.
“I’ve spent my whole life working, striving,” I say, staring down at the city that has given me so much, the mist settling like a diaphanous sheet. “And yet right now, Winter, standing here with you, I feel more accomplished than I ever have. I can’t wait to spend the rest of our lives together, to grow, to fucking—to conquer, Winter.”
“Me neither,” she whispers. She kisses my cheek, then grazes my lips. “I feel like I can finally let go with you, Wayne. I feel like I don’t have to be so freaking self-conscious anymore.”
“I love you.”
“I love you. I love you. I love you.” She laughs. “How long before you get bored of me saying that, huh?”
I laugh. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe in a thousand, a million, a gazillion winters.”
She laughs with me, but then I cut it off with a kiss, and we sink into our lust and love, keeping the cold at bay with our irrepressible warmth.
Epilogue
One Year Later
Winter
I sit back in my quite frankly heavenly office chair and stare at the computer screen, my completed manuscript gazing back at me.
I can’t help but let a smile lift my lips as my eyes roam over the windows that look out onto my enclosed office garden. A light snow is falling over the city, which seems pretty freaking fitting to me.
“What do you think, boy? Will my readers like this one?”
I look down at Rusty, curled up at my feet with his head resting on his paws. He blinks and his tail waggles a little in a dreamy affirmation. I grin and stand up, walking to my kitchen corner and brewing myself a hot cocoa.
This winter is set to be dark and cold, which is fine by me. There’s nothing better than hugging up close to the fire with Wayne, my husband, my freaking husband.
The weeks after our marriage I had to keep pinching myself to remind myself that it was real, but then life did another amazing somersault and Andrew came, our perfect Andrew, named after Anna.
Anna-Andrew.
“It does make sense, right?” I asked Wayne the evening we learned his gender.
“What do you mean?” he smiled, grunting a little as he completed another set of sit-ups.
We were in our Manhattan penthouse apartment. Wayne had been working late and I was working on my first book, so it made sense for us both to stay in the city and not our suburban mansion. It still feels slightly unreal sometimes, when I think about being able to flit between the city and the countryside so seamlessly.
I’m lucky.
I’m so incredibly, unbelievably lucky.
“Do you think people are going to refuse to call him Andrew because they don’t think it’s similar enough to Anna, is that it?” he teased.
“Ha, ha,” I grunted, picking up a pillow and miming that I was going to launch it at him.
I return to the desk just as Rusty’s ears perk up and his eyes open.
I glance across the wide open-plan office to the tall Victorian-style door, easily wide and tall enough for two normal-sized people, or one and a third Wayne Wakefield.
Rusty yips merrily as my husband pushes the door open, Andrew cradled in his arms. He smiles at me over the top of our sleeping son’s head as I walk toward him, taking Andrew and inhaling his scent, his sweet, wonderful scent that somehow never gets old.
Having just come from the office, Wayne is still sheathed in a suit of silver, his top button undone to show a slice of chest. His arms press against the jacket of his suit as his neck pops from side to side, sighing.
“It’s done?” I ask, reading him.
Reading him is easier than reading a book these days.
“It’s done,” he says with satisfaction. “I’ve finally cleaned up Comet. For once and for all. No more pulling teeth every time I want to make an ethical decision. What about you?”
“It’s done,” I smile. “The second book is completed. Well, the first draft.”
“I know it will be as loved as the first,” he says. “How couldn’t it be? I’m married to a genius. Hear that, Andrew? Your mother is a certified writing genius.”
I blush, my heart feeling floaty and warm as Wayne kneels down to play with Rusty. With my son close to my chest and my husband wrestling with the terrier, I feel like I could float, higher and higher, right through the roof and into the sky.
Then, crazily, I feel tears fill my eyes, freaking tears for no reason, drifting down my cheeks.
Wayne hugs Rusty close to him and looks up at me, smiling, just smiling.
Because he knows without having to ask that they’re tears of happiness.
Extended Epilogue
Ten Years Later
Wayne
“So you met Mom here?” Andrew asks, carving a fine line on the ice with his skates as he darts ahead of me.
I grit my teeth in a smile as I struggle to keep up with him, the skates feeling ungainly on my feet even after wintering here for the last seven years. It’s almost as though being seven foot and over two-hundred and seventy pounds makes it difficult.
But it’s worth it to see the smile on Andrew’s face, his hair the same deep brown mine was before it turned the silver of fading snow.
He smiles as he stops in a whoosh of ice, and gestures to the house, the cabin built into a rock formation, the place that will always hold a special place in my heart.
“In a way,” I tell my son. “Down the road. But this is where we fell in love.”
“You know that’s gross, right?” he grins, and then mimes sticking a finger down his throat. “Love. Ew.”
“If I could catch up with you, little man, I’d make you pay for that.”
“Dad,” he groans. “I haven’t been ‘little man’ since I was like six.”
“You’ll always be a little man to me,” I smile. “Even when you’re old and gray, I’ll see you as the little baby who still needs his diaper changed.”
This makes him laugh even if he thinks being ten makes him too cool to laugh at his old man’s jokes.