Page 78 of Double Dared

We made a fire before we made anything else, and when the ground floor was warm enough to exist in without coats, Taylor announced that we were going to build a snowman and that this was nonnegotiable. I built the base, and he built the middle, and we argued pleasantly about whether the head was proportional, and Taylor won the argument by default because he was the one holding the head, and he placed it exactly where he wanted it, and I found two good sticks for arms while he pressed stones into a face. We stood back and looked at it. The snowman was imperfect in the way handmade things always are, leaning slightly to the left, one arm longer than the other, and Taylor looked at it with an expression of such pure, uncomplicated satisfaction that something happened in my chest, something I recognized after a moment.

I had felt this way when I was very young, early enough that the memory had no clear edges, only a feeling. The feeling of being someone’s center of gravity.Of being the point around which the important things organized themselves.

I felt it every day with Taylor. I was only just then finding the words for it.

Our first anniversary, we were nine people around a table at a bar with a jukebox against the back wall and wooden floors that had absorbed thirty years of spilled drinks and kept them as a kind of warmth. Jason and Bennet sat across from us, Bennet’s glasses catching the light every time he tilted his head, which was often, because he was saying something precise and unanswerable, and Jason was looking at him with the expression he always wore when Bennet spoke, that particular mix of pride and helpless affection that Jason couldn’t have hidden if you’d paid him to try. Finn was at the end of the table, being loud as ever, and Greg sat next to Emma, the two of them deep in a conversation that had started an hour earlier and showed no signs of finding its natural conclusion. Emma laughed at something Greg said, and Greg looked genuinely surprised that she’d laughed, which made her laugh again.

Taylor had been feeding coins into the jukebox all night. He’d been doing it every fifteen minutes with the dedication of a person with a mission, returning to the table between songs and saying nothing about it, until the opening bars of “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” came through the speakers, and he looked at me across the table with those lit-up eyes.

We danced. Of course we danced. The floorcleared for no one, and we danced anyway, and the table made noise behind us, and Finn whistled through his fingers, and Emma and Greg were clapping, and Bennet covered his face with one hand, but he was smiling behind it, and Jason was laughing with his whole body. Taylor spun me once, which he had gotten good at, and I let him.

Another year after that, Taylor stood at the front of an altar in a suit that had been fitted so precisely it took my breath away, and I sat in a pew near the front and watched him instead of watching the ceremony with any particular care, because the ceremony was happening and would continue to happen regardless of where I looked, but Taylor in that suit required direct attention. He stood to the right of Jason, who was facing Bennet across a narrow distance. Between them, with an expression of total self-satisfaction, sat Peanut, a string tied loosely around his neck from which two rings hung. He was very still, which was unlike him, which meant someone had recently given him an extraordinary treat, and he was enjoying the memory of it. When Jason and Bennet said the things they had written for one another, I heard Jason’s voice catch on one word and recover, and I watched Taylor’s face watch Jason’s face, and there was a tenderness there that I loved him for, a tenderness he’d always had and had been careful with, and I thought, sitting in that pew, that I would spend my life being grateful I had been the one he’d stopped being careful with.

And though Taylor didn’t know it yet, Jason wouldbe his best man, too. And I knew it with the same certainty with which the waves carved caves and with which the sun decided to rise each morning.

New York arrived the way New York always does: with more boxes than you remembered owning and an elevator that was slightly too small for the sofa. We found Hudson Burrow inside the first week, a bar two streets from the apartment with good natural light in the mornings and a menu that included a breakfast worth writing home about. I wrote three pieces there in the first month. Taylor left for his office every morning at seven forty-three and returned every evening with the look of someone who had accomplished things, and we ate dinner on the small balcony when the weather allowed, close enough together that our elbows touched, and the sounds of the city rose up around us like the sound of a large, indifferent engine that had no idea we were sitting inside it in love.

We were a little homesick in those first months, though homesick wasn’t precisely the right word for it. It was more a low-grade awareness that we were far from the people who knew us fully, the ones who had been present for the story and didn’t need anything explained. Friends, it turned out, were a thing you had to rebuild every time you moved, with the patience of someone who understood the value but felt the labor of it. The making of new friends had lost whatever ease it might have had when we were eighteen and in college, and when every Friday opened its doors to whoever appeared.

Then one Saturday morning, at a corner table at Neon Nights, I looked up from my notebook to find a couple two tables over sharing a crossword and a silence of long familiarity. One of them caught my eye and nodded in a friendly manner, and I nodded back, and by the following weekend, we had learned that one was a novelist in the patient middle section of a long project and the other a photographer who made pictures of cities that looked like they were dreaming. We had dinner the following Saturday, and Taylor talked to Rafael about composition for forty minutes while I talked to Luke about the tyranny of the second act, and we walked home afterward, and neither of us had to say that we had done something good.

Life continued, as it does, with the peculiar combination of speed and specificity that makes you look up from it surprised.

The Meridian piece ran and changed things in the quiet way that the right piece, at the right time, in the right publication, can change things. Taylor’s promotion changed things, too, in a louder way, and one afternoon, we stood in an empty apartment three floors above where we’d been living and turned slowly in the middle of a bare room while afternoon light came through windows that faced in two directions at once. The agent had stepped outside to take a phone call, and the apartment was full of the sound of nothing, that particular nothing that an empty room makes when it’s waiting to be inhabited.

Taylor walked to the far wall and pointed. The sofa would go here, he said, angled toward the windows so the light fell across it properly in the afternoon. The television on this wall, not that one, because of the glare. His hands moved through the air, sketching furniture that didn’t exist yet, a life that hadn’t happened yet, and I watched them move, those long, elegant hands I had known for four years now, and I felt the apartment fill up around us in real time, all the versions of ourselves we would be in it, the winter mornings and the summer evenings and the arguments about small things and the agreements about large ones, all of it flooding the empty space and making it a home before a single box had been carried through the door.

He pointed at the corner by the window. “Your writing nook,” he said, “with a pothos hanging above it and good light and a comfy chair you’ll sit in for hours.”

He said it as if it were already true. As if it had always been true.

He said my name before the room and then faced the window, still talking, painting his picture of this life he could already see clearly, and I put my hand into my jacket pocket and felt the small box there, the one I’d been carrying for three weeks, waiting for the right moment with the patience of someone who had once been very afraid of the wrong word at the wrong time and had learned slowly, through the particular education of loving Taylor, that the right moment was rarelythe one you planned and almost always the one that arrived without announcement.

I took the box out.

I went down on one knee on the bare floor of the empty room.

He was still talking when he turned around.

He stopped. His hands went still.

I looked up at him and held the box open, and for a moment, the whole room was full of nothing but the sound of his breathing and the distant noise of the city below and every year of our lives laid out between us like a map of somewhere we had always been heading.

“You have been every good thing,” I said. “Everything I didn’t know I was looking for, and everything I couldn’t have described before I found it. You walked up to my table on a dare, and you ruined me for anything ordinary, and I have been so glad every single day since. I love you. I love who you make me. I love who we are together, which is something I couldn’t have invented without you.” I looked at the ring in the box, then back at his face. “I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

Taylor looked at me with his eyes very bright.

“Is it a dare?” he asked. His voice was rough at the edges.

“Does it matter?”

His smile broke wide and clear, the one that had no calculation in it, the one I had been trying to describe to myself since the first night I sawit. “No,” he said. “Not one bit.” His voice caught and held. “I’m going to say yes.”

“Will you marry me?”

The yes came out through tears he didn’t bother to hide, and I stood, and I slid the ring onto his finger, and he looked at it for one long moment and then looked at me, and I took his face in my hands and kissed him in the empty room that was already, in every sense that mattered, home.

Thanks for reading Double Dared.If you’ve enjoyed Taylor and Harrison’s book, I’ve written many more. Consider joining my mailing list for two free novels and regular updates when similar stories are released. Keep reading to see more about Crash Course. Visit haydenhallwrites.com for more.

The End.