My tears fall in heavy streaks down my cheeks, but I don’t even want to blink. I don’t want to miss a single expression on his face.
“I want to give you everything you could ever want, and then I want to give you even more. But first.” He opens his palm, and then that heart that was around my neck is opened, and a small, silver band falls out, right into my hands.
I gasp, having had no idea it was a locket. “Noah...”
“First,” he repeats, his knuckles lifting my chin, calling my eyes to his. “First, I want to marry you.”
A cry slips past my lips, my hand coming to cover my mouth.
“Marry me, Juliet. We can wait until you’re done with school, or we can drive to a chapel right now, I don’t care. Marry me.”
I’m nodding before he’s even done speaking, my lips smashing with his as I pull him as close as I can get him, and it’s not close enough.
It will never be close enough.
But forever is a damn good start.
“You will?” he rasps.
“Of course I will.”
His palms shake as he grips my cheeks, his eyes piercing mine. “Say you swear?”
Placing my palm over his tattoo, I recite its meaning.
“Fear not the fall, but the life that comes from having never leaped at all.” I smile through my tears. “I’ll always leap if the jump leads me to you, Noah Riley. Always.”
“And forever.”
“I swear.”
He kisses me, and I get lost in the man before me.
My Romeo.
My fiancé.
My everything.