Page 94 of Soaring Free
“Alright, ladies, wrap up your creations, and get them on the tray. I will take them out to cook in the pizza oven and then we shall feast!” I declare. At the word feast, Emily perks up and nudges Gigi, who immediately sits up super straight and winks at me.
“Hey, Savannah? Do you think you could quick braid my hair before we eat, please? I want it out of my face,” Gigi says right on cue.
“Oooo, you could use those new pink hair ties we got at the mall last weekend. I can braid your hair too, Lucy. Come on, Mama!” Emily grabs Savannah’s hand and tugs her toward the stairs to go up to Gigi’s bathroom where all of her hair stuff is kept.
“It’s fine, I’ll holler when the pizzas are done.” I wave them off like it’s no big deal, even though my gut is filled with butterflies. I can’t remember the last time I was nervous-excited in a good way like this, but it makes me feel twenty years younger. It’s not very often that you know the day your life is about to change.
As soon as Emily, Gigi, Savannah, and Lucy go upstairs to braid hair, Olivia follows me out to the outdoor kitchen to finish up before cooking the pizzas. Olivia sets the place cards she made at the dining room table while I keep an eye on the pizza oven—and the stairway.
Once they’re finished cooking, I place each pizza at the appropriate spot and Olivia covers each one with a cloche. I don’t think we have ever used these covers in our dining room before and I wasn’t even aware we had them until Pippa pointed it out the other day.
“It’s showtime,” Olivia whispers with a giant grin and jazz hands. I fist bump her and walk back into the kitchen to call up the stairs and let them know dinner is ready.
And so am I.
Savannah follows behind the girls, who each take their assigned seat. She looks at the place cards with a raised eyebrow. “Are we dining fancy tonight? Am I appropriately dressed for such an occasion, kind sir?” She laughs and I let the sound soak into mysoul. When she was missing, my greatest fear was never seeing her again, but also never hearing her laughter or getting to hold her in my arms. I will never take any of those things for granted again.
“Ahem, shall we?” Olivia asks me and I nod.
“Please have a seat, but don’t lift your cloche just quite yet. The girls have something special for you.” I pull out her chair and will remain standing just behind her until it’s my turn in the presentation.
“I love a good surprise! What’s going on?” Savannah sits with a gleeful clap and looks expectedly at our girls. Three of them are sitting on one side of the table, with Lucy to the left of Savannah and my name card placed at the seat to her right. The seating arrangement is intentional, even if Savannah doesn’t realize it.
Olivia clears her throat, really leaning into that dramatic moment. She reaches for her cloche, and with a dramatic flair, lifts it off while reading the word spelled out in mini pepperonis out loud. “Will…”
Emily promptly follows suit and lifts the lid covering her plate, revealing the next mini pepperoni-formed word. “You…”
Gigi doesn’t miss a beat, and I grin at the knowledge that all four of them have practiced the timing of this. “Marry…”
Savannah gasps but doesn’t get the chance to look at me before Lucy nudges her and lifts her cover to read her pizza. “Me?”
Whipping her head back around to search for me, our eyes meet, and her mouth drops as she now sees that I’m no longer standing behind her but rather am down on one knee with my own little pizza uncovered with a small glass dish in the center. I pick up the vintage three-and-a-half-carat round brilliant solitaire diamond ring. The girls all wanted me to have the ring held by a stack of pepperonis, but I just couldn’t put this custom creation in a pile of pepperonis, but I figured this was close enough.
“This may very well be the least surprising one in the history of surprise proposals, but I knew that it wouldn’t be right if we weren’t all together as a family.” Savannah hums her approval, andthe tears are already forming in her eyes. The girls were with Shane until this morning, so pizza night was scheduled as close to Christmas as we could get. I wouldn’t have done it without her girls here because while this is about the love Savannah and I share, it’s also about the promise of the life and family we are all going to build and share together.
“Savannah Caroline Callahan-Williams, I promise to always have your back, no matter what life throws at us. I will always keep you and our girls at the top of my priority list. You were the last thing I expected to discover that morning just over ten months ago, but I cannot imagine life without you. You do not occupy a piece of my heart—you and our girls own the whole damn thing. I want to wake up next to you every morning. I want to cheer our girls on at sporting events and be the loud parents that embarrass their children with how much they love them. I want to sit through dance recitals holding your hand.” She laughs at that one because we have both complained about sitting through three hours of dances to watch a five-minute performance. “I want to dance with you under the stars in Paris. I want to spoil and love you with every fiber of my being. However many years I have left on this earth, I want to be very selfish when it comes to you, because I want it all, your joy, your struggles, your hopes, your dreams, I want it all so long as it’s with you by my side. You have already made us a family with your love and care, but I think we need to make it official. So, what do you say, Kitten? Will you marry me?”
She laughs and wipes away the tears that have been streaming down her face, before dropping to her knees at taking my face in her hands. “That damn—darn—nickname. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes, I will marry you!”
My ears could potentially bleed at the level of joyful screams that come from our four girls at her answer, but I am so damn happy, I don’t even care. I hold the pizza plate away from us with one hand and wrap my other arm around her waist, pulling her into me as she yanks me to her and sears me with a kiss. I plan to kiss her properly and devour her in every possible way after ourgirls are asleep, but we keep it mild for now. I pull back to grab the ring from the pizza dish, and I barely have the ring before Lucy dive-bombs to hug her mama, knocking the pizza right out of my hands. The pizza flops on the wood floor with a splat as marinara sauce and cheese ooze out from under the now flipped plate, causing me to break out in laughter.
“That’s okay, I’m not actually sure that crust was cooked anyway. I was worried about the pizzas with the words on them.”
“It wouldn’t be us without a little chaos anyway, right?” Savannah asks as she grins at her ring and accepts hugs from the girls.
A little chaos, a lot of love—it sounds like a pretty great life to me. “I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
After we tucked the girls in on their air mattresses in the home theater in our basement, all four were fast asleep before the snowman on the screen could sing about experiencing summer. I adjust the lights to the lowest dim setting while Savannah turns the attached bathroom light on, leaving the door open so a ray of light serves as a beacon of comfort for the girls if they wake up during the night or need to use the restroom.
We barely had the door closed to my room before I was on her like white on rice. Savannah will try her best not to be loud, and it is the sweetest torture for both of us. We have discovered that a little edging enhances everything for her, and I serve at the pleasure of my queen. I declared she would be coming once by hand, once by mouth, and once by cock. She didn’t have any objections, and by the time it was finally round three, once again, Savannah surprised me.
As soon as I entered her, I lifted her leg up to get the angle I know drives her crazy, but before I even move, Savannah reaches up and places her hand on my cheek.
“Baby, what’s wrong? Why are you crying?” I rack my brain but no, I know I was gentle and thorough on the first two rounds.
“Theodore Smith-Harrington, you are the very best thing I didn’t know I was missing in my life. Thank you for being a safe place for me to let my guard down, for taking such wonderful care of me, and for loving me in a way that I thought only existed in fairytales.” The tears continue but now that I know they are happy tears, I just occasionally wipe them away with my thumb as she speaks. “I will spend the rest of my life loving you to the best of my ability. Thank you for choosing me, for choosing us, and for asking me the best question ever tonight. I love you.”
“It will be the honor of my life to be loved by you, Sav. But you forgot a very important fact in the list of why you love me so much.” I raise an eyebrow and hold back my smirk.
