Page 105 of Serpentine Valentine
The reckless rush of hurling your entire self into a relationship with only a tenuous hope you’d find a soft place to land.
And I did.
I sank into the fragrant, sweetly spiced leaves with a loud yipping yell of joy, closing my eyes as I was buried beneath them. I stayed there for a second, enjoying the autumnal womb, smiling because I had a lot to smile about.
I emerged with it stretched so wide between my cheeks, it ached, my mouth open to say something silly to my girlfriend.
Only, the words crashed to a halt on the back of my tongue because I stopped breathing.
And I stopped breathing because Lex Gorgon, the girl I’d first noticed standing like an unconquerable warrior across the quad at Acheron University, was on one knee before me.
With a ring in one hand lifted to me in offering.
My gaze flickered madly between the two gold snakes curling around a large diamond in their center and the solemn, striking face of my lover.
“Falling in love with you was like stumbling from a dark haunted house into sunlight for the first time. I felt more warmth and acceptance from you in the first hour we spent together in the library than I ever had from anyone else in my entire life. You scared me, because in my experience, everything good was merely pretty gift wrap around a ticking bomb. You can’t know what it’s been like to discover every single day since then that with every layer I unwrap from you, there is only more goodness to be found. How much that has changed me and how I view the world. You are not just the light in my darkness anymore,lux mea. You’ve driven out so much of the shadow and now, you’re the light of my entire life.Of my soul. You accept every inch of me, even the dark deeds I’ve felt compelled to see done, and it feels like a miracle. It’s not enough to call you my girlfriend anymore, I want more than anything to call you mywife.”
She sucked in a deep breath, the only sign that she was anything other than composed. Still, I knew better because her eyes burned as they stared into mine and I felt every single word she spoke seared into my soul.
“Marry me, Lux,” she said, not a question, not a demand.
An offering.
Something precious laid at the altar of a beloved and benevolent god.
We hadn’t spoken about marriage. Not because it was something I dismissed, but because, truly, I was so incandescently happy already I didn’t figure anything could make it any better.
Obviously, I was wrong.
Because looking at the face of the woman who had changed my life so much for the better and shown me who I could be if I was just brave enough to embrace it, I was overcome with awe.
Struck dumb with pure, unfiltered euphoria that lit up my veins like a drug.
“Lux?” she asked after a long moment where I could only gape at her, hand pressed to my pounding heart, eyes filling with tears.
“I’m so happy I can’t speak,” I tried to explain in an odd breathy gasp because I also couldn’t breathe.
Her pink mouth twitched. “Yeah?”
I nodded vigorously.
Her smile spread, white teeth peeking between split lips. “Should I take that as a yes, then?”
Another nod, this one so hard Ialmost threw out my neck.
“Good,” she said, relief and joy breaking open on her face as she stepped forward into the pile of leaves and gathered me into her arms.
My knees went soft the second she touched her mouth to mine, and when her tongue swept through my lips, I swooned fully. Lex laughed against me, holding me carefully as she lowered us to the leaves. Somehow, she found my left hand and slid the ring onto my finger without breaking our fierce embrace.
“I love you so much,” I said, and I realized I was cryinghard, tears streaking down my face into the leaves beneath my head.
Lex grinned down at me, thumbing the wet off my cheek. “I love you just the same.”
I lifted the ring between us, admiring the intricately curled bodies of the two snakes, one totally gold and the other littered with small emeralds, the center diamond a perfect circle.
“Two snakes and a moon,” she murmured to me, tracing the ring with a fingertip. “I designed it myself.”
“It’s absolutely perfect,” I breathed, sucking in a deep breath to steady myself.
