Chapter 261 Nobody Has Said Yes

Chapter 261 Nobody Has Said Yes
ETHAN'S POV

"Where are we going."
"You'll see."
"That's never a good sentence out of you." Ares said with a weak frown. I chuckle at him and kept driving.
We left the highway for a neighborhood neither of us has any business being in.
Ares sat forward and started reading the street. He reads a street the way he reads a rink — counting the exits.
The driveway should have given it away, and it still didn't. I walked up to a front door while he sat in the car with his seatbelt still on.
Then I took out the keys, and he had his door open before I had mine.
"Why have you got keys."
Inside, it smells like paint and somebody else's floor polish. He toured it slow, hands kept well clear of everything. The front room. A kitchen big enough for the disasters we keep having trying to cook. Two rooms upstairs at opposite ends, because we've both tried working at one table and it was a catastrophe.
In the kitchen he opened a cabinet, looked in at nothing, and shut it again. Then he stopped in the middle of the floor.
"Ethan."
"Go on."
"You bought a house."
"I bought a house."
He stood in the middle of the kitchen and looked at me. "You bought a house for us."
I'd had a good line ready for that moment, and I didn't use any of it.
"I wanted somewhere neither of us has to explain who the other one is at the door."
Nothing out of him for a bit.
"You are extremely bad at surprises," Ares said, his voice snagging somewhere it shouldn't have.
"Apparently I'm not."
There's one more, and it's out in the yard. He hadn't the faintest idea what he was looking at out there. Then a very small dog came around the corner of the house at speed.
Ares dropped straight down onto his knees on wet grass, in a good coat. That coat cost more than my first car.
"Absolutely not."
"Absolutely yes."
"Ethan."
"She's eleven weeks and she's already ruined a door frame."
She was against his chest inside four seconds, both front feet up on his collar, doing his whole face.
"I love her."
"You don't know it's a her."
"Then I love him."
"It's a her."
"I know it's a her," Ares said. "I'm not blind. I was making a point."
Down on the grass beside the two of them, I made my case.
"You told me I'd be walking it in the rain."
"You will be."
"So why."
"Because we'll both be walking it in the rain," I said. "That's the whole idea."
We stayed out there till the light went, and he didn't ask me one obvious question. Nothing about the second bedroom, or how long I'd been planning this, or what it cost. A man who counts the exits on a street asked me nothing at all about a house he'd been standing in for two hours.
All evening his hand kept going to the inside of his coat and coming away again. I put it down to nerves about a mortgage.
"What have you got in your pocket."
"Nothing."
"You've been at that pocket since the driveway."
"You've been at your own since the arena," Ares said.
Indoors, the dog fell asleep on a rug that's not a good rug for a dog.
In the middle of the front room, boxes still stacked against the wall, I took his hand. My own hands were steady, dead steady. Out of everything that happened that day, nothing surprised me more than that.
"I have to ask you something."
"I spent a long time being frightened of what it would cost me to have you," I said. "I made you carry that. For about a year the choosing was all being done by you."
"Ethan—"
"Let me get it out. I've had it in a sock for five weeks."
The ring came out, and I knelt on the floor of a house I haven't slept in yet.
"Ares Cole. Will you marry me."
Ares looked at me for two seconds and started laughing. Everything in me dropped straight through the floor and kept going.
What.
"You have got to be joking," Ares said, laughing harder now.
"Is that a no."
His hand disappeared inside the coat.
"It is not a no."
Then he knelt on the same floor across from me, a small box out of that pocket and open in his hand.
"I've been carrying this eleven days," he said. "Had it done the afternoon I got the watch back. Been standing in kitchens all month not doing it."
"You were going to ask me tonight."
"I was going to ask you tonight."
"In my house."
"I didn't know it was your house," Ares said. "That's the single most annoying part of this."
The box was out at me now, in hands that weren't steady at all.
"You've been my ride-or-die since I was twenty-two," Ares said. "I'd like it for the rest of it."
So there we were, both down on one knee on a bare floor, holding a ring out at each other, a puppy asleep on the rug behind us and a house neither of us has furnished properly.
I looked at that ring, then at him, and the laugh caught me too, and it ran too long to fix.
"Ares."
"What."
"Nobody has said yes."