Page 37 of All In

“Inconclusive. Possibly excellent. Possibly a beautiful disaster. Jury’s still out.”

“I like those odds.”

I roll over to face him, and he looks unfairly good for someone who’s had maybe four hours of sleep—hair a wreck, eyes soft and a little dazed in that early-morning way, the kind of look on his face that makes my chest do something embarrassing.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi.” He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “How are you feeling about everything? Honestly.”

“Honestly? Slightly insane. In the good way, I think, but I want to flag that this is genuinely one of the more irrational forty-eight hours of my life. I’m choosing to be at peace with that instead of panicking about it, which feels like progress.”

“I can work with slightly insane in the good way.”

“What about you?”

He’s quiet for a second, looking at me like he’s deciding how much to say.

“I think,” he says slowly, “that I’ve spent years being extremely rational about exactly this kind of thing. Guarded. Careful. Not making a move with strict calculations before beforehand. Keeping my heart under lock and key.”

I clear my throat. “That’s not the only thing you kept locked up.”

He laughs. “You are the best and most fun I’ve ever had.” He kisses my forehead and I think my heart grows ten sizes.

“Sorry, I interrupted you from your speech. I was distracted—once again—by your impressive package. Carry on.”

“Well, after being careful about everything, the entirety of my adult life, sometime in the last three days, all of those calculations and plans just stopped mattering. Which should probably scare me more than it does.”

“Does it scare you?”

“A little. Mostly it just feels like relief.” He brushes his thumb along my jaw. “I want to get breakfast and then take a walk before we head back to the convention. There’s something I want to do.”

We end up downtown, away from the convention center, in one of those old stretches of a city that still has actual sidewalks. There are actual trees and stubborn flowers growing up in the cracks of the sidewalks. Shop windows that haven’t been replaced with anything corporate yet. It’s quiet this early, just us and a guy walking a dog and a woman setting a sandwich board outside a coffee shop.

Leo’s hand is laced through mine, and he’s got this look on his face—something between nervous and resolute—that I can’t quite place until he slows his steps in front of a jewelry store window.

“Okay,” he says. “I want to say something, and I need you to let me get all the way through it before you say anything back. Because I’ve been rehearsing it in my head since approximately five this morning and I will absolutely lose my nerve if you interrupt me.”

My heart does something squishy. “Okay.”

“I know this is fast. I know it’s been three days. I know if I told my dad this exact sentence, he’d sit me down and ask very gently if I’d lost my mind, and he’d probably be right to.” He takes a breath. “But I also know that I have spent years being careful about exactly this, and none of that carefulness prepared me even a little for you. I’m not asking you to marry me right now, standing on a sidewalk, in front of a window full of rings I haven’t bought. That would be insane, even for the weekend we’ve had.”

“Even a little insane,” I agree, mostly because I don’t trust my own voice for anything longer yet.

“But I want you to know that I’m not going to need convincing later. If you ever decide you want this—all of it, the ring, the whole thing—I am completely, embarrassingly ready right now. Today. All in. I will walk into that store with you this second if you want to. You can pick out whatever ring you want. I just need you to say the word, whenever that word comes, and I will spend the rest of my life making sure you never regret it.”

I stare at him, this absurd, wonderful man standing on a sidewalk at seven in the morning, offering me his whole future like it’s the easiest thing he’s ever decided. And I wait for the nerves to hit. I wait for the “holy hobbits, this is pure craziness” to come out of my mouth.

“Leo.” My voice comes out thinner than I mean it to. “We’ve known each other for three days.”

“I’m aware.”

“I don’t even know your last name. I realized that last night and had a minor crisis about it.”

“West,” he says. “Leo West. I should’ve led with that, in retrospect, given everything.”

A laugh startles out of me. “Juniper Hill.”

“Juniper Hill.” He says it like he’s testing the weight of it, like he’s already practicing.