hopefully this makes up from the lil mini hiatus im taking from dear john but if not then sorry homies i tried my best

On his first day of kindergarten, he catches her playing in the dirt with a little boy in glasses, and he thinks that she's the most beautiful girl he's ever seen.

Yes, they have cooties, and yes, the most beautiful girl in the world is supposed to be his mama, but this girl has on a baby blue dress that makes her eyes look like the sky and her smile as white as the clouds, and he thinks that the dimple in her cheek is just the right size to be poked.

(He tries it and she punches him in the arm.)

.

She won't tell him her name, and they're not in the same class so he has to work really hard to find it out. The best that he gets is Peaches because he sees a little girl with a gap in her smile call her that, and so he wonders if she has this weird thing about peaches. He starts asking his mom to pack them in his lunch, and when he catches her eye from across the lunchroom, he takes a huge chunk of the fruit into his mouth and smiles with stuffed cheeks so wide that juice dribbles to his chin.

(She sticks out her tongue and scrunches her nose, and so he does it the next day, too.)

.

At his first assembly, he gets in trouble for escaping his class to sit by Peaches. He climbs through the bleachers when Mrs. Sweeney turns to the floor of the gym and ends up squished next between the boy she plays with and the beaming brunette she's holding hands with and by the time the speakers boom with the sound of their principal's voice, he can't make it next to her.

(He has the perfect view of the dimple he likes, though, so he thinks he'll be okay.)

.

Her name is Maya (the kid with the glasses tells him eventually), and he tells her the story of his hamster named Maya that accidentally got put in the dryer from his older brother, but he doesn't really think she wants to hear about it too much and so he skims through the details of his family and his dead hamster and she laughs at him when he tells her that he doesn't know why he's saying all these things.

(She calls him "Huck" and he doesn't really get it, but he thinks it means she likes how he talks so he doesn't stop.)

.

His parents fight.

He doesn't tell the other kids because back in Texas, his daddy didn't make his mama cry and he doesn't want anyone to get the wrong idea about him. He's a good dad, he really is, he's just really angry right now and it's gonna get better.

It's the stress of the move, his mama tells him, it'll settle down soon.

(It's been seven months, and his daddy still drinks from the bottles hidden behind the cereal boxes on his fridge every evening. He pretends he doesn't see.)

.

Maya ends up in his reading group because their classes go to the library at the same time, and so they sit together because he's assigned to help her finish her book. She can't pronounce her r's correctly and sometimes she switches her d's and her b's and so he teaches her a trick with his fingers that he uses when spelling 'bed' so that she doesn't get so confused anymore.

(She tells him it's stupid, so he acts like he doesn't see her using it under the table for the rest of the year.)

.

They find out that they live near each other during that summer. Well, Maya moves into the house next door to his and their bedrooms lineup so that they can wave from their respective homes even when they're grounded. Which she is. A lot.

It's because her parents broke up, and her daddy never came home, so they're living with her Gammy now.

(She tells him when they start playing on his swing set together, and she makes him

spit shake that he won't spill it to anyone.)

.

They begin the first grade as friends, close friends. It would be best friends, but she says she already has one of those and so he can be her runner up. They even get put into the same class-finally!- but then the girl that Maya spent all of kindergarten attached to started crying every day for her best friend to be in her class and so they switch her to save the trouble of dealing with a screaming child every day.

(He befriends the boy with the glasses this year because he stays in his class, and he doesn't laugh when he finds out his name is Farkle Minkus because he promises.)

.

Her friend is named Riley, but Maya calls her Honey and he thinks that Peaches and Honey are an awfully sweet combination. If they ever need another ingredient, maybe he could be something to balance them out well like blackberries or a tea of some sort.

(When he asks his mama, that's what she said she'd put with those, and she makes the best tea in the entire world so he trusts her word.)

.

When Maya gets home, she sometimes has trouble with her homework, and so Lucas will go over and help her. No one knows about it, and so it feels special because he doesn't think that her and Riley have top secret meetings. He doesn't think her and anyone have top secret meetings besides him, so it's almost like they're spies but he's the only spy that matters because Riley and Farkle are nowhere to be found.

(He knows it's not a competition, but there's still a sense in winning when her Gammy hands him a baggy of cherry tomatoes from her garden that he munches on all the way home and Maya says Thank you with that really sweet look in her eyes.)

.

Farkle doesn't like when things are out of order, and Lucas watches Maya organize his desk the same way every single day. It's before any of the other kids are settling in that they finish, and Maya whispers something in his ear that he smiles at after thanking her.

(He wishes Riley wasn't such a crybaby when she has to leave the classroom for her own.)

.

He likes to follow her during recess, and she calls him Ranger Rick because he has a puffy coat that reminds her of a forest worker. He wants to tell her that it's only his coat because it's a hand-me-down from Andrew, but he doesn't because she has already created a song for him and promises to make a banner for his very own park to protect that she will bring to school the next day.

(It's a promise to see her that he doesn't need but he wants, and so he's never said yes quicker.)

.

They're finally together in the second grade, and they even sit together because their names are so close in alphabetical order.

(Emily Garson and Timothy Hillard are there, too- who he doesn't really like- but he doesn't complain because he's just glad he's finally sharing a teacher with Riley so Maya won't be going anywhere.)

.

He doesn't get around to asking about Farkle until almost halfway through their third year in school, and he's glad that him and Maya are as close as they are when he doesn't because she opens up fairly easy.

"He sometimes has trouble with the order of things," she explains, her legs kicking out so that she can pick up momentum on his backyard playground set. "My cousin Alexander has to open and close the refrigerator eighteen times before he gets a glass of water because that's twice his age, and Farkle has to reset his desk every morning before he can work because otherwise it feels icky." She shrugs carelessly as if it's the average routine for a second-almost-third grader. "He's working on it, and so I'm helping him until it gets a little easier. Every morning, I switch one little thing around out of place and he has to try to see how long he can work without fixing it. His record is two entire hours."

"But what if you get sick?"

She smiles at him, one that seems empty yet full at the same exact time. "I can never get sick."

(When she does get sick, just after winter break, he silently switches Farkle's pencil box and pink eraser before the bell rings.)

.

They spend the entire summer before the third grade perfecting their paper airplane flying skills. They're on the second floor of their homes, and so they open their windows, write notes to each other, fold the sheet up, and send it soaring across the area of their yards meeting below them.

(He likes that when he gets home from baseball practice, he can see an airplane resting on the floor before peeking into her bedroom and spotting her mama brushing her hair before bed. It's relaxing and when he disassembles his message, he always grins at Goodnight, Huck scribbled in crayon.)

.

In the third grade, they have different classes but remain reading academy buddies because Maya won't work with anyone else. When they tried, she bit Mrs. Adam's hand for even attempting to partner her with Missy Bradford.

(She gets sent home before they can start, and so he tucks their assigned books into his backpack during the chaos of cleanup for that night.)

.

When he's nine, Andrew is eighteen and he goes into the navy. There's a formal suit that they send him after his graduation at the top of his ROTC class and he doesn't like it because it means he's going off to fight in a war he shouldn't be fighting.

Maya comes with to his graduation, and she comes with when he leaves for boot camp, and she comes with when he tries on his new suit to get it tailored, marveling at the deep blue of the fabric as she touches it lightly.

"It's the most beautiful blue I've ever seen," she whispers. "I want to paint it."

Two days later, he searches four craft stores with his mama to find the right shade of the most beautiful blue paint before he buys it for her, making sure to snatch the bottle of the color that is swirled into her irises just in case she's looked in the mirror since then and realized that there won't ever be a prettier hue than the one resting under her lashes.

(She hasn't, and so he keeps it for himself.)

.

Sometimes they lay in his backyard, and she asks him about the constellations they can make out under the moon. He doesn't know what he's talking about, but she doesn't care. She closes her eyes and listens to his voice, only peeking up to point to a new cluster every so often.

"And what are those, Lucas?"

"Well, those are the Maya Borealis. They're the brightest bunch in the entire universe."

(The most beautiful, too, he thinks.)

.

Maya's dad comes back at the beginning of their fourth grade year, but it's only for a day and she doesn't like it at all.

He finds her crying, tucked under the bushes in her Gammy's garden with her hands covering her ears while tears flow down her cheeks. She lets him pull her out and they go to his swingset, settling into the grass beneath it as he holds her close.

"I thought that I would want him to come

back, but he's making everyone upset. I want him to just leave again. I want him to go away, no matter how much we missed him." Her eyes find his, fresh tears spilling from them that he wipes with the pad of his thumb. "Does that make me a bad daughter? Is that why he left us? Because I'm a bad daughter?"

(He tells her no, and he wishes that she looked like she believed him.)

.

For Christmas that year, he buys her a locket and she wears it every single day. It's real silver and has an M engraved into the front with a little picture of the two of them together on Lucas's tenth birthday- cake smeared against each other's cheeks from the food fight they'd started.

(He saved up sixteen allowances for it, but he would've done it for twenty million if he had to after seeing her face when he helped clasp it around her neck.)

.

He gets into his first fight in the fifth grade because Billy Ross makes Maya cry during their English lesson. She's using the trick with her fingers under the table, and he spots it before teasing her that only babies use that method. He calls her dumb because she confuses her letters and so Lucas punches him right on the nose as hard as he can. It's not her fault that she gets mixed up.

(It is, however, his fault that he gets escorted to the principal's office and suspended for one day.)

.

Maya has dyslexia, and she tries to act like it doesn't bother her when she's diagnosed with it, but it does. It's why she always struggled in reading and why her letters get mixed up and why she sometimes gets so frustrated trying to help her Gammy with a recipe from her cookbook that she starts to cry and locks herself in the bathroom until Lucas is called over to lure her out.

She begs him not to see her any differently. She's not stupid and she's not dumb and she's not all those things that kids have called her because she can't follow along in their novels in class, and he knows that. He does.

(She's brilliant and she's amazing and she's the most beautiful bunch of stars in the entire universe, and he's going to spend every day of his life trying to get Maya to see herself through his eyes.)

.

Riley takes her on vacation the summer before middle school, and it's the first summer he spends without her since just after kindergarten and he hates it.

He sends notes in through her window that she won't see until she gets home while his parents fight so loudly that his hand shakes when folding them. He tells her that he misses her and he tells her that she's not allowed to leave any more because he's bored out of his mind.

(He doesn't tell her about his dad's temper growing worse, but when she gets back, she feels how tightly he holds her against him and she knows.)

.

He doesn't like the sixth grade because he doesn't like having to switch teachers every hour and he doesn't like that Maya is only in four of his seven classes- but he's glad that art is one of them so he can still see her draw.

(Ms. Kossal usually gives her the entire period as a free period and they tuck themselves in a corner so that she can work peacefully. She paints meadows with beautiful green grass and wonderful white flowers and he paints skies with beautiful blue horizons and wonderful white clouds while the other kids yell and whip markers at each other.)

.

Andrew comes home for Thanksgiving, and he tells Maya that she's growing into a very pretty young lady when she shows up wearing a dress that Riley gave her. Lucas thinks it's ridiculous because she doesn't look just very pretty, she looks gorgeous. She looks wonderful. She looks like an angel sent straight from heaven, giggling over the pies she's pulling out of the oven with his mama.

(He thinks that means that he loves her, but he's only eleven and a half, and he doesn't think that's old enough to love girls that much yet. Not besides his mama, anyways.)

.

There's a shift in middle school that isn't as subtle to Lucas as it seems to be to everyone else. She starts spending more time with Riley and suddenly, instead of dinner with him, he spends it with her and instead of their movie nights, she's out shopping with Riley for lipgloss and boots and all these things she didn't wear in elementary school.

(He hates it, but he loves her, so he pretends that it doesn't bother him because Riley makes her happy and that's all he wants.)

.

She pretends not to know answers a lot, and it infuriates him. She calls out things that don't make sense with this rebellious grin, and it doesn't make sense because she's always been brilliant in history and she's better in math than he is, and the only class he can really see her struggling with is language arts, but she's getting better with reading and he sits next to her so that he can help her when she needs it, so there's no reason.

(He yells at her for trying to be cool by failing all of her classes, and she yells at him for having a thick skull.)

.

They don't talk that entire summer. He has friends from baseball that he goes to water parks with and she's linked to Farkle and Riley everywhere that they go. He tries to dive himself into his sport, to focus on nothing but being the best so he can go into the big leagues after high school.

He doesn't think it would hurt as bad as it did; not hearing her cheering him along at his practices.

(He stops going after a while.)

.

He tries to send a note through her window every so often but it's always closed. He doesn't need to check to know that it's locked.

(He wishes she wasn't so dramatic.)

.

Seventh grade goes like this: Lucas stops playing baseball, Maya doesn't do her work, he excels in school, she becomes president of the art club, he gets into fights, she causes trouble, his window stays open, hers is sealed shut.

(He misses her, and she misses him, too.)

.

She discovers heels in the eighth grade with makeup and short skirts, and it's evil- pure evil because suddenly boys are talking to her all the time and she's twirling her hair and she's laughing too loud and batting her lashes and she smirks a smirk that he's never even seen before.

(God, he wants her to look at him like that.)

.

She's funny, so funny, and he tries not to notice her long hair falling onto his desk or the slip in his heartbeat when she laughs at something Riley does- he really tries, but he just can't because he knows that he loves her and everything she does is in slow motion from the way she enters the classroom to her standing on her chair to announce a revolution.

(He'd give anything for her to just look at him again.)

.

During the winter break of their final year of middle school, Gammy Hart dies and Maya locks herself in the bathroom for the first time since they were kids. Ms. Hart calls his mama and she sends him over so that he can explain that he and Maya are no longer friends and she won't listen to him anymore- but Ms. Hart refuses and tells him frantically that she heard something break and she can't find the key. She begs for him to get her baby girl out because she doesn't know what to do, and so he says he can try and her mama hugs him so tight that he can't breath.

It takes him four knocks and six times calling her name before he hears the soft click of the lock being undone and steps inside. She's pressed against the wall facing her shattered mirror, and her hand is bleeding because she tried to clean up the scattered fragments of glass, and, Jesus Christ, she's so broken. He doesn't like calling her that, but she's whimpering against the floral wallpaper of her outdated bathroom, pools of red dripping from her palms, and she's just so damn broken.

He closes the door and lowers himself beside her, his arm twisting around her waist and pulling her to his lap so she can cry into his chest.

(When he gets her wounds bandaged up, they go and they eat frozen cherry tomatoes from her Gammy's garden that are stashed in her freezer and she cries into him some more. He doesn't think that it's fair such good people have to face such terrible things.)

.

After the funeral, her window opens up again. They become friends, and they spend every moment possible trying to make up for the gap they created. He almost feels like he's seeing her for the very first time when she leans in so close, laughing hard enough that there are tears in her eyes, and he presses his lips against her forehead because she's making fun of him- she always is.

(And he always lets her.)

.

He joins baseball again that spring, and she rolls her eyes because she thinks he should do hockey.

("Huck rhymes with puck, Ranger Rick, what am I supposed to do to with no nicknames that rhyme with ball, base, or bat?"

"I guess you'll have to stop calling me nicknames."

"In your dreams, Bucky McBoingBoing.")

.

He takes his team to the championships, and she's chanting, "Chase! Chase! Steal that base!" when they make the final point to bring them to victory.

(His friend Dave cocks his head when he asks Lucas who the heck Chase is, but Lucas only smiles, his eyes catching Maya jumping up and down while she claps because "That's my Ranger Rick! That's my Huckleberry! We won! We won! That's my Huck, he doesn't suck!")

.

They're each other's first kiss and he doesn't think he wants to kiss anyone else for as long as he lives.

They're looking at the stars, and her hand is tightly locked with his when she confesses that she's the only girl in their entire school going into freshman year without having her first kiss. Even Riley kissed Farkle when they both went for each other's cheeks, and even accidents count. It's in the rules of first kisses everywhere, and she's the only loser who has never kissed a boy. She pouts her lips and she tucks her head into his neck to try and forget it before he pulls her closer and tells her that she doesn't need to not kiss anyone to be a loser.

When she leans up to tell him that his argument is dumb because he used a double negative, he presses his lips against hers and it's a mess of teeth and bumping noses and her grip crushing his hand.

("See, Maya Papaya?" he whispers, "Still a loser."

She laughs and kisses him again.)

.

One day when he's getting off the bus after school, he spots men in dark suits and white gloves carrying a folded flag to his front door.

(He runs and he runs and he doesn't realize that he's crying until Maya catches him and doesn't let him go.)

.

Andrew was a good man. He did what he was told and he got good grades and he was the best big brother in the entire world. He taught Lucas everything he knows about baseball and he let him hold his medals when he visited home and he always teased Lucas about the way he looks at Maya before telling him that he picked one hell of a girl because there's no one else in this world that will probably ever love her like him, even if they were young.

(His parents fight more and his dad moves out and as he watches his mama fall asleep weeping at their kitchen table, he still doesn't think it's fair that such good people have to face such terrible things.)

.

He takes a break from baseball and his dad says that he's blowing any chance of a scholarship, but his mama tells him that it's okay and asks if he could bring a basket of laundry into Andrew's room and maybe put it away.

(She still can't go in there, and Lucas wonders if she'll ever be able to.)

.

Maya comes over and helps make dinner a lot because her mom works late. Gammy isn't there to help with bills using her pockets full of bingo money she usually gets gambling with her community center friends, and so she picks up a lot of extra shifts in the evening.

At least, Maya's mom tells her it's for bills, but Maya tells Lucas that she thinks it's just so that she's always busy. It's easier not to remember that way.

(He asks his mama if that's why she started quilting, and she doesn't have an answer.)

.

His dad still pays for their house and their bills because he's a good man that makes good money, but Lucas picks up a job at the park district building so that he can buy his mama the new set of needles she's been looking at when they stop at the craft store before grocery shopping.

(Maya pitches in so that they can get the even better ones, and when his mama opens her present, she's so happy that she starts to cry.)

.

They don't kiss again until towards the end of their freshman year. Maya is rambling on about some art expo that she found a few cities over and her cheeks are flushing from how out of breath she's getting and he just needs her to stop talking before she passes out.

(He couldn't think of a better way to stop her.)

.

They take a trip back to Texas that summer because that's where Andrew is buried, and it's his first time back since before he met Maya, yet everything seems so familiar. He introduces her to all of his horses and his Pappy Joe loves her and he even shows her where his dead hamster is buried that she shares a name with.

(They search the sky at night and when he tells her that he found the Maya Borealis, she kisses him until they get dizzy.)

.

Andrew's death fell around homecoming of their freshman year, and so they decide to go the next but when Maya finds out that tickets are $30 per person, she protests it. Lucas insists he'll buy them, as well as every other boy that asks her, but she laughs at that because Minkus may be blowing sixty bucks on Riley's fantasy night, but she can think of at least forty things she'd enjoy spending that money on more than a dumb dance in a sweaty gym with a mediocre band.

(She lists them all out, and they decide to go laser tagging in full out homecoming gear- dressing up for pictures with Riley being the one requirement for the end of her nagging about Maya missing the event.)

.

They're swinging on his swing set on a spring afternoon, and he watches her kick and kick higher and higher and higher. Her hair flutters like ribbons and her laugh echoes like an orchestra and he's in love.

(Oh boy, he's in love.)

.

His dad comes home, and he's better than he was, he really is. He's less angry, and he's stopped drinking, and Lucas is happy that his family is whole again.

(Except that it's not because there's an empty seat at dinner and a room they don't go into and he feels like such a baby when he cries into his hands that night about how he misses his big brother.)

.

She kisses him in his bedroom the night before they start their junior year, and she tells him that she's loves him.

He knows, but he doesn't want to ruin her moment, so he stays quiet and nods quickly- but then her hands are running through his hair and they're fumbling with the buttons of his shirt and it takes him a minute to realize what she means when she stops kissing him to whisper while staring into his eyes that she loves him- and after that minute, everything gets blurry because clothes are lost and he's kissing down her neck and she whimpers as his hand traces small circles on her hip before she wraps her fingers around his wrist to direct him where she needs to be touched.

(Her body hums and she moans into his ear, and he's so glad his mama has bible study every Tuesday so that tonight his walls can echo these noises over and over.)

.

He formally asks her out about a month into the school year before they get caught making out in the janitor's closet on the second floor. He asks her if he can call her his girlfriend and if he can take her out on a date- a real date- and she freezes up because she's never had a boyfriend or even really been on any dates, but it doesn't sound so scary escaping his lips so she nods against him and whispers out an eager yes because she's excited to experience these things with her Huck, the one that she's known since she was practically a baby and she trusts with her heart.

Lucas smiles the biggest she's seen him smile in a while and he lifts her up, his hand tugging on her hair the way that she likes and his name tumbling from the back of her throat when she's pressed against the wall.

(They're so lost in each other, they don't notice Janitor Harley unlocking the door so that the principal can get to the bottom of the strange noises reported from the halls.)

.

One would think that Riley and Farkle would be the dream couple in their high school, but the pair to beat is Lucas and Maya because there's not one student in that school that doesn't wish to have a bond like theirs. He takes her things to class and she kisses him behind lockers and even when they argue, it's about him being too tall or her being too cute or his smile being too charming for her to ever stay mad at him.

No one quite understands how they work so well when Maya is so feisty and hot headed and stubborn while Lucas is a well known moral compass, but when he taps her nose calls her "Maya Papaya" and she scrunches it and calls him "Huck", everyone within a mile radius turns their head and softly sighs with a frown that they don't have that.

(Lucas would frown, too, if he didn't have Maya- and he's so very glad that he does.)

.

They spend their junior prom at a bowling alley, after Riley's mandatory pictures, of course, and they spend almost all of their money in the arcade playing air hockey, but Lucas tucks five bucks in his suit jacket pocket for the photobooth he spotted near the bar.

They're only looking in the camera in one of the five pictures, and they're all blurry, the teenagers laughing messes with kisses being shared as she's seated on his lap, and when Maya takes her strip and tosses it into her clutch she scoffs at how they wasted five dollars on a blurry column instead of the nachos that had been tempting her.

(He loves it, but he doesn't tell her. He only laughs and explains to her that he will go waste five more dollars on her excuse for dinner before folds his own photo strip up to put in his wallet later when she's not looking.)

.

Maya helps when his family makes the decision to clean out Andrew's room. She tells them that it's only fair considering that Lucas helped out with all of Gammy's old things, but he knows she would've done it anyways.

(His father gives him his brothers medals to hold onto and he looks from the awards of recognition in his hands to his dad kissing his mama's forehead and his girlfriend smiling softly at him and he knows that everything will be okay.)

.

Riley and Maya decide that they don't want to grow up one day and so they take a week off of school to drag the boys to Disney on the Minkus checkbook. It's a trip full of the girls twirling around the amusement park with Mickey ears pulling their hair from their faces and pretty dresses flying in the wind.

(Farkle tells Lucas that he plans on proposing to Riley the summer after graduation, and it makes Lucas think about the future.)

.

They don't tell each other what colleges they apply to because they don't want to be a factor in each other's decision.

(Neither of them stick to their word and they dig around until they're satisfied to know they applied to three of the same schools.)

.

They go to senior prom because Riley will not let them out of this one, and she asks him casually while they're eating leftover Chinese on her couch during the commercial of their Criminal Minds marathon.

He says yes and kisses her while she's chomping on an egg roll which is truly disgusting- but he does it anyways because he loves her and he's happy and she's so fucking beautiful.

(That's how he ends up standing at the bottom of her staircase with a corsage in his sweaty hands a few weeks later and he loses his breath watching his girlfriend run down the stairs and into his arms because she hadn't seen him all fucking day thanks to Riley's dumb prom superstitions.)

.

Prom is pretty fun, he finds out, but he accidentally tears her dress that night and she tells him that she spent six month savings on that fucking thing, so promises to make it up to her.

(He makes good on his promise.)

.

They make it into Columbia together, and they both know that they'll end up there so they don't bother discussing it.

(He asks her if she wants to rent an apartment together once college rolls around, and she shows him the paper she has tucked under her bed with their options circled in red.)

.

Graduation is a big event, and Maya hates it because she hates the crowded gymnasium and the bombarding of flashing cameras and how messy the cap makes her hair when she takes it off, but all of her frustrations melt away when Lucas tucks a stray curl behind her ear and whispers against her lips how proud of her he is before his mama captures a picture of their very first kiss as high school graduates.

(He frames it and it's the first thing they hang up in their new apartment.)

.

Riley says yes, of course she says yes, and that's why he's sitting in the bridal shop, patiently waiting for Maya to step out of the dressing room so that her very special maid of honor dress can be tailored perfectly. The theme of the wedding is pink and purple and other hues in a sunset, and so he doesn't really know what to expect from Maya's dress, but he's sure it'll look great with his periwinkle bow tie that he is wearing as best man.

When she steps out, she seems almost unsure, her bottom lip tugged between her teeth and he can't take his eyes off of her. He tells her that she looks beautiful, even more than beautiful, and he stands up to help her onto the pedestal in front of the mirror before he looks at their reflection together.

He loves her so fucking much and he wants to marry her. He knows it right then that he wants to marry her and he wants to be her husband and he wants her to be his wife because she's wearing a baby blue dress that makes her eyes look like the sky and her smile as white as the clouds, and the dimple in her right cheek is still just the right size to be poked.

(He tries it and she punches him in the arm.)