9.

December 2, 1994

If I don't ask her soon, I think I'll explode.

I was starting to think the same thing.

Jan 1, 1995

A year ago. Holy shit, it was a year ago that I didn't want to go to the NYE party but forced myself because of protocol, and what if I hadn't?

Ten seconds before midnight I asked her to marry me. I caught her by surprise, but thank God she said yes.

She wants to marry me. How fucking lucky am I?

I've asked myself a hundred times since then, what if he hadn't decided to suck it up and go to that New Year's Eve party? He wasn't in the mood for it, and under the circumstances even McKee, the boss with his head wedged so far his ass he could see out his own nostrils, would have understood. And what if he had been just a little more polite and backed up a step when I said I needed to go inside and find the guy I had gone to the party with?

I wasn't expecting him to propose that night; I could feel he was leading up to it, but I had expected, that like everything else with him, he would take his time getting there. I was all right with that; whether he realized it before that night or not, I had no intention of letting him get away.

We both remembered that I had been far apart from my date the year before and we made sure that as midnight approached we were right there together, and all I was thinking was that he had been right the year before; the person you kiss at midnight as a new year rolls in should be the person you would like to end the year with. When everyone started navigating toward the people they wanted to kiss at midnight, and the countdown was getting ready to start, I looked at him and the expression on his face changed from “Hey, this is way better than last year” to sudden longing. And yet I still didn't get it, and it didn't register with me that he was holding out a ring to me. Right as the countdown from ten began, he told me he loved me more than anything, and all he wanted in life now was me. And he asked me to marry him just in time for me to get “You know it's yes” out before it was midnight.

That was the first and last night I spent at his apartment. I'd been there several times, but he lived in a tiny studio with a mattress tossed onto the floor, and he had a small table lamp on the floor, his computer, and nothing else. He'd asked me a dozen times to help him buy furniture and pick out things like cookware and dinnerware, but I could never bring myself to do it. The truth is that I didn't want to help him furnish an apartment I hoped he wouldn't be living in very long.

We'd had plans for after the office party, a late dinner/early breakfast with Dack and his girlfriend, and Ian made a reservation at a hotel downtown, but I hadn't known that he was going to propose and he hadn't realized that all he would want after hearing “yes” was to be alone with me. His apartment was closest, so that's where we went. It really had nothing to do with sex, but with just being able to hold onto each other and to talk about what we wanted. He thought that I had probably formed an idea in my head when I was a little girl about what kind of wedding I wanted someday; he couldn't have known that I'd never given it any thought because that wasn't what I had grown up with. All the same, he was already talking about what and when. The same man who had moved in slow motion for months was ready to make wedding plans on the spot.

We'd been engaged for all of six hours when we decided to get married in June, just a couple of weeks before my 25th birthday.