A long lane at night

2.5. I THINK HE KNOWS

** NATE **

IN THE TWENTY-TWO YEARS THAT I HAVE KNOWN JACK, not once had he ever given me a reason to doubt his word. Trusting him has been second nature to me, honestly, ever since always. I must come clean and say I felt relieved he wouldn't give me reason to doubt him now.

I cannot exactly put my finger on what it was that woke me up, but the first thing I felt, still with my eyes closed, was this weird and heavy weight on the small of my back, going down to my leg. I tried to get up, but it turned out, I couldn't. I wouldn't be true to myself if I denied my paranoid ass panic for a brief second, but comprehension came to me fast.

At some point of the night, Jack fell asleep while hugging me and he wasn't showing any sign of waking up any time soon. On a normal day, such a huge dead weight on top of you is an awful way to wake up, but when that weight is actually your fiancé's leg, you feel fine.

My fiancé.

How on earth did that happen? I know it happened, I was there. But how crazy is it? One second I'm getting ready to let go of an unrequited love, the next one I'm engaged to the only person I ever loved.

I have to be fair to Jack here. 'Unrequited' isn't the appropriate word. He just never knew. And it's rather easy to believe he didn't. Jack has always been the most oblivious person I've ever met. And to give credit where credit is due, he had the balls to own up to his feelings the second he understood them. If anything, I'm the coward one.

I have gone down that path too many times to know how it would end, but today wasn't the day to feel like that. I adjust my train of thought and place it on a much happier trail. I try to see if I can get a bit comfier closer to him without disturbing his sleep and I was rather successful.

My new position had Jack's arm over me and I could see his hand so close to my chest. I pushed my luck a bit further and took his hand in mine, moving it ever so lightly in order to preserve his sleep.

I was sitting on cloud nine right now.

I never knew what were worse, the mornings I woke up alone, which were most of them, or the mornings I woke up sharing a bedroom with Jack whenever we travelled. Those probably were the moments that stung the most, to have him so close to me and not being able to touch him.

I dreamed of having him so often that I could probably make an anthology TV series where each episode is a variation of how it would be to wake up like I did today. But with all the greatness of the impossible scenarios my brain could ever come up with, reality beat the crap out of them by a landslide.

My mind kept replaying all of the moments I shared with Jack last night while I gently stroked his hand. Every time a stronger moment came to me, my mind would try to sabotage it by screaming in my ear that it hadn't really happened. But I had all the physical evidence I needed to prove this awful voice wrong right here, literally in my hand.

The scene of his rushed kiss when I opened the door replayed in front of me and I held his hand a bit closer to my face. Then I thought back to the feeling of Jack's touch in parts I had only dreamed of and my body responded by tingling in a great way at the same places. I remembered his proposal. How he hadn't exactly asked me to marry him, he had told me to. There was no hesitancy in his command, because Jack knows me far too much to be confident that I would never deny him something so big.

Because he knows how much I trust him.

He was so nonchalant to say he loved me. Those words meant the world to me and to think that he said them before I did! True, he had already proposed by then. My imagination also has a collection of different scenes where Jack and I would propose to one another. Some of them were totally out there, others were the most romantic thing you can imagine, but not a single one of them was a rushed demand between finally freed kisses. I wouldn't trade reality for any of those no matter how much you pay me.