Putting life back together.

Time passes slowly for you after your weekend with Amber. You’re busy running your business and buying a house; you decide on a house that’s rather larger and nicer than the first one you visited, and it takes a while to close the deal. It’s a busy time of the semester for her, so she doesn’t have a lot of free time either. If you could spend the nights together, you’d be fine, but you don’t want to impose on Niall’s hospitality, and it would be a bad idea to stay overnight with her when all her housemates are around. You entertain the idea of getting a hotel room for . . . some number of nights, but decide against it; you don’t want anyone starting to think either of you has anything to hide. Instead, you spend a lot of time on the phone and on Skype.

It seems like forever until you close on your new house, but it isn’t really all that long; you’re just impatient to see Amber again. As you walk through the house once it’s finally yours, it occurs to you that April probably never realized how much money you actually make. You never talk about it, you never set up a joint account with her, and your spending habits have always been modest; you’ve been happy with your car, April had the house, and you’re not into clothes, so most of your money has gone quietly into various investments. You admit to a weakness for high-powered computers, smartphones, and the like, but since you use them for business, they’ve always officially belonged to the business, not to you. Come to that, the business owns your car, too. That’s one reason you don’t drive an expensive car—it would have been one thing for you to indulge yourself with your own money, but you weren’t going to treat the company coffers that way.

You walk through the master suite into the master bathroom—a suite of its own, centered on an in-floor hot tub big enough to hold a small orgy. (The hot tub takes up its own room in the basement.) As you look around, it hits you that this is the first time you’ve ever splurged on yourself and bought yourself something really nice. Then you realize the truth: you didn’t buy it for yourself. You bought it for Amber. Four bedrooms, huge master suite, large, open kitchen, big lot, nice neighborhood, all of it—if it were just for yourself, you wouldn’t care enough to spend the money. Now you have someone to buy it for, and someone to share it with.

That thought stops you in your tracks. You were with April for five years and more; why didn’t you ever think of her that way? It simply never occurred to you—but now, with Amber, it has. Maybe you were never really as attached to April, or committed to her, as you thought. Or maybe subconsciously you never really trusted her. Why, after all, didn’t you tell her how much you were making? Again, it just never occurred to you, but if you were really committed to build a life with her for the long haul, it should have. You’re glad it didn’t, because you would no doubt be much poorer now if it had. Maybe that means your backbrain was wiser than your forebrain. (To say nothing of your animal brain.)

You call up a bunch of friends and family to help you move everything from storage into your new house. Obviously, that includes Amber; you offer to pick her up, figuring that will look like a harmless enough gesture. She exclaims quite a bit about how big and how nice your new house is, but so does everyone else; and if she’s one of the ones razzing you about how little stuff you have for such a big house, she’s not the one who starts it. Nor is she the one who, when you mock-indignantly tell everyone you’re going to buy new furniture and things to solve that problem, retorts that you should take someone else along to do it for you, because your judgment is not to be trusted. She is the first one who volunteers to go shopping with you, but that seems perfectly unsurprising. After all, not only has she run many errands with you over the years, she’s a top student at the university’s School of Design. She also has excellent fashion sense, when she chooses to use it. Who better to help you plan out your rooms and pick out furniture? (Especially since she’s dependent on you to get her home anyway.)

You feed everyone lunch; after that, everyone disperses fairly quickly. Except for Amber, of course; she had to be the last one there. After you bid your last helper farewell, you go looking for her, and find her sitting in the master bath looking at the hot tub. She looks over her shoulder at you as you come in and asks, “How can you afford all this?”

“Baby, the business is a lot bigger and a lot more profitable than your mother ever realized,” you tell her. “One of the things we need to do here soon is sit down so I can give you the overview of my financial situation. I never did that with your mother; it never occurred to me. I realized after I bought this place that if I’d really planned to spend the rest of my life with her, I should have. I need to do that with you, as soon as I can.”

Her eyes fill with tears as she realizes what you’re telling her. You continue, “It seemed strange to me to think that I’d bought all this for myself, when I’d never really splurged on myself before. Then I realized I hadn’t—I bought it for you. I bought it because I had you to share it with.”

You take a deep breath and realize you’ve made a decision without knowing it. As the tears stream down her cheeks, you go on. “I haven’t bought you a ring, and I don’t feel like I can ask you to marry me yet—you still have your senior year to go, and if we’ve been family for over five years, this phase of our relationship is still very new. It feels like getting engaged would be rushing it. You need to give the apple tree time to grow if you want good apples. But even if it’s not yet time to pick the apples, it’s still an apple tree. If that makes any sense,” you add, because you’re not sure it does. But she nods, and you go on.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that I want to marry you, and I hope you feel the same way about me.” She nods jerkily. “I love you, and I’m yours, always and forever, and I intend to spend the rest of my life with you; and if I think we ought to give it more time before formalizing that commitment—if only to avoid giving the gossips something to chew on—I intend to live out that commitment starting from right now. From this minute, you’re an equal partner with me in everything, and everything I have is yours. All of me is yours, and whatever you have to say to me, you have every right to say it.”

Amber explodes into your arms, wraps hers around you, and buries her head in your neck. “Yes,” she says through tears of joy. “Yes, I’ll marry you. Whenever you ask me, the answer is yes, always. All of me for all of you, always and forever.”

You hold her, kissing her hair and her ear, until she calms down. Then you say, “You know, we need to go buy ourselves a bed today”—this earns you a sultry grin—“but even without a bed, we can still have a little fun.”

Amber kisses you and asks, “What do you have in mind?”