Page 85 of I Dreamt That You Loved Me

“Only you would make me wait until the very last fucking piece of fruit in the bag.” He dragged his hand down his face and groaned like this was all just too much for him.

I didn’t know what he was going on about. “If you had fed me, we wouldn’t have had this problem.”

I finally found the last lychee and held it up in triumph then looked at it more closely. It looked as if someone had run a knife around the perimeter of the skin. “Hey, someone cut into this lychee already…” He was watching me so intently that I immediately suspected foul play. “Are you playing a trick on me? If there’s a spider in here, I swear to God?—”

“Why would I put a spider in your lychee?” he laughed.

“Uh, because you’re laughing?”

He gave me an adorable boyish smile, the one that made him look like the picture of innocence. Gabriel the choirboy. “Do you trust me?”

I didn’t even have to think about it. “With my life.” I studied the lychee again. “No spiders, right?”

“No spiders.” He crossed his heart. “No insects whatsoever.”

I separated the two halves and then I stared and stared, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. A ruby ring was nestled in the white, fleshy fruit where the pit would normally be.

When I lifted my head to ask Gabriel what was going on, he was down on one knee in front of me.

He plucked the ring from the lychee and held it up. “I have been loving you all my life. That’s how it feels. Like you were made especially for me and have been a part of me forever. In my heart, my soul, my wildest dreams and my secret fantasies. You are the single best thing that has ever happened to me. You are my music and my every waking dream. I love you with everything in me, and when I said that no one can own another person, it was because I hadn’t known a love like this existed yet. I am yours, and I’m praying like hell that you’ll agree to be mine. Will you marry me, Cleo Babington?”

I was crying so hard I could barely see. I threw my arms around him with so much enthusiasm that I knocked him over and fell on top of him.

“Feels like old times,” he said. “I’m not usually this smooth.”

We laughed and rolled around the floor kissing. We lost our clothes by each other’s hands and he worshipped my body and made love to me so reverently that it felt like a sacred pact. Our bodies connected, our souls united, our hearts beating in sync.

Afterward, we lay side by side, trying to catch our breath. We both had rug burns but neither of us cared.

I looked over at him, at his beautiful face, and his beautiful everything, and I couldn’t believe I got to call him mine. “That’s a yes, by the way.”

“I’d put the ring on your finger if I knew where the hell it was.”

We put our clothes back on and searched for the ring on our hands and knees until we finally found it under the sofa, just out of reach. We had to move the entire sofa to get to it. When Gabriel finally snatched it up, the ring was covered in dust.

After he polished it on his T-shirt, he slid it onto my finger. It was a perfect fit. I held out my hand to admire it. The ring was so very me. So very us. The rubies looked like pomegranate seeds around a larger stone in the middle encrusted with milky pearls in a delicate gold setting that looked like the branches of a tree.

“Where did you ever find this? I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s the most beautiful ring…” I covered my face with my hands. I was crying again, but they were happy tears.

Gabriel tugged me into his lap on the sofa and I wrapped my arm around his neck and kissed his jaw, placing my hand over his heart.

He told me he’d collected the rubies on his travels. His bandmates called him the bagman. “I’d show up at hotels looking like a homeless man in my crumpled, secondhand clothes and my messy hair, but little did they know, I was carrying around a paper bag filled with precious gems.”

Oh God. That was priceless. I couldn’t stop laughing.

“You must have hidden them well. I never even noticed. How long has this been going on?”

“I bought the first one as soon as I got the record deal.” He pointed to the largest stone.

“No wonder you were so broke.”

He shrugged. “I didn’t want anything for myself.”

Gabriel still didn’t want anything for himself. Material possessions meant nothing to him. He still wore the same secondhand clothes he’d owned since I met him. Gabriel was more interested in collecting experiences than things.

“So you’ve been carrying these jewels around for three and a half years?”

“Except for the big one,” he said. “I hid that in a sock under the loose floorboard in the bedroom.”