Page 86 of I Dreamt That You Loved Me

I shook my head. “There is no one like you. You’re one of a kind. I cannot wait to marry you.”

He let out a deep, contented sigh. “I’m so fucking happy to hear that. I wasn’t sure you even believed in marriage. I know I didn’t. Until you, of course.”

“I wouldn’t want to do it with anyone else. It’s not like we need a piece of paper to prove our love.”

“Right,” he said. “I mean, my vow to love you and cherish you is already a sacred pact I made with myself so it’s not like weneedto get married.”

“But we want to,” I said.

“We want to.”

We shared a smile.

We went to dinner at John’s of 12thStreet to celebrate. It used to be a splurge, but now that we could afford it, we still reserved it for special occasions.

“Now that you have some time off from touring, we should get back to our apartment hunting,” I said, popping a piece of fried calamari into my mouth. “We’ve outgrown our space.”

“Yeah,” Gabriel said, nodding seriously. “We’ll get right on that.”

We laughed. We would do no such thing. We’d been talking about moving for the past two years. We’d even looked at other apartments, but none of them had felt like home.

“So we’re getting married.” I couldn’t stop looking at the ring on my left hand. The ring he’d had made especially for me.

“We’re getting married.”

We smiled at each other like two loons, our happiness so great it couldn’t be contained. He still gave me butterflies.

“How about June?” I took a sip of my wine. “We just want something small, right?”

He nodded. “Just our close friends.”

“So basically, everyone we called to share the news with before we left for dinner.”

“That should do it,” he said. “May’s good. Or April. Fuck that. Are you free tomorrow?”

“I think that’s short notice,” I laughed. “You have an album to finish, and I have a runway show next month. But we can file for a marriage license first thing tomorrow.”

“First thing,” he agreed.

I felt like the luckiest girl in the world to find a man who was so excited to marry me that he’d do it tomorrow. A man who let me eat off his plate when his chicken parm arrived and looked just a tad bit better than my pasta dish. When the waiter walked by, Gabriel ordered another one for himself. So that solved that problem.

“So what’s your view on kids?” Gabriel asked, watching me demolish a tiramisu while he drank his espresso.

Love made me hungry.

“I like them. Big fan.” I set down my fork as the realization dawned on me that this wasn’t a question about kids in general. “Why? Do you want kids?”

“Someday. It would be cool to have one or two little Cleos and Gabriels running around. I’m not ready for any of that yet though. And even if we decide to never have kids, I’m just happy to be with you. I don’t need anything more.”

I felt the same way. I would be happy either way. But now I couldn’t help but think what a great dad he would be.

Growing up, I’d never dreamed about a wedding or a husband or kids or the house we’d live in, and even as I’d gotten older, those things weren’t part of my dreams.

I’d always just wanted to be an artist, to create something original that hadn’t existed before, and to find my person.

Now I had all those things. I’d created the life of my dreams, and I was living it with the man of my dreams.

I had the whole damn cake and I got to eat it too.