Winter Wonderland

twenty-four: big news

It's been a couple weeks since Storie and I got engaged and we haven't had the chance to go down to Cincinnati to see my parents, so my family still has no idea that I popped the question, that Storie said yes. Neither of us have posted anything anywhere, no way for any of them to find out before we tell them. Which will happen this weekend, at last.

Three days with my family. I'm looking forward to it, even if I am slightly dreading what my asshole brothers will say when they hear I'm getting married. Which I still can't believe. I'm getting married. I only proposed once I was pretty sure Storie would say yes but part of me can't believe she did. She's my fiancée.

It's been almost three months since we last made it down to Cincy and Mom pokes me every now and then to check that we haven't forgotten about them. As if I ever could. Daria would never let that happen. Even if I was knocked on the head and lost my memory, she wouldn't accept it.

"Ready?" I ask, standing by the door to the apartment with a backpack over my shoulder, keys in my hand.

"I'm ready for the journey and the weekend in the most general sense," Storie says, shouldering her own bag, "but I'm not sure I'll ever be ready for your sister's reaction when we tell her. And your mom's, for that matter."

I hold out my hand to her. She takes it, and I squeeze. "It'll be fine. Just ... loud."

Storie laughs. "Very loud. Probably quite overstimulating. Let's do it."

We hold hands all the way down to the parking lot beneath our apartment building, only separating when I get into the driver's seat and Storie sits next to me. As soon as I've released the handbrake, my hand goes to her thigh and she laces her fingers with mine, and we stay that way for most of the drive. Three and a half hours with the windows rolled down, the late July sun pouring through the windshield and warming the air. It's almost eighty degrees today, so it's a relief to get on the interstate, the wind buffeting my hair.

"How do you want to do it?" I ask when I have to take my hand out from under hers to indicate right to get off the freeway, not too far from my parents' place now. "Should we have gotten a ring as a prop?"

Storie laughs and says, "Knowing Allie, she'd be screeching the moment we walked through the door. I bet she checks my hand every time she sees us."

"We can swing by a pawn shop, see if we can pick something up," I joke. "Unless you've got a whole speech planned?"

"I figured it'll just ... come out," she says. "We get there, your mom asks what we've been up to since she last saw us and we say, well, we spent an entire month traveling across the country. That'll take up quite a bit of time, I imagine. Your sisters will have questions about everything we did and saw."

I glance at her as she speaks. She has this little smile on her face as she looks out of the window, her eyes tracking the scenery as it changes from roads and buildings to fields and stretches of nothing.

"Then," she continues, "either your mom or your dad – if he's there – will ask what we've been up to since we got back, why we haven't been down yet. And that's when we tell them. I haven't figured out the exact wording yet, but I think it'll come to us in the moment."

"You've got it all figured out, huh?"

She taps her temple. "You know me."

I do. I know how her brain works, how she overthinks everything, bad or good; how she likes to emotionally prepare herself for all eventualities; how she will sometimes spend hours or days planning how conversations will go only for it to be wasted because the other person can't be predicted that easily.