“Can we—just—I’d like to go home.” Pam’s voice quivered high and tight, despite her intention, in the solemn glow of the dashboard lights.

She was the string of an instrument tightened far beyond reason. No melodious sound hummed from her, as it had before with his fake proposals. Time had turned her taut, in muscle and mind, and the disappointment of tonight had plucked a screech of pain within her. It was an unnatural sound.

“Um—just—not yet.” Jim didn’t look at her, he couldn’t. The shattered plans of tonight lay crystalline at his feet, shimmering with flickers of hope, but undeniably smashed. As the ghastly orange glare of streetlights spilled hazily into the space between them, only to yield quickly and without warning to the omnipotence of darkness, his mind desperately tried to save this night.

Only one thought held in his mind, clinging for life in the swiftly shifting sea of inadequacy, anger, and disappointment that frothed in roiling waves within him. He had to ask her.

“Jim, I’m really tired.” She turned to him now, too exhausted for desperation, but in a numb and careless way. Weakness had left her lethargic and drunken with barely concealed emotion. Another cut to her tonight would bring tears that couldn’t be staunched, and a purge of insecurity and questions that would hurt them both.

His jaw was so tight the insides of his ears hurt. “I know—but, um—we’ve got to make one stop first, okay?” He still didn’t face her; his eyes remained on the road ahead.

“Fine.” Her response was clipped and curt. She stared out the window despondently, watching as the storefronts and sidewalks she knew so well slid into focus for a brief moment, and then were gone. Their present became her past.

Silence was theirs for the rest of the short journey; neither spoke or looked at the other. Inane conversation to fill the nervous air between them was unnecessary, and aborted, stumbling starting syllables were avoided by experience.

South Washington Avenue was deserted when Jim pulled up in front of Gertrude Hawk. Its stillness appealed to him in a way. Sometimes the boundless kinetic sound and light phantasmagoria of bigger cities, briefly visited but never lived in, was too much. At least it was when he was alone, or felt like it.

She followed his lead unquestioningly and got out of the car. The twin slamming of their doors echoing in the quietude of their isolation. All the stores were closed, all the people were at home or hopelessly scrounging and searching in a club or bar. But they were here, and she didn’t know why.

No matter what had happened tonight, or hadn’t, she still wanted to end it in bed with him. With his large hand splayed on her hip, and his measured breath delicately moving the soft curls of her hair. Lying in his arms at the end of the day was a promised peace. It was an oasis she could always return to, no matter the struggles and failures of the day, even if he was in some small way a part of it.

The pieces of this plan were still forming in his head, but the urgency that whipped them into a feverish pace was clear. The desire to ask her, and to make permanent what already felt like it was, was nothing new. He had bought the ring a week after they had started dating in a euphoric fit of energy at the every-other-second rediscovery of gratitude for having her by his side.

But its acuteness had never been this sharp and intense; tonight’s failure in the mockingly familiar fireworks display had reminded him of the past. Of the pain of not saying what was felt, of being close but not together, and of years of lonely longing. It burned a panic inside of him, blue-hot and irrational. He now could and he now would.

Maybe it was the streetlight, but as Pam sat down on the bench in front of the store, and looked over at him, his face seemed grotesquely pale. The playful vitality that usually lit it seemed drained from him, and his eyes were set back in dark rings.

He knew he must look nervous to her, and he still wasn’t saying anything as he accompanied her on the bench. A distant siren pinpricked the bubble of silence they seemed to be floating in, and brought his attention from glazed-eyed rumination to the present and to Pam.

“I’m sorry about tonight.” His voice was low and small, a suffocating concern smothering the words.

The uncertainty in her voice set her heart beating faster. They seemed on the precipice of something that had only been flirted with through wit and smiles. If he was sorry, then her suspicions about tonight might have been right. However, her past had taught her that assumptions were a misleading enemy.

“About what?” It came softly from her, careful and cautious.

“Andy—uh—I didn’t expect him to do that.” He tripped on the words, stumbling around nervously in the shadow of the momentous change that he felt so close to.

“Oh.” Her eyebrows furrowed, cleaving deep rows into her forehead. It was as if a fog rested behind them, leaving her with only a perception of the vague outline of what he was thinking and feeling, but still unsure.

“Yeah—that was crazy, huh?” She offered, a weak chuckle punctuating it mirthlessly.

“Yeah. It—” He stopped suddenly, shaking his head a little in confusion. The well-formed words, and precisely poetical sentences he had imagined for so long seemed lost or horribly mangled in his head. He decided to start simply.

“Do you remember this bench?”

She did. The warm familiar flood of memory squeezed her stomach tight, and set her bottom lip between her teeth. “It’s where we first kissed—well as a—couple.”

It seemed as though it was the blink of an eye ago, but it had been almost a year. The whirlwind shock of him interrupting her in the conference room had quickly spun itself out into a nervous and timid dinner date. Eventually, the fleeting eye contact faded and teasing small talk flowed like the wine they drank. Afterwards they had come here for dessert, to Gertrude Hawk, and shared their first official kiss on the bench.

It hadn’t been like the movies. The kind that always ends romantic comedies, where the man sweeps the woman into his arms and kisses her without break until the screen turns to black. Nor had it been desperate, like the night between them after she had lied to keep her head above the waves of uncertainty that crashed down on her.

Instead, it had been hesitantly cautious, with each of them wondering if it was real. Their lips, sticky with chocolate at the corners, had slowly drawn together. They’d only touched for a second or two, fused together with the heat of it, until they’d both broken away. Lips tingling, eyes closed, and cheeks flushed.

Jim unconsciously licked his bottom lip, still tasting the memory of chocolate. It drove him now to speak, imperfect and garbled as it may be.

“You know—the day we met you wore a gray cardigan and a black skirt.”

She smiled in confusion at him, but her expression remained nonplussed. Still, the fog was beginning to thin.

“And the first time I made you laugh was when I asked you if there was something wrong with Dwight.” The both laughed at that. The innocence and ignorance of it now, so many years later, and with so many shared memories between it.

“I remember those things—” He glanced down at the street in front of them, and away from her. “I remember those things because the first day I saw you, and talked to you, and laughed with you, I—” His words faltered now again, the dizzying emotion that spun within him was whipping a maelstrom of confusion in his own mind. But he turned back to her, faced her, and found in her apprehensive glance the strength he needed.

“I knew you were like nobody I had ever met. I liked you—right then. And I don’t know when it changed. I mean, when it was that I first started loving you—but it wasn’t very long after.”

She was on fire. Her nerves blistered, and her vision wobbled hazily. The streetlight had become a spotlight, and the bench a stage. It was only her and him, together, in a silent but electrified intimacy.

“And after that—well, it is what it is, you know? It’s brought us here, together, and there’s nothing more that I could want.” He swallowed hard, gulping down his anxiety and nerves. Forcing them down, because there was no place for them now.

He got up slowly, and turned around to face the bench. Even in the dimness, her face looked flushed, and her mouth hung agape slightly. But again, it was the eyes. They stared at him unblinkingly, as if to miss one fraction of a second of this would be too much.

The pavement was unyielding as his knee came to rest on it, and the tiny bits of gravel that dug into it made him flinch a little in pain, but it didn’t matter. Everything came down to this.

Every single moment together, all the thoughts, longings, feelings, and needs each had experienced for one another, in short their entire past, crushed into the present and collapsed itself into the distance between them as they looked at each other. Like a dying star, it wasn’t an ending, but the beginning of a brilliant new radiance.

Looking up slightly at her now, he decided to continue to speak with honesty, and from the emotions that teemed within him. “Pam, I had—thought of how to do this so many times, I mean, what to say and how to do it. And, I had all these things I wanted to say, but I don’t think that matters so much. Not really. Um—”

He dug into his jacket, and pulled out the small box within which comfortably rested his future. Holding it out in front of him, he heard her gasp slightly, and saw that tears were curving down her cheeks, but she didn’t swat them away.

“Pam, I love you. I love you—so much. And I know what its like not to have you in my life, and I know how happy I am when you are. Its—you’re amazing. You’re just—God, I mean, you’re everything. And I want more than anything to spend the rest of my life with you, so—will you marry me, Pam?” He opened the box, with hands that shook uncontrollably, and the diamond of the ring shimmered in the light.

She tried to speak, but her throat was constricted with the tears and sobs of release that racked her. The dam had burst, and everything was pouring out. The past leaked out of her, one tear and one panicky catching-of-breath at a time, until she shook it off completely with a shake of her head up and down. Yes, she could and she would.

He moved into her arms swiftly, hugging her as she still sat on the bench. His eyes closed tight against the swell of emotion that he felt building. They just clung to one another for several moments, until she spoke.

“Yes, Jim—I love you—I love you so much.” She whispered in his ear, raspy and uneven.

He pulled back a little in her arms so that he could see her face, pink and flushed, with tears soaking under her eyes. “I love you too Pam.”

He took her cheeks in his hands, her eyes becoming narrower slits in the pressed curvature of her face, and kissed her softly, hesitant and cautious. It wasn’t passionate, sweeping or theatrical. It didn’t need to be. There was time for that; there was all the time in the world now.