He said it so simply that it took me a moment to fully register what he'd actually offered. "What are you saying," I asked, needing to hear it plainly, needing to be certain I wasn't simply hearing what I'd hoped for instead of what he meant.
"I'm saying I want to marry you," Alex said, steadier than I'd ever heard him, none of the nervous blushing from that first night at the club, just quiet, complete certainty. "For real this time. No contract. No blackmail. No four-year deadline counting down somewhere in the back of either of our minds. I want to choose this, completely, the way you've been choosing it for longer than I think either of us admitted to ourselves."
"You stole ninety thousand dollars from me," I said, something warm and disbelieving cracking through my voice. "And now you're proposing to me."
"I prefer to think of it as an excellent return on investment," he said, the corner of his mouth lifting into the smile I'd fallen in love with somewhere over the past year without ever quite marking the exact moment it happened.
I stood up, came around the table, and pulled him to his feet, holding his face in both hands the way I'd wanted to for longer than I'd let myself admit even to Markus. "Yes," I said. "Obviously, yes. I would have said yes the first night you brought me that beer, if you'd asked me then, except neither of us knew yet what we were actually building."
"I'm glad we found out the hard way," he said, laughing against my mouth as I kissed him, "instead of the easy way. Builds character, apparently."
"Never do that again," I said. "The hard way. I think we've used up our quota for an entire lifetime."
"Deal," he said. "No more robbing casinos. No more secret feelings festering into hospital visits. Just this. Whatever this turns into."
We told everyone the following week — Karen first, who cried in a way that looked nothing like the brittle performance from before, just genuine happiness for both of us, hard-won and entirely real. My parents next, who took the news with more grace than I expected, my mother actually smiling instead of calculating, my father offering something that almost sounded like real congratulations instead of a business assessment. Markus heard it from me directly, the same evening, and said nothing for a long moment before pulling me into the kind of hug he rarely allowed himself, gruff and brief and more meaningful than any speech he could have given instead.
"I'm proud of you," he said, the words landing with more weight than I think either of us expected. "Both of you. I wasn't sure, in the beginning, whether this was going to end somewhere worth all the difficulty. I'm glad I was wrong to worry as much as I did."
The wedding itself, when it finally happened, was smaller than the one my parents had originally planned — no longer a performance for anyone else's benefit, just the people who actually mattered standing together in a backyard that belonged to nobody important, watching two men say vows they'd written themselves instead of whatever their families might have expected of them.
Karen stood beside Alex, steady and present in a way that would have seemed impossible a year earlier. Frank walked Alex partway down the aisle before handing him off, gruff and emotional in equal measure, muttering something about finally getting rid of his best waiter that made everyone laugh through their tears. Markus stood at my side, the closest thing to family I'd ever truly had before Alex walked into my life, watching the entire ceremony with an expression I'd only seen on him once or twice before, somewhere between pride and quiet relief.
"Do you, Alexzander Cinder," the officiant said, "take this man—"
"Yes," Alex said, before she'd even finished the question, earning another round of laughter from the small crowd gathered around us. "Obviously, yes. Get to the kissing part."
I laughed harder than I had in longer than I could remember, and when she finally pronounced us married — really married, no contract attached, no four-year deadline hovering over either of our heads — I kissed him the way I'd wanted to since the first night I watched him cross a crowded club floor in a maid's costume, certain even then, in some quiet, stubborn corner of myself, that he was going to matter more than I had any reasonable explanation for.
He did. He still does, every single day since.
We built our life slowly after that, the way the truest things usually get built — not in one grand gesture, but in a thousand small choices, each of us showing up for the other through everything that tried to pull us apart, until showing up stopped feeling like effort and started feeling like simply who we were.
Karen visits most Sundays still, steadier with every year that passes, the bookstore she runs now entirely her own. Markus finally retired from active driving duty, though he still shows up at every family dinner like he never left, the closest thing either of us has to the father neither of us got to keep long enough.
And some nights, when the casino's quiet and the city outside our window has gone soft and dim, I still catch myself watching Alex the way I did that very first evening — staring, plainly, without apology — and he still catches me doing it, and still blushes, just slightly, every single time.
I never did get tired of that. I don't think I ever will.