How to Say I Do

by Tal Bauer

I brushed my lips over his salt-coated blond strands. Feet over my head. My dreams were soaring for the moon. Anything could happen here. I could fall in love. Maybe I already had.

omg it’s been two days 😭

I couldn’t have stopped my smile with a sledgehammer. The entire ride back, I’d been trying to figure out how to ask him to dinner. I didn’t want this day to ever end. I was greedy for more time.

Then he’d gone and assumed that we’d be sticking together. He hadn’t even asked. Yes, I do want to have dinner with you, Noël. Yes, I do want to stay with you.

wanted to treat him, at least as much as I could at an all-inclusive resort. I wanted to give him a night as special as he was, and pull out his chair and pour him a glass of wine.

We’d shared sun-warmed joy and salt-sprayed days, and now I wanted to have the candlelit dinner and the lazy moonlit night. In fact, I wanted everything. I wanted his sharp edges and the teased-out laughs. I wanted to watch his eyes glitter, then turn mischievous or soft or startled, doe-eyed or wondrous or uncertain. He was like a top that spun and spun, and I was dizzy with him.

Noël was a startlingly beautiful man, built of acute angles and sweeping bone structure. He could stop traffic even when he was disconsolate.

Sober, he made the most mundane happenings seem gorgeous by design. Sipping coffee wasn’t supposed to be artful, but with him? Lord, the way he moved. The way he held himself. The angle of his jaw and the uplift of his chin. The way he pushed his aviators on top of his head as he came through the doors, and how a lazy lock of hair spilled down his forehead.

Until he saw me, and he seemed to spark from the inside out. He looked me right in the eyes and smiled, like that smile was crafted just for me and hand-delivered into my heart.

No wonder celebrities signed with him. I’d have followed him off the edge of the planet.

From ages five to eleven, I'd won the “Most Talkative” paper-plate award, always presented to me by an exasperated teacher before summer break. Even today, I could talk a gate off its hinges and keep up with Jason and all his little-kid babble. I could spin bullshit out of cotton, but in that moment, I couldn’t rustle up a single word. Instead of speaking, I held out my golden plumeria, twirling the stem between my thumb and forefinger. “Howdy.” You’re beautiful.

My little flower won me another smile, and Noël breathed in the scent as I offered him my elbow. “That’s as close as I could get to a yellow rose on short notice,” I told him. He laughed, and our eyes met and he...

I got to tick off another item from my Noël bucket list when I slid his chair out for him. He hit me with his dazzling smile again. I wanted to do a thousand ridiculous things to keep him looking at me like that.

own. It seemed to be a rule that couples shared a corner to cuddle over at tables here, so it was all too easy to press my leg against his and forget it was there, or leave my forearm and my wrist twined with his while we both had our fingers on the foot of our wine glass.

Lord, I was gone for this man. Pure gone, and you couldn’t have beaten my soul back into my body with a baseball bat, or nailed my heart down when it started to run.

We kept scooting closer, supposedly to share each other’s food, until eventually we were all tucked up together. I’d rested my arm around the back of his chair at some point during our last glass of wine. I couldn’t remember doing it. It just seemed like holding on to Noël was the most natural thing in the world.

“This is so wonderful,” Noël breathed. “I’m actually having the best honeymoon.” Him in my arms, his cheek brushing my collarbone. The night smelled like secret gardens, sun-ripened grapes, and bubbles bursting like fireworks. “I’m having a pretty good time on our honeymoon, too.”

He laughed. His whole body went into it, and his hand stretched toward mine as his fingers brushed my wrist. Electric zings danced through my veins. Never end. Never, ever end.

“Wyatt…” He stared at our hands, at where my thumb was rubbing circles over his knuckles. “You’re here with your family.” “Well, now I’m here with you, too. I want Liam and Savannah to meet you. They’ll like you, I know they will. Please. Come with us?”

“I’ll think about it.” “We cast off at eleven a.m. at the marina. It’s going to be a great day, and it will be even better if you’re there.”

We were both quiet, and we walked a few feet apart, which was more space between us than there’d been since we’d met in Dallas. We’d been magnetized together, it seemed, and this extra space—normal-people space—felt wrong.

It was a bewitching display of romance, and completely overwhelming to me. My dates always took place in the back seats of trucks and in motel rooms. Would I even know what to do with candlelight and beauty?

Noël tried to smile. “I guess this is—” “Don’t say goodbye.” He looked past me, watching the waves churn. “Noël…” A thousand words log-jammed in my mind. Come with us. Come with me. We’ve got something here, don’t we? This doesn’t have to end, not like this.. Of course, I said none of that. No, what I did was far, far more revealing. I kissed him.

On the cheek, a quick brush of my lips against his skin. Just one half-step forward, one of my hands landing on his hip. He turned into me as I moved, and his nose and his cheek slid along mine when I pulled back. My heart was roaring. My hands were shaking. He stared at me, his eyes as bright as the stars. “I hope I see you tomorrow, Noël.”

11:06 a.m. No Noël. Don’t be disappointed. He never promised he’d show up. In fact, he’d all but insisted he wouldn’t, adamant that he didn’t want to intrude, no matter how many times I’d tried to reassure him that he wouldn’t.

Maybe tomorrow I could swing by his villa to say hello. I could tell him about Luis, and about how he’d tried to get me drunk on champagne before ten a.m. Noël would laugh at that. Lord, I was inventing reasons to talk to him now. I really was sixteen again.

He looked like a baby horse about to bolt. “Wyatt, I really shouldn’t be here—” “Yes, you should. I want you here.” I tugged on the hem of his t-shirt. “We’ll have a great time. You’ve given me two amazing days. Lemme give you a fun day?”

“I feel like I’m intruding.” His cheeks ballooned, and he blew out a fast breath. “I feel like I’m being desperate.” ”You’re not. At all.” If anyone was desperate, it was me. “My family is going to love you. Can I introduce you? Please?”

As we walked, my hand settled on the small of his back. Was that him leaning into my touch? My thumb circled a single vertebra, the tiniest massage.

He knew what I looked like every day of the year when I wasn’t falling head over heels in love. Today, he’d seen a completely different Wyatt, and, being a college-educated man, Liam could add up my heart-eyes with Noël’s presence and figure out what was what pretty dang quickly.

Noël clung to the netting and my leg. “This goes fast.” “I won’t let you fall.” He shot me a grateful smile and scooted closer.

I took his hand. There was no reality down here. Underwater, I could take his hand and it could mean something, as long as we were cocooned in this world. It was just us and this deep silence. We hung there in the blue, outside of time and consequence. His hand squeezed mine.

I wanted to swim him back out to the shallows, where we could hold hands underwater again, and maybe get a little bit closer, close enough where I could feel his thighs and his chest and his hips move against mine, and he could nuzzle his cheek against the side of my face as I ran my fingers through his sea-soaked hair.

I tried not to give into the urge to massage him as I swept titanium dioxide down his sides. Okay, I gave in a bit. Noël was more than fully capable of putting sunscreen on his own arms, but I did it for him, rubbing the lotion into his elbows and his forearms and his wrists before massaging his hands and each of his fingers.

“I’m glad I came,” Noël said. “I’m real glad you came, too.”

Noël and I lounged across from Liam and Savannah, loose and happy with our legs outstretched and Noël’s ankle crossed over mine. Noël leaned into me, and I traced hearts, waves, and smiley faces on the outside of his arm with my finger.

My hand brushed against Noël’s waist as I helped him down to the dock. We stayed like that, swaying on sea legs as we grinned at each other. “Thank you for insisting that I tag along,” he said.

I still felt Noël’s skin beneath my fingertips. It was like magic had touched me, pure electricity that kept singeing my veins. “I was right, you know. Everyone does love you. I knew they would.”

“We just really hit it off. He’s… he’s incredible.” My cheeks were flaming. Heat burned from my toes to the tips of my ears. I could still feel the echo of Noël’s touch on my skin. I kept looking down, thinking I’d see his hand on top of my wrist or sliding up my forearm.

What did it mean that Noël had shown up that morning? Or that we’d been inseparable all day, again? What did it mean that everyone around us thought we were already head over heels for each other? I thought this was a one-way love affair. I was the one falling. I was the one with my boots in the clear blue sky. Noël was…

Noël preened and pretended to be non-plussed. Praise did beautiful things to the color of his cheeks.

No praise on Earth meant as much to me as hearing that I was a good uncle to Jason or a good brother to Liam. Good uncle, good brother, good son to my father and mother. Good family. That’s all I wanted in this life—to be good for the people I loved.

That he knew to ask. That he knew, on some level, that I would carry that tradition along, from my father to Jason through me. That he knew me well enough, even after so few days, to guess I’d been counting down to Jason’s seventh birthday, when Savannah said he was finally big enough to spend a handful of hours out in the fields, dressed up in a snow parka and clutching a thermos of hot chocolate. I was burning up all over again, about to leap out of my own bones.

It was indescribable, these feelings Noël sparked inside me. I wanted to crawl into his lap and cradle his face in my hands, look into his eyes and whisper, Where have you been all my life?

He was so close. So close I could breathe him in, smell the sage-and-blossom shampoo of the resort and his warm, clean smell. Nighttime and moonlight, brash eyes hidden behind aviators, the cocky angles of his smile as he swirled a glass of red wine, and his hand laced through mine as we swam after sea turtles.

I spoke for hours, long after Noël’s breaths evened out and he went soft and slack against me. It was only when he was asleep that I was brave enough to take his hand and kiss his knuckles. “Noël, what are you doing to me?” I whispered.

I held him beneath all those glittering constellations, and as the tide rolled in, I wished on every shooting star I saw that this little moment could grow into forever.

I had no worries. None at all. Every sharp-edged thought or hook-ended anxiety had melted from me, and I was free-floating on the shimmer of Wyatt’s smile.

Waking up curled into Wyatt’s side as dawn broke and gulls circled overhead had been embarrassing, but what was one more in a long line of mortifying events these days?

Besides, Wyatt had smoothed away the awkwardness, brushing aside my apologies and the sand in my hair as he reassured me it was all good, and that he hadn’t ...

“See you later at the beach?” he’d asked. “Of course.” Like I could stay away. Wyatt had become, in such a short amount of time, an ad...