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We’d been dating for almost three years when it first came up. It was the summer between our second and third year of college, and Dante and I were tangled together in the back of my truck. The sky above us was filled with stars, so much brighter in the desert than it ever was in the city. I hardly ever got the chance to go out into the desert during school, so I savored the summers even more than I had when I was younger.
“One of my cousins got engaged yesterday,” Dante said. He tugged the blanket back toward himself and turned his body so that he was pressed against me, instead of on his back.
I continued to stare up at the sky. Legs lay at the edge of the truck bed, keeping watch over the desert around us.“Yeah?”
“Yeah. She was on the phone with my mom for an hour talking about how her boyfriend proposed.”
“Have they set a date?”
“No. Probably next summer. Want to go with me?”
“If nothing else comes up.”
Dante pinched me and I pushed him off of me, laughing. He turned to face the other direction and took the blanket with him. “I’m only joking, Dante. You know I’ll come with you.”
He refused to give me any of the blanket back, so I broke my gaze away from the sky and curled around him for warmth. My t-shirt and jeans were warm enough during the day, but now the cool night air made me shiver. Legs took the opportunity to crawl up into the space behind me, which helped to shield me from the cold. She rested her nose up against the back of my neck, sniffing my hair.
“When it’s two boys,” Dante said quietly. His voice bounced back at me from the side of the truck bed. “How do you know which one is supposed to propose?”
I squeezed him tighter. “Good question. Probably whichever one gets to it first.”
“I don’t know if we even could get married,” he continued. I’d learned by then that some of the things Dante said weren’t really meant for anyone. He just wanted put his words out in the world. “A lot of places deny marriage licenses to couples like us.”
“There are other ways,” I said. I rested my chin over his shoulder. “Civil unions or whatever.”
He sighed so heavily I could feel it where my arms wrapped around him and my chest met his back. “But it’s not the same,” he said.
I closed my eyes and imagined the stars above us. “Okay,” I said.
###
The next time it came up, we had just found an apartment together in downtown El Paso. We’d considered moving farther away from where we grew up, but really it was never an option. Dante wanted to be a part of his little brother’s life--he was almost seven, which Dante insisted was a very important age--and I think my mom would have really been sad if all of her children lived farther than and hour’s drive away.
Dante sprawled out on the couch we’d found at the Goodwill and threw his arms out. “I never want to move again,” he announced. Legs was laying in the middle of the floor, panting in the heat. She was old by then, and didn’t like to go on runs with me anymore.
I pulled open the window in the living room and begged it to draw a breeze into our stifling apartment. Our apartment . I didn’t think I’d ever get used to that.
“Did you hear that, Ari? Never again.”
I turned a smile on him. “If you didn’t have so much stuff, it wouldn’t be so much work.”
“It’s our stuff now, Ari. We live together. What’s yours is mine, and all that.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s only for married couples.”
Dante shrugged. He’d just gotten a haircut, and it made his face look so much older. Every time I looked at him, it struck me how young we were when I first met him. He looked into my eyes, his expression inscrutable. “All we need is a ring,” he said.
I broke his gaze and went into our little kitchen to start unloading dishes into the cabinet. The only thing we had out already was the coffee pot, and even though it was five o’clock, I had a pot brewing. We would have to find some pots and pans soon. Our moms would only put up with us taking leftovers out of the fridges at home for so long.
“Besides, I need all those things,” Dante said. “They’re proof that I exist.”
“They’re proof that I’m going to be sore tomorrow from carrying so many boxes up three flights of stairs.”
Now Dante grinned. “You can take it.”
He rolled off the couch and opened a box laying in the middle of the floor. From it, he pulled out pictures in frames of our families, of the two of us, of all of our friends from college. I didn’t need to look at the photographs to see how happy we looked in all of them. He put them next to our diplomas on the coffee table.
“We should visit Marco and Jonathan,” he said, studying the photographs. “They’ll want to hear all about the apartment.”
I focused on unboxing our coffee mugs to quell the fear and sadness that filled me at their names. Those same men who looked so invincible in our college photos were lying in hospital beds now, withering away. I swallowed. “What are visiting hours on the weekends?”
“The same, I think,” said Dante. He rearranged the pictures on the coffee table. “We should bring them churros from Rosa’s, too. The nurses won’t care.”
I closed my eyes and imagined all the people we’d already lost. “Okay,” I said.
###
The third time it came up, I’d been working at the Charcoaler again while I wasn’t at my day job. Dante had been forced to spend most of his evenings grading assignments for his students and teaching swim lessons, so he wasn’t at home much, anyway. We were enjoying a rare evening together at home that night.
We were on the couch, the radio playing from the kitchen. The staticky music only barely carried over the sound of the rain pounding down outside. The weather made my legs ache, and the pale light from the kitchen mixed with the street lights outside to make my scars almost glow.
“I never see you anymore,” Dante said, his head resting on my thigh. His eyes traced the path of the ceiling fan above us. I rolled some of his hair between my fingers to unstick the hairspray that kept it in place.
“You’re seeing me right now,” I told him.
Dante grunted. “Yeah, for the first time in weeks. I swear I haven’t seen you in daylight since October.”
I considered his words. “So seeing me at night doesn’t count? Then I take back all those--”
“You know what I mean, Ari,” Dante cut me off. There was an edge to his voice, like hail during a rainstorm. “I miss you. You’re gone all the time. Is something wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong,” I assured him. I put my hand on his chest. “I’ve just been working extra to save up some money is all.”
“I would rather have you than extra money,” said Dante, no hesitation. “I know I’m gone a lot too--but I can promise to only stay late a couple days a week. Please, Ari?”
I nodded. “I hate flipping burgers anyway.”
He linked his hand with mine on top of his chest. His heartbeat pulsed through my fingertips. A bird landed on the sill outside our window, trying to escape the rain. It hopped a few times and took off again, and I watched it disappear into the night. I leaned my head back on the couch and took a deep breath. Then I nudged Dante’s head off my thigh and stood up.
“I’ll be right back,” I muttered, and went down the hallway to our bedroom.
When I came back, Dante was still laying on the couch. He’d gone back to watching the ceiling fan, his eyes flickering around in tiny circles. He paused and glanced up at me. “You look good upside down,” he said.
“You look good always,” I said back.
Dante covered his face with his hands to hide the blush that rose up his neck toward his cheeks. “Not fair!”
I knelt at the edge of the couch so our faces were nearly at eye level, and waited for him to open his eyes. I pulled his hands away from his face and pressed a kiss onto his forehead. “It’s true,” I told him. “You look good always, and I’m in love with you always.”
Dante looked at me. He didn’t say anything..
“So, so in love with you.”
Dante’s blush turned his skin a splotchy red. His gaze flicked back and forth between both of my eyes. “I love you too, Ari,” he said. His voice was quiet, like the words belonged only to us. I kissed him on the mouth, and then took his hands in mine to pull him into a sitting position.
“I’m going to do this right,” I said. I changed my feet so that one knee was out and the other was on the ground. Dante’s legs rested on either side of mine, and I was so close to him that it was all I could do to stop myself from kissing him again.
The ceiling fan whirred above us. It made shadows spin across our ceiling. “Do what right?” asked Dante. His hands were still in mine. I could kind of tell that he already knew what I was doing, but he asked anyway.
“Dante Quintana,” I began. My throat felt like I’d swallowed a cactus, and now it was wreaking havoc in my stomach. “I was planning on taking you out into the desert to do this, but I can’t wait any longer because you are the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.”
“Ari,” Dante said. His face told me all the things he didn’t say in words.
“These past few years, Dante… I’ve learned what it means to lose people I love. And I can never lose you, not even a little. You are the love of my life, and I want to be with you until the sun stops rising and the world ends.”
“Ari,” Dante said again. I loved hearing him say my name.
“There aren’t enough words in English or in Spanish to say how much I love you. And how much I want to spend forever with you. Since the moment I met you I’ve been in love with you, Dante. And I’m more in love with you every time you hide your own shoes, or make my mom laugh, or get distracted while we’re at the supermarket because you like the song on the radio. I want to keep falling in love with you every single day for the rest of our lives.”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the small velvet box. I cracked it open and displayed the ring for Dante to see.
“I want… to marry you. If you’ll have me.”
It was a simple ring. A golden band with a thin row of diamonds inlaid at the top. There weren’t a lot of options for men’s rings, or my budget, but this one felt the most like Dante. When I looked at it, I was looking at the stars in the desert sky.
Dante said: “That’s not how you say it.”
There were tears in his eyes, but he was doing his best to ignore them. And he was smiling, too.
“You’re supposed to do it more like--here, give me that.” He took the box from my hands and slid off of the couch. We probably looked really stupid, both of us kneeling in the cramped space between the coffee table and the couch in our tiny living room, but I didn’t care.
“Angel Aristotle Mendoza,” he said. “You are the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
I started to protest, but he held up a hand.
“When I’m with you, I don’t see the rest of the world.” The way he looked into my eyes in that moment made me believe him. It was like we were the only people that even existed. “And when we’re apart, you’re the only thing I can think of. And that makes doing anything really, really hard, okay, Ari? I try to draw a landscape or a still life, and I always just end up drawing you instead. I have so many drawings of you that they could fill a whole museum. I would call it, Falling In Love Every Day , and I would only sell admission tickets to myself.”
With the hand that wasn’t holding the ring box, he laced our fingers together
“And here’s the part you messed up, Ari, so pay close attention.” His smile was back and it was contagious. “I love you with all my heart, and I want the world to know you are mine because you are the best kind of worst thing that could ever happen to me.”
He cleared his throat. The tears were on his cheeks now. “Will you marry me?”
I didn’t even care that the ring he held out to me was the one I bought for him, or that we were on the carpet in our living room. I wrapped my arms around him and kissed him for so long that I forgot where I ended and he began.
“So that’s a yes?” Dante asked once we pulled apart.
I laughed. “Yes. Shit, of course I’ll marry you.”
Dante slid the ring onto his finger and held it out for both of us to see. “You only beat me to it because the ring I bought for you needed resizing.”
He let his forehead rest against mine. I bumped his nose with my own. “I need to hear you say it.”
“I will marry you, Ari. I will be your husband until the end of time.”
His words felt like the first drops of rain in the desert. My heart was banging around in my chest, trying to break out so it find Dante’s heart and be with it. I kissed him and said: “We should probably get up off the floor.”
Dante wrapped his arms around my neck and pulled me on top of him. “Not a chance.”
I closed my eyes and breathed him in. “Okay,” I said.