Free Yours Truly by Jen Meyers

that interesting—he got down on one knee, and I said yes. You don’t want to hear it.”
    “Of course I do.” She leaned her elbows on the table and waited expectantly.
    I turned to Josh, my mind racing to come up with some story so he wouldn’t have to, but under the table he just calmly placed a hand on my knee and squeezed.
    “Well,” he started, and my parents both leaned closer, ready to be enraptured again. “After that first night we met, we bumped into each other several more times up on the roof, then started making regular dates to meet there. It became our place even before we were dating. It still is.” He took a sip of wine amidst complete silence—my parents hung on his every word and I was too anxious to know what he would say to breathe, let alone speak. “So, on The Night, I lit up the roof with candles all around the edge, had two bottles of her favorite Sam Adams—Octoberfest—and a pint of her favorite salted caramel and bittersweet chocolate ice cream.” He paused, turning his smile on me.
    They were my favorites, and I could hardly believe he knew that. I mean, we’d been good friends for three years, but I guess I never realized how well he knew me.
    “When she arrived, I gave her this speech about how long we’ve known each other, how she was the only person I always wanted more time with no matter how much time we spent together, and how I never wanted to be without her.” He swung his arm over the back of my chair, squeezed my shoulder, and pulled me into him. “And since she realized she didn’t want a life without me either, she said yes.”
    I nodded, mesmerized. “Well, who wouldn’t?” I took a deep breath, sucked in by his story. “That is the most perfect proposal I’ve ever heard. Wow.”
    “And you said it wasn’t a good story, Will,” my dad said, clucking his tongue.
    Crap.
    “Well…I just hadn’t ever heard Josh tell it before.” It wasn’t a lie, thank goodness, but even so my cheeks were tingling and I could feel my face grow warm. “He tells it REALLY well.”
    Part of me almost wished it were true because it was possibly THE most romantic proposal I’d ever heard. Lucky had been proposed to ad nauseam , but not one of them had even come close to this. And while Austin’s proposal to Ever had been all swoony and adorable…the whole public proposal thing? Nope. I wasn’t into flashy or anything that required the kind of coordination it took to put on a Broadway show.
    Not that those weren’t fun—they totally were. They just weren’t me. Simple and personal, what he had just described, was my idea of perfection.
    Damn. Josh was going to make some girl REALLY happy one day.
    That thought should have made me feel good for him and his future wife, but it actually left me unsettled. Slightly out of sorts. I shook it off, though, ignoring the little pang in my gut, and filed this moment away to use in one of my books.
    Because SERIOUSLY. I was swooning here.
    I leaned back, grabbed a pen and a sticky pad off the counter behind me, and scribbled proposal on it so I’d remember.
    When I looked up, my mom had tears in her eyes and she was reaching for Josh’s hand. “We are so thrilled that you found each other. George and I feel so much better about Willow being in the city, knowing that she’s not alone.”
    “She’s not alone,” Josh said, his arm still around me, his hand warm on my shoulder. “Not as long as I’m around.”
    I smiled at him, but this knot of emptiness and longing formed in my gut at his words…because they were not true. I was alone.
    I wanted to be alone.
    I was happy being alone.
    So why was I suddenly feeling like my life plan had a gigantic man-shaped hole in it, one that could not be filled one hot night after another?
    Looking across the table at my parents, they were saturated with each other—happier together than they were apart. It felt so good sitting here with them, Josh by my side. I was surrounded by