I hear the door crack open.

“Are you alone?” she asks. “I’m with Wynn.”

“Malcolm just left,” I admit sleepily, and the door swings wide open.

“OHMIGOD!” they squeal, and there’s bouncing on my bed around my feet before they each drop down next to me. “FUCKING TELL US THAT HE PROPOSED!” Wynn cries.

I roll to my back¸ and my face hurts from smiling so much. I wonder why they’re asking me this. Do they know me this well? I look down at my hand and . . . there’s the diamond ring flashing. I couldn’t take it off, not even to sleep. But I quickly cover it right now with my free hand.

“Rachel, we don’t have all day.” Wynn nudges me excitedly, and she seriously looks so stoked, she could be on Ecstasy right now.

“I was going to invite you guys to lunch to tell you about it.”

“Dude, you still owe us lunch, but tell us now. The whole world knows and we’re your best friends!” Gina counters.

“What? What do you mean the whole world knows?” I leap off the bed and whip out my laptop, then rush back under my warm covers.

“Go ahead and surf the Net.” Gina gestures. “Dude, your mother probably already knows.”

I open my laptop and start scouring the Net.

Within minutes, I glean the most prominent information.

a. His groupies are not happy.

b. The one who divulged to the world was goddamned Tahoe.

Well, ladies, it’s official @malcolmsaint is off the market. From now on @RachelDibs gets both the Saint and the #sinner

And the replies to that came fast and furious, with commentary that basically read, in different forms:

FUCK THAT BITCH I GIVE IT A MONTH

WHATTTT!

Seriously there’s no way Saint can get sated with just one! EVER!

I shut my laptop. “Nope,” I say. “I’m too happy to let this spoil it.”

“You can tell Saint to ask the dickhead Roth to remove it,” Gina says.

“Saint’s busy. It’ll happen anyway, the speculation. Might as well happen now.” I fall back on my pillow and my eyes drift shut as the sudden memory of last night hits me.

I’m marrying the man I am in love with, the one who takes me to Pluto and Saturn, makes me lose my senses, and makes me want to be the best I can be. Oh god.

I slide my hands under the sheets and grip my stomach. We’re not using condoms anymore. I’m on the pill but I swear I can still feel him inside me.

“Well, are you going to tell us?” they yell, snapping at me to sit up in bed.

How can I deny them when they’ve got those puppy-dog, take-me-home, tell-us-everything eyes?

How can I deny myself the pleasure of telling them ?

“Coffee first,” I say, and after I get up, brush my teeth, and slip on my fuzzy socks, I find them sitting, with a steaming cup of coffee placed right where I usually sit.

“Wow, thank you.” They’re sitting across from me, waiting, smiling the widest smiles I’ve ever seen.

I take a sip of coffee just to seem cool—like this isn’t the best thing that has ever happened to me aside from Sin—and then I nearly trip over the words of what to tell them first.

“So,” I begin, suddenly overflowing with such incredible happiness that I can’t seem to speak, so I just pull out my hand and show them Saint’s ring.

“Are you telling Mom?” Gina croaks.

“I’m calling her right now to tell her I’m coming over. I want to tell her in person.”

“Rachel!” Wynn screams, and they both hug me and urge me to call my mother.

I suppose that when you’ve been dating a guy for several months and you’ve never dated anyone before, your mother starts getting her hopes up. It seems a natural thing for a mother to want the best for her daughter. Steady job. Friends. Happiness. She watches you struggle, all while she is trying to help and simultaneously letting you spread your wings, but the very moment that your mother spots something that could make you actually happier than you already are—something that seems impossible—she sets her hopes on it.

“Have you ever discussed marriage?” she had asked only recently when I stopped by to see her one weekend.

“No. Mother! I’m twenty-three.”

“I was certain he was going to propose on your birthday,” she’d said.

“Stop dreaming. Plus, things are so perfect.”

I’m a journalist, young still. With so much to learn. I read stories, write stories, and love stories, but I’m not a person in one of my stories. This is me, real, just human and amazed that I found what I did, that the man I’ve fallen in love with actually loves me, but my mother kept asking.

And that’s not the only part of being in your first relationship.

Your friends start asking you about it too. They’ve noticed all the benefits, fund-raisers, movie nights, and they definitely noted the trip to Napa he took you on. They start noticing that the ratio of times he goes out to club with his friends versus the times he goes out with you starts leaning in your favor. And they seem to have a chart measuring all these things, as if that will tell them how serious it is. And it’s serious. It’s very serious. You know it most of all. That you’re in seriously deep, you can’t possibly go deeper. So your friends start to suspect he’s just as serious about you too.

And they keep asking, curiously, if you’ve talked marriage, and they frown when you say, “No, don’t be silly.” As if they just added one plus one in their heads and your answer isn’t two, so it’s not the right one. Not the right answer, it can’t be.