closed for: @vanessagable
where: the beach, august 24th
With NDA's in place and a solid team of assistants appointed by his band's manager Dalton, the set up for his beach proposal looked exactly how he had envisioned it. Another pat of his jacket pocket and he verified again that he hadn't fucked up and forgotten the ring, along with Van's allergy meds that were in the pocket of his trousers.
The latter was half out of necessity for the floral arrangement that surrounded him in the shape of a heart, the other half being for himself. She had asked him to carry the very same for her at the flower fest sixteen months prior, where they had ended up on that very same beach instead and shared their first kiss in three years.
( That had been all it had taken for him to know he wanted her to be his last kiss too. )
His sureness that Vanessa Gable was it for him had never wavered, all that had stood between him and what he intended to do was life and it's intricacies. He wanted the right time, right place and exact right moment -- now that all seemed trivial to him in the wake of his father's death.
The right time was any time with her, the right place was wherever she was and the right moment would be any they spent together.
Despite being certain that he knew what the answer would be -- she certainly hadn't expressed anything other than a potential yes when he had told her at the New Years masquerade that she would be his wife before the next New Years Eve -- rare nerves grip him. He never experienced those when he performed on stage no matter how large the crowd, a frontman by nature, but this was a crowd of one made up of the one.
One and Dayne, their bandmate and Submergence's lead guitar player, armed with an acoustic one rather than the electric one that was usually found in his hands on stage. After a pep talk and a relight of the candles that illuminated the flowers around him in the same shape, their drummer Bowie was supposed to clear out, though X had a sneaking suspicion that he was still nearby but out of sight.
After nearly a decade and a half together as a band, it felt right to have them there when he and Van cemented the next chapter of their life, one they would both be heavily involved in no matter what Submergence's recording or touring schedule looked like.
He glances over at Dayne as he exhales, getting a thumbs up of encouragement from the brunette that does actually manage to settle his nerves some, until the real concern rises again as the sun began to set -- had Lori pulled off the sole task he had given her?
