215. Chapter 215

It starts with that damn Valentine’s card, but it doesn’t end there.

It continues with a post-it note that Alex sticks onto Maggie’s coffee cop before she goes to bed one night a couple of weeks later.

“Coffee is good

Coffee is great

But instead of making it yourself

Can I take you on a breakfast date?”

Maggie chuckles and Maggie shakes her head, and she doesn’t stop smiling the entire ride on the back of Alex’s bike to this little diner they both love, because her sweet dork is just that: so, so sweet.

It happens again when Maggie’s rummaging through her gym bag, on an index card this time.

“You’re so hot

All the time

But especially when you’re working out

Damn you’re fine.”

She laughs so hard the woman in the locker room next to her raises her eyebrow, and she finds that she doesn’t care, because what did she do to get so lucky?

It happens with fair regularity, and it happens over the span of months, years.

Sometimes, the notes are at home – their home, now, officially, together – and sometimes, somehow, her secret agent girlfriend finds a way to get them in her locked desk at work, in her lab equipment.

She finds dinner invitations in her jacket pocket.

“Kara wants to do dinner tonight

And Adrian wants to come too,

I’m really excited,

Because I love my family with you.”

She discovers random reminders of her apparent beauty in the side of her boot.

“I saw the sunrise from a chopper

This morning on the job,

But it wasn’t nearly as beautiful as you,

My darling heartthrob.”

She uncovers Alex’s poems in her work notebooks, in her case files, in the box where she keeps her stamps.

“You are my sunshine

And I am your rain

Together we make a rainbow,

And rinse away all the pain.”

She keeps them all.

She jokes with James about how they’re going to have to find a bigger apartment, just to accommodate the ever-growing pile of notes.

But she never throws out a single one.

There is one, though, that they agree to frame.

The one that Alex slides across the table to her, eyes sparkling and nervous and full of life, full of love, full of hope, at a restaurant in the airport whose tarmac hosted their first encounter.

The one that makes Maggie smile hardest, the one that makes her heart soar highest.

The one that says:

“I don’t wanna imagine

My life without you,

And I will treat you right forever;

Please say I do.”

And she does, she does, she does.