“YES!” the audience yelled in response.

Sacha pointed out into the audience before jumping up high off of a speaker, at the same time the cymbals on the drum set crashed and the second to last song began.

Me.

Me.

I was the greatest thing since air conditioning, and who didn't love air conditioning?

When I looked over at Mason with what I'm sure was the dumbest, goofiest smile to ever exist, he grimaced and shoved at my head, which only made me smile more.

In that moment, I made that decision that there was nothing, and I mean nothing, that I'd let stand between Sassy and I. There would only ever be him. He was the end to my beginning.

An hour later, when we were standing around outside while the guys finished signing autographs and posing for pictures drenched in sweat and smelling like dirty socks, I let myself take it all in. Sacha walked over after ending a conversation with a couple of fans and grinned. The bastard knew I had the swoons for him and his words. Plus, he was still wearing his stage clothes, specifically the suspenders he’d added to his performance wardrobe.

"I love air conditioning," I told him, threading my fingers through his when he stopped in front of me.

He nodded, smiling that same grin that I'm sure I’d replicated when he'd spoken to the audience earlier. "Me too, Rocky. Me too."

In twenty-four hours, we were going to be separated by thousands of miles. But distance was insignificant when you loved someone the way I loved Sacha. Like air conditioning. And laughter.

Epilogue

"Hiiii," I cooed into the camera on my laptop.

"Hi, Princess." The screen in front of me blurred while I figured Sacha moved around his hotel room. A second later the shot focused on the normally handsome man on the screen. He looked terrible. His pale eyes were dull, highlighted by the dark bags beneath them.

"You look like shit," I said, taking in the sickly, ashen shade of his skin. It was a telltale sign that the flu he’d come down with two days ago was still kicking his ass.

Sacha smiled weakly, chuckling. "Happy anniversary to you, my love."

I squeaked, temporarily forgetting about how sick he looked. "Happy anniversary!"

"I'm sorry I can't be there," he murmured, running a hand through his growing hair. The last time I'd seen him—almost four weeks ago—it'd been at its usual short buzz cut length on the sides. Recently, he'd been getting a lot lazier about shaving it meticulously, and I liked it. Then again, I'd probably still think he was beautiful if he had a mullet—the true sign of a perfect specimen.

I shrugged, smiling at him through the camera. "It's okay. My present showed up in the mail yesterday, but I waited until today to open it like the box said," I told him in a sing-song voice, with a wiggle to my eyebrows, holding up the cool bracelet he'd sent me from Indonesia. "I love it."

Sacha leaned forward to rest his chin on his hand, still looking out of sorts but happy. The plain white-gold band on his ring finger winked at me, reminding me that exactly a year ago, we'd decided at the last minute to go get hitched. We didn't even have rings when we did it. It had just been two random people at the courthouse who’d served as our witnesses, and us. Weeks later, we finally got around to getting some simple bands and couldn’t have been happier.

We'd made it exactly two months living in different states before he stated the distance was killing him. In sixty days, he’d visited me three times, and I’d gone to see him twice in San Francisco before accepting that we didn't want to be so far away from each other. Correction: We couldn't be so far away from each other.