Not a nickname. Not a stage name. Her mother, a whimsical jazz singer who believed in destiny and dissonant chords, had named her for the unpredictable, the fleeting, the beautiful chaos of a sudden change in tempo. And Caprice had lived up to it every single day Leo had known her. She had moved into his apartment after knowing him three weeks, dyed her hair emerald green on a Tuesday because “the subway seat was that color,” and once quit a stable job to train service dogs for a month before realizing she was allergic to dander.
“Not in my version,” Leo said.
“And I refuse to be anyone’s ‘ball and chain.’” caprice - marry me
She slipped the ring onto her own finger, held her hand up to the fairy lights, and said, “I’ll give you five years. Then we renegotiate.”
Her name was Caprice.
“But then I realized,” Leo continued, stepping closer. “I can’t ask you for forever. Because ‘forever’ implies a straight line. And you… you’re a scribble. You’re a key change in the middle of a quiet song. You’re the sudden left turn when the GPS said go right.”
So he abandoned the plan.
“I’m not asking you to be my wife,” he said. “I’m asking you to be my next caprice. The big one. The one where we wake up one day and we’re old, and you’ve dyed your hair purple this time, and I’ve finally learned to stop planning every meal. I’m asking you to let me be your constant variable while you change everything else.”