"So I kinda picked this up some time ago," he tells her, dropping the box on the round little restaurant table. It looks a little weird, all black and cloth-y on white-painted metal curlicues. He shrugs, scratches his neck. "And I kept thinking I oughta look for -- no, make the right time to... I mean, not just off the cuff but a moment that makes me go, yeah, okay, right now."
Kazuha isn't saying anything, which if you know her is kinda really weird. So he takes a deep breath in and gather his courage as a man of the Hattori family (think of all the ancestors he'd disappoint if he chickens out right now! Worse, think of his mother.)
"But then I realized..." He's blushing now, and not even because realization came in a hotel shower stall as he contentedly scrubbed another man's scent off. His eyes slide away and he coughs into his hand. "... That's. Pretty much every day."
Kazuha pokes at the box with her index finger, flipping it on another face, and then pries it open the way Gojita-san from the bomb squad handles booby-trapped packages.
She stares. Heiji waits. For thirty seconds; after that he starts getting a little annoyed. It's not that surprising, is it?
"Oi. Yes or no?"
Kazuha looks up and blinks at him. "Heiji, you huge idiot." And before he can decipher this one ('you idiot' is a secret language with a hundred possible translations, most of which depends on the direction of the wind, the position of the stars, and her mood at that exact microsecond) she's waving her hand under his nose, back turned to face him, fingers extended straight down. "Don't you know yer s'posed to put it on yerself?"
He'd believe her impatience more if she didn't sound all choked up. He's glad he doesn't need to talk right now; he might, too. But he just has to take the box back, and take her hand, and slide it on, and even if his hands shake it's faint enough not to be a bother.
She grins at him and then bursts into tears. Her sobs come out as laughter. "That's the worst... the worst proposal ever. I shoulda known."
"Oi!" Heiji protests, and then he starts laughing with her, because it kind of is, isn't it. "See if I ever propose again."
"You better not need to," Kazuha threatens, but she's still laughing and crying and he hasn't taken her threats seriously for years anyway, and it's a good thing they took a corner table because no one can see their linked hands, the ring sparkling in between their tangled fingers.