12. Bex
Chapter twelve
Bex
Ican't believe I said that. Let's go in. I can't believe Kit said okay.
Kit reaches the door first. She knocks with the tip of one index finger, careful, like the building might be a client she doesn't want to startle. I almost laugh. We are about to do the least careful thing either of us has ever done, and she's knocking politely.
The door opens.
She's a short, compact woman in a cardigan, probably in her sixties, her steel-gray hair pulled into a simple twist at the back of her neck. She squints only briefly, as though two women knocking on her door at two in the morning is an everyday occurrence. Then she offers a small, knowing smile.
"You here for a ceremony?" she asks.
Just like that. Straight to business.
Every logical cell in my body screams that I should say, "No, sorry, wrong building," and leave. Instead, I hear my voice say, "Yes. We, um, we want a ceremony."
She doesn't wait for anything more. She waves us in, the corners of her eyes crinkling. She's done this before.
We step into a narrow front room with plastic flowers, a creaky floor, and a sign that says something about wearing your best attitude for your big day.
There's a desk off to the left. A small corridor leads to a curtained-off area in the back.
A potted fern stands in one corner, like maybe it's the official witness.
The hush is unreal. Even the city noise outside feels a thousand miles away.
I do what I always do in an unfamiliar room: I case it like a shop.
Old habit. The desk is the front counter.
The forms are the consent paperwork. The curtained area in the back is where the actual work happens.
If I squint, this is just Nico's place with worse lighting and a fern instead of flash sheets on the walls.
A wedding is basically a tattoo, I tell myself.
You sign something, it costs more than you expected, and it's permanent.
This reclassification holds for approximately four seconds.
Kit's hand finds mine, which is basically the only reason I haven't turned around and run. She's gripping my fingers in a way that suggests she's just as unsettled, but also that she won't break first.
The overhead lamp glows with a flicker. A fan in the corner does almost nothing against the Louisiana heat, but I'm not sure the warmth under my skin has anything to do with the temperature.
The woman gestures to a metal folding chair.
We don't sit. She's already retrieving a small stack of forms from a battered wooden desk.
"Let's get names," she says, pen poised, as calm as if we're applying for a library card.
Kit speaks first, voice trembling. "Katerina Bennett."
I supply, "Rebecca Russo."
The officiant writes them down efficiently, then glances up. "I'll need IDs."
Kit rummages in her purse. I fumble mine out of my wallet.
My license photo is six years old, back when I still had the undercut, and for one unmoored second I think: that version of me would not believe where this ID is currently being presented.
The officiant studies them for half a second, then passes them back.
She doesn't bother remarking on how improbable it all is.
Two travelers, rumpled from a night out, obviously not following any traditional script.
Somewhere in Carroll Gardens, my mother is asleep.
She calls me every Tuesday. She is going to call me this Tuesday, and I am going to answer, and I am not going to tell her a single thing about this room.
The thought arrives fully formed, which is how I know some part of me has already decided we're going through with it.
"You got a license?" she asks.
I freeze. Kit's grip tightens on my hand. "A license?"
"Louisiana marriage license. Gotta have that before I can sign anything official." The woman taps the stack of forms. "I can process the paperwork right here, but there's an after-hours fee. Or you come back during business hours like sensible people."
For a second I can almost feel the wave of relief rolling through Kit's body. There it is. The exit ramp. The reasonable thing. This can't be real, and now it doesn't have to be.
But then Kit doesn't take it. She just looks at me.
And me? I'm standing here, hearing my father's voice in my head telling me I never do anything serious. Telling me I'm just messing around with tattoos and no real future. Hearing Kit on that sidewalk ten minutes ago saying I wouldn't actually pick her.
I'm picking her. Right now, in this moment, I'm picking her. Maybe it's insane. Probably it's insane. But something huge is welling in me that won't let me back out.
I turn to her, heart pounding. "We can leave," I say softly. "But if we stay, if we do this, you're sure we want to go all the way? Official?"
She stares at me. Her eyes reflect both panic and something else. Slowly, she exhales. "We can always fix the official part later if we need to," she says, voice shaking.
That's not exactly a no.
So I press forward, adrenaline rocketing through me. "The paperwork, then?"
Kit bites her lower lip. That small gesture hits me right under the ribs. Then, unbelievably, she nods. "Yes."
It feels like my entire body just short-circuited. I blink. "Yeah?"
"Yeah," she says. "Let's see where this goes."
The officiant, to her credit, doesn't so much as raise an eyebrow. She slides two blank forms toward us and quotes a price that makes me choke slightly. It is not cheap to buy a spontaneous marriage at two in the morning.
Kit is already scanning the form, eyes trailing each line carefully. Of course she is. I'm half expecting her to stop, to say no, to claim this is a step too far. But she signs her name at the bottom. I sign right next to hers, and my hand trembles a bit, so the signature slants. Kit's is neater.
"Do you have rings?" the officiant asks, turning to a different stack of papers.
My stomach lurches. Of course we don't have rings. I open my mouth to confirm it, and what comes out is, "Um, no."
The officiant sets her pen down and rummages in a drawer.
She pulls out the shallowest of shallow trays, maybe a repurposed plastic dish, and sets it on the desk.
Inside are a few pairs of plain metal bands in small ziplock bags.
"Silver-plated," she explains. "Ten dollars each.
Most folks just want something to mark the day. "
The rings are not special. They're definitely not sized for us. They are also the only rings available.
Without thinking, my thumb finds the silver ring on my own index finger and gives it a turn.
I've worn it so long it's basically part of my hand, a piece of metal I picked up at a flea market for less than these cost, back when I was new to Brooklyn and wanted something that felt like mine.
Funny that the most permanent thing I own started out that cheap.
Maybe that's the trick nobody tells you. The permanence isn't in the metal.
I wait for Kit to speak. I watch her look at that sad little tray, and I can see her somewhere behind her eyes, standing in every immaculate ballroom she's ever run, every insured heirloom band she's ever couriered across a city. This is the polar opposite of all of it.
She presses her lips together and nods. "We'll take them."
Before I can reach for my wallet, she's pulling out hers.
Her credit card looks so ordinary in her hand.
The officiant swipes it on a tiny card reader, and the finality of that beep rattles something loose in me.
Kit Bennett just paid a flat fee for a two a.m. wedding, and she did it before she could think about it long enough to stop herself.
I know that's what she did, because I watched her not think.
I've spent all weekend watching her think.
The officiant prints a small receipt, passes it over, and shuffles the forms into a neat stack.
Papers. Signatures. A short legal explanation of what we've signed.
Once she adds her own signature after the ceremony, the state of Louisiana recognizes this as legitimate.
There is no pretend version happening here. This is actually official.
Ten minutes after knocking on the door, we are theoretically legal to marry.
I can't breathe.
And here's the thing my brain chooses to do with that: it goes back to the shop.
Not the dare, not the bottle spinning, but the moment right before, when Kit was in my chair with her wrist turned up and her jaw set, and she looked at the needle the way most people look at a cliff edge, and then she looked at me instead.
She held still because I told her I had her.
Nobody holds still like that for someone they don't trust.
That's the observation that's been circling me all night, waiting for its moment. It picked now.
Sofia's face floats up next, unhelpfully.
My sister, three streets away, asleep in a rental with cucumber slices probably still chilling in the fridge for tomorrow's under-eye emergency.
Sofia, who joked that we should just get married, who is going to walk down an aisle in three weeks in front of two hundred people while her baby sister carries around a secret the approximate size of Louisiana.
I file that under problems for a future Bex. The drawer is getting extremely full.
The officiant glances around the cramped front room. "No guests, I assume?"
I smile faintly. "No. It's just us."
She nods, heading toward another door that presumably leads into the ceremonial area. "All right, come on in. I'll make it quick, if that's what you want."
She doesn't wait for an answer.
Kit doesn't move right away. She's standing very still, the little ziplock bag with my ring in it resting in her open palm like she's weighing it. Her other hand is still in mine.
"Hey," I say quietly. "We can still walk out that door. No paperwork gets signed by anyone but us until we say words in that room. You know that, right?"
Her eyes come up to mine. There's terror in them, no point pretending otherwise. But underneath the terror is that same stubborn thing I saw in the tattoo chair, the thing that looked at a needle and said yes anyway.
"I know," she says.
She doesn't let go of my hand.
Neither do I.
We follow the officiant toward the doorway. Through it I can see a small rectangular room, a fake ficus in the corner, a row of metal folding chairs, a lectern with a worn binder on it. No music. No aisle. No guests except a potted fern and whatever version of ourselves we walk out of here as.
A binder, I think, a little hysterically. Of course the ceremony runs on a binder. Somewhere in the universe, this is somebody's idea of a joke built specifically for Kit Bennett, and I get to be standing next to her when it lands.
My whole life, I've turned away from things before they could turn away from me. Left first. Joked first. Kept moving. It's a good system. It has never once failed to keep me exactly as safe and exactly as alone as I planned to be.
I'm not moving now.
Kit takes a breath beside me, squares her shoulders the way she does before she walks into any room she intends to handle, and steps through the door.
I step through after her.