Chapter 16 Aurelie #4
It was a note folded around a scrap of lace. I lifted the garter, soft blush pink, the fabric whisper-thin. I just laughed before focusing on Callum’s scrawl, dark and crooked across the page:
Something borrowed: your control.
Something blue: my balls if you don’t come back to me fast.
This? This is for later.
—Your Husband (almost)
At the very bottom, in smaller handwriting:
Turn it over.
My fingers trembled as I flipped the parchment. His handwriting was slightly messier here, like he’d scribbled it quickly, like maybe he was spiraling when he wrote it, wrecked and giddy and buzzing just like I was now.
Pain and poetry forever, right baby?
Mo chridhe.
Wear it so I can tear it off with my teeth tonight.
I nearly dropped it.
The garter was suddenly too hot in my palm. My thighs clenched. My breath shuddered. I craved him when my pussy clenched around nothing, could hear the rasp of his voice in every word, could feel his stubble on my thighs.
It was filthy. It was perfect. It was him. And it made me want to cry and come and sprint into forever.
I laughed, breathless, as I scrambled to slide the garter on my left thigh, then straighten my dress.
My hands were shaking, my heart was full, and my panties? Ruined. Again.
I started to fold the note back up when I saw a butterfly he’d drawn in the corner. The wings were uneven, sketched like he used to doodle in the margins of his notebooks during GPDA meetings. And right beneath it, he wrote, You give me butterflies.
And as if conjured from the ink, movement flickered in my periphery.
I stilled.
A blue butterfly—so vivid it looked unreal—fluttering just in front of me, wings shimmering in the light.
It floated for a breathless moment, then landed gently on the olive sprig tucked in my bouquet, still resting on the ground at my feet.
Its wings were the exact blue of Callum’s eyes.
The color of sky and sea and the first moment I knew I loved him.
I stared. It didn’t feel random. It felt… intentional.
And suddenly, I remembered the loss, the ache we carried, the pain that nearly broke me.
But he didn’t run. He held me through it. Every cramp, every sob, every hour I didn’t think I could go on—he stayed. He never looked away, and he loved me harder.
Butterflies meant change. And rebirth. And the souls of those we loved. Sometimes they meant rainbow babies. Sometimes they meant hope.
And in that moment, watching the wings pulse slowly, I realized if we could survive that, if we could still make each other laugh and ache and feel like this after everything… we’d be okay.
My stomach fluttered. My fingers brushed the sketched wings. And to myself, I smiled.
“Yeah,” I whispered. “You give me butterflies too, baby.”
I slipped the note into the bouquet ribbon, tucking it behind my vows like a secret only the two of us would know.
The butterfly lifted gently from the olive sprig and drifted up into the olive branches above, like it had delivered its message and was ready to go.
I watched it disappear into the blue sky.
And then I stepped forward.
Olive and grape. Two sides of the same coin. One bore fruit from stone; the other from sun and water. One was bitter, twisted, gnarled, resilient. The other bloomed soft and sweet, coaxed gently toward harvest.
Rivals in nature, bound in cultivation.
Split like enemies, drawn together in the center of the orbit we created.
It was symbolic in ways I hadn’t expected, this grove. These vines. This marriage.
And I realized maybe I wasn’t being “given away” in the traditional sense. I was giving myself—fully, wholly, fearlessly—to the only man who’d ever held my heart and never broken it. Only helped it beat stronger.
I waited for loneliness to hit, to ache for the absence of my father walking me down the aisle. But as I adjusted my veil and took my first barefoot step forward, I realized I didn’t feel lost. I felt found.
Suddenly, I understood.
This walk wasn’t about being given away. It was about being seen. Being celebrated. Being loved.
And as I stepped forward barefoot, dress whispering against the earth, veil catching the breeze behind me, I didn’t feel like I was missing anything at all.
Every broken step that led to here. Every scar, every sacrifice, every lonely night, every defiant scream.
This was my walk. The journey I’d taken on my own, through grief and glory and every aching inch of self-discovery.
Where I rebuilt myself from the ground up and found my identity in the wreckage.
I had grown into the woman who now walked—unshaking, unbowed—toward everything she had ever wanted.
And there Callum was, at the end of the aisle with his back to me, down the row of olive trees and golden light, a man I had idolized, then yearned for, and now loved with every fiber of my being stood waiting to become my husband.
By grace. By fate. By fire.
I was ready.
Sunlight glittered through the canopy, a breeze lifting the veil at my back just enough to make me believe in fate, as if it hadn’t carried me here on purpose. Like it hadn’t put me exactly where I was always meant to land.
Up ahead, the boys and Ivy waited beneath the simple wood arch, draped with ivory fabric, fluttering in the wind. Pink peonies and olive branches twined into soft loops, framed by the Aegean behind them, glittering like a second sky.
Marco stood tall, and definitely crying, though he tried to hide it by pretending to squint against the sun. Kimi was composed, but his hand was subtly resting on Marco’s shoulder like a tether.
Ivy clutched her bouquet to her chest and mouthed “don’t trip” with tears in her eyes and the grin of someone who’d never seen me shine so bright.
The music swelled, Lucy’s voice lifting, soft and slow, the guitar humming like a heartbeat behind her.
Hands trembling, heartbeat racing, grin splitting my face in half… and all of me burning with the kind of love that survived the crash.
Every hard thing we’d survived softened at the edge, even the light had decided to be kind.
And Callum Fraser—my idol, my champion, the king of my goddamn heart—turned.