Chapter 44
chapter forty-four
Mateo
The choreographed dance was going to go as badly as you could imagine. After the rehearsal dinner I took my reluctant, mildly drunk groomsmen across the resort to an empty conference room to put something together. Echo was as uncoordinated as he was wide; grace eluded him entirely. Although Pike was a fighter pilot, he apparently couldn’t distinguish his right from his left, and Angelo’s go-to move was something he learned watching Jersey Shore as a teenager. Staying on beat, even putting one foot in front of another in a sequence, was as difficult to solve as a Rubix’s Cube. Wink was the only one of them worth his weight, unsurprisingly. Sam Swan was a jack of all trades.
Ophelia hadn’t given us any rules to abide by, and after an hour sweating and frustratedly trying to come up with something original to perform with no luck, I decided to pull up an old classic on YouTube to mimic instead. One we’d all seen a dozen times. Then it started to click. For two more hours the five of us watched the White Chicks dance battle scene on repeat until we nailed it, flips and all. If that didn’t get the people going and satisfy the girls, nothing would.
It was after midnight when we were finally satisfied and exhausted. Echo went to grab a nightcap at the bar, which was code for finding someone to warm his bed for the night, and Pike and Wink left to rack out with their women. I, on the other hand, was stuck trailing my brother back to his hotel room for a sleepover while my wife spent the night alone in that big, beautiful, king-size bridal suite.
Fuck the wedding traditions.
I’d said it before and I’d say it again, there was nothing conventional about Natalia and me. Weddings were evolving. Couples didn’t even wait for the bride to walk down the aisle anymore; they were doing first looks , and I only knew this because the option was sprung on me and I stared at Tally like she’d grown two heads while she was forced to explain it.
Angelo’s room was on the same wing of the resort as mine and Tally’s, directly below it and facing the oceanside to catch the morning sunrise over the Atlantic. Meaning I’d have to stare at the ceiling all night wishing I could ram a hole in the drywall and crawl through the floor to her. We were rattling on about our hockey team’s recent playoff run when Ang shouldered us inside the doorway and flipped on the recess lighting. My shoes came to a squeaking halt on the wood floors.
“What the fuck is that?” My already low expectations plummeted further as I gaped at the bed against the wall. The one bed, against the wall. This could not be fucking happening to me. My hands found my hips. I spun around, searching for a cot or a pull-out couch, but the only other things in the room were a cuck chair and a coffee table.
“We’re cuddling, brother.” Angelo leapt onto the bed, ruffling the white comforter. “Isn’t this everything you ever dreamed of the night before your wedding?”
My finger wagged back and forth at him. “Don’t mock me right now.”
“Are we going ass to tip or ass to ass?” He tapped his finger on his chin, a smirk showing off all his teeth. “Tip to tip?”
“Flat on your back, and if you so much as scratch the underside of your balls I swear to God I’ll maim them.”
Two grown men in a queen-size bed was too close for comfort, and I’d spent weeks in a six-by-six tent in the jungle with Pike, unshowered. The difference was I didn’t have a choice with one of them.
“I don’t like this any more than you do.” He hopped off the bed with his hands up. “You’re making it really hard for me to get laid. I could be prowling at the bar like Tyler but instead I have to tuck my big brother in and read him a bedtime story. I didn’t even get a choice. You were put in my room without my knowledge.”
“Ang, if it were you and Echo sitting at a bar, what chance do you really think you’d have of getting the girl?”
Angelo scratched the back of his head, clearly unused to the shorter curls. “Some girls prefer a man with a little more pasta on his bones than meat. I’m warmer in the winter.”
“You keep believing that.” I smiled.
He snatched a toiletry bag off the top of his open suitcase on the floor and trudged into the bathroom, jarring it closed.
Not an hour later, Angelo was snoring beside me. I was under the covers with my fists pinning the sheets to my sides like I was a cadaver on a gurney, trying not to make any sudden movements and catch a hairy limb that didn’t belong to me. Even if my body was tired enough to sleep after a long day, my mind was still racing, and the ticking of Angelo’s watch on the dresser was keeping me just unsettled enough that my only option was staring at the wall.
This was complete and utter torture.
I snagged my phone off the nightstand next to me and opened our text thread.
Me
You up?
The three little dots on my screen showed up a few seconds later.
Tally
Damn, I haven’t gotten a 2 a.m. text like this since college, and on the eve of my wedding no less
Me
Send pics
Tally
Once a fuckboy always a fuckboy
Me
A domesticated fuckboy. I used to be for the streets
Tally
You are pretty well house trained
I smiled at the screen.
Me
I can’t sleep without you
Tally
Me either, I don’t like rolling over and not feeling you
Me
I’m going to instinctually try to cop a feel and end up with a hand full of beanbags
I swore I heard her laughter spill out from the floor above. That or I was consciously trying to materialize her next to me.
Me
Go out on the balcony
Throwing the covers off my body without so much as a stir from Angelo, I draped myself in his hotel robe and slipped quietly out onto the stone deck and into the warm, salty air. It was so tranquil the only sound was the wind blowing through the palm trees, shaking their leaves, and the ocean crashing onto the shallow sand. I walked over to the edge and put my elbows on the railing, taking it all in. The whole resort sprawled out in front of me in a U-shape, pool deck, cabanas, and lounges where we’d sat earlier with our friends down below. The lights inside the restaurant on the ground floor opposite me were dim. A trail of wooden fence posts marked a path to the beach access and disappeared behind a dune, poking back out at the open wedding ceremony space where Tally and I would be standing tomorrow.
The sliding glass door a floor above me opened and shut. I could sense the hesitation in Tally’s steps as she trekked onto the balcony. “Mateo?”
“Down here,” I called out.
“Have you been underneath me this whole time?”
“God, I fucking wish.”
I glanced up and saw her fingers curled over the banister, but the architecture of the patios was designed to give every guest ample privacy and the rest of her was obstructed by the angle. “Don’t worry, we can’t see each other. I know it’s technically our wedding day.”
“I always said tomorrow doesn’t start until you go to sleep.”
“Did you work everything out with Bridesmaidzilla? I mean Camilla?”
“Thankfully. Did you dance your little heart out?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“It’s keeping me awake.”
I smirked, running my fingers over my dry knuckles and the calluses on my palms. “I’ve had a lot of time to think while I was staring at the ceiling and I’m wondering how we’re doing the kiss.”
“Is that why you called me out here?” A sweet laugh trickled out of her. “We can’t exactly practice.”
“Are we keeping it PG for the parents? Throwing a little tongue action in there? Should I dip you? We only have one chance for the cameras. We can’t fuck it up.”
“I don’t know.” She giggled again, soft and dreamy. I could tell how tired she was by how loosely her words flowed, the muddled sound of her voice. “We should do whatever feels natural. Not stick to any scripts. Let’s just be us. We’re generally very good in front of a camera lens.”
“Can’t argue with that, Ms. Duran.”
“I can’t believe it’s our wedding day,” she marveled. “Or that we’re all still in one piece. It’s crazy how much planning goes into a day of your life, and then it's there and gone in a blink. Even crazier, after all this, I don’t care if every single thing goes wrong tomorrow. I already have what I always wanted.”
My chest warmed and swelled. I was desperate to reach out and touch her, bring her into my body, smell the fruity shampoo she used on her hair. Tangle my fingers in it.
“You put together an unbelievable wedding, Tal. We’re going to enjoy every minute of it, and the guests are going to be talking about it for the rest of the century. But getting married to you in that little chapel, just the two of us in a moment as raw as that, was exactly how it was meant to play out. I have no regrets.”
“Not even tipping Elvis a thousand dollars?”
I tilted my head. That momentary lapse of judgment had been stuffed into the back of my mind like a discarded tissue. He had caught me in the most vulnerable and ecstatic hour of my life, and naturally I wanted to spread the love. Schmear it, generously. “I regretted that a little bit when I found out how much Angelo’s bail was.”
“You can’t put a price on love.” I could hear the shrug in her voice.
A cooler breeze whipped over me and I stuck my hands into the pockets of the robe. We were silent for several seconds, watching the foam caps roll onto the beach and sweep back into the dark ocean without knowing where the water stopped and the night sky began.
I had a feeling we were both stalling going back inside. Falling asleep would be hopeless for me even when I did, so standing on the balcony with Tally until the sunrise was all right with me. It wasn’t fair to her though. She needed to rest before the morning because as long as today was, tomorrow would be twice that.
“I don’t like this rule,” I said. “We break all the rest of them, anyway.”
“It’s more of a superstition,” she sighed.
I looked up again and her hands were still hanging over the railing. “What are we stitious about?”
She rushed out a laugh. “They used to think if a bride saw her groom before their wedding, it would give her more time to run away.”
“That’s not a superstition, that’s called forcing pre-pubescent girls to marry grown, gout-stricken men who didn’t shower.”
“Well, when you put it like that.”
“I think that I’m the logic to your limerick, and that’s why we work so well together.”
“I didn't realize I was married to a poet,” Natalia mused.
“I can be whatever you want me to be, baby. A pillow, a blanket, a sock that gets lost under the covers at the foot of your bed, you name it.”
I pictured her shy, dimpled smile in the darkness even though I couldn’t see it. She probably had her bottom lip wedged between her teeth, wanting to give in, but fighting that last bit of resolve I was plucking at like a guitar string. An ultimatum, perhaps.
“You should sleep, angel,” I murmured. “We’ll both be so busy in the morning it will fly right by. Then I’ll see you at the altar.”
“You’re right.” She sounded disappointed, and the corner of my mouth tugged upward impishly.
My voice dropped lower, and I added, “But maybe before you slip under the covers, you tiptoe over to the door and leave it unlocked.”
Tally’s breath hitched. That I did hear loud and clear. Silence followed, like she was gathering too many thoughts together to articulate only one. I peeked up again and her arms were pulling away from the railing, footsteps retreating toward the door. “Good night,” she called out.
“Good night,” I answered. I waited until I heard her close the slider before darting back into Angelo’s hotel room. He was turned over on his stomach and snoring into the mattress, oblivious. He didn’t hear me tug my slacks back on without bothering to hinge the belt buckle, or hastily throw my dress shirt over my shoulders, leaving the buttons all undone.
I snuck out ready to be disappointed, and if that was the case I’d be okay with it because Natalia was getting what she wanted. You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take, as they say. This was no different than every other part of our relationship. The chase, the give-and-take, the teasing. It was almost always worth it to test each other's boundaries.
Nearly two in the morning, the hotel hallways were just as quiet as outside. I bypassed the elevators and pushed open the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time to the next floor to avoid waiting a second longer than I had to.
I rounded the tight corner, nearly losing my footing on the carpet, and skidded to a stop, panting with my hands on my knees in front of the bridal suite. The swing lock was wedged in the doorframe, and I threw up a victorious fist as I walked right in.