My Husband Took His Mistress on Our Honeymoon (Her Marriage in Crisis #88)

1. Melody

— ? —

Melody

I have been dreaming about today for longer than I’ve known Leo, which is a strange thing to admit on your own wedding day.

Not this exact day. Not the dress. Don’t get me wrong.

The dress is beautiful. It took three fittings and a seamstress named Pilar, who treated my waistline like a personal vendetta, and right now it fits like it was poured onto me.

But standing in this little side room with the door cracked and the string music leaking through, I am not thinking about the dress, or the crowd out there.

I’m thinking about everything this day is finally about to give me.

For four years, I have been waiting to marry Leo.

To stop being two people with one toothbrush holder and become something with a name.

A wife. His wife. I used to think the word would feel heavy, and instead it feels like a door swinging open.

In a few minutes, I’m going to walk out there in front of everyone I know and step through it, and the thought makes my chest go tight in a way I’ve decided is the good kind.

The aisle is shorter than it looked in the rehearsal.

I keep my eyes up because Jessica warned me that brides who look at their feet end up in the bloopers.

So I look at Leo. He’s handsome in that suit.

He has always been handsome, that easy kind of handsome that never had to try, and when he sees me, his eyebrows go up like he’s pleasantly surprised, like I’m a nice thing that arrived in the mail.

He smiles. I wait for him to cry. He doesn’t.

I tell myself that’s a man thing, that he’s holding it together, that some people just don’t.

I reach the front and hand my flowers to Jessica. His hands close around mine, warm and a little damp, and I think, this is it, this is the moment, feel something enormous.

The officiant talks. I don’t hear most of it.

I catch words the way you catch leaves, a few out of the thousands going past. Cherish.

Honor. As long as you both shall live. Leo says his vow first, and then it’s my turn, and I open my mouth to say the thing I wrote at two in the morning over six different drafts, alone at the kitchen table while he slept, and for one clean second, the room goes quiet inside my head.

“You’re the calm I never knew I needed. The one steady thing in a life that never sits still. Loving you has always been the easiest thing I’ve ever done.”

I wrote that in March, curled up on the couch at midnight, and I cried when I finished it. I meant every word so hard it hurt.

Now I’m saying it out loud and I’m watching my own mouth move from somewhere far away.

The words are still true. I think they’re still true.

But they’re coming out flat, like a song you’ve played so many times you stopped hearing it.

I tell myself it’s the exhaustion. The months of planning, the four hours of sleep, the headache sitting behind my left eye since Tuesday.

You don’t feel things at full volume when you’re this tired. That’s all this is.

When I look back at Leo to slide the ring on, his eyes have drifted somewhere past my shoulder, toward the guests, and then they come back to me and he grins.

“Sorry,” he whispers. “Spaced for a second.”

“Me too,” I whisper, and we both laugh because we think we mean the same thing.

The officiant says the words. Leo kisses me.

The room stands up and roars. And I wait for the floor to fall away and the violins to swell and the certainty everyone promised.

Instead, I just feel my own heartbeat, and the heat of the crowd, and Leo’s hand already loosening on mine to wave at his cousins in the third row.

With him far away where the drinks are, my mind can’t stop running ahead to what comes next. I’ve been waiting on this just as long, and if I’m honest with myself right now, it’s the thing that keeps pulling at me even here.

Thailand.

The honeymoon. A place I’ve wanted so badly for so long that it feels less like a trip and more like a memory I haven’t made yet.

I have a folder on my laptop named “T” so nobody would ask.

Inside it there are photos of long-tail boats and limestone cliffs that come straight up out of green water and temples at dawn before the heat ruins everyone’s mood.

I have been dreaming about putting my face in that water since I was twelve years old and saw it on a calendar in my dentist’s office.

I bought a little phrasebook two years ago and taught myself to say hello and communicate the basics.

I read about the festivals, the markets, and the way you slip your shoes off at the temple door.

“You’re doing the face,” Jessica says.

She’s beside me now, glass of something in her hand, mascara holding on by faith alone. She has been my best friend since we were nineteen and broke and splitting one plate of fries between us, and she always knows exactly where my head goes when it wanders.

“What face.”

“The one where you go somewhere I can’t follow.” She nudges my shoulder with hers. “Where’d you go?”

“Krabi,” I admit.

“Of course you did.” She laughs, and for a second the tightness in my chest eases.

I keep feeling that pressure under my ribs that I’m assuming is just nerves. Or maybe relief, that after months of stress and planning, most of it mine, this day finally came.

“You okay? You look a little...”

“A little what?”

“I don’t know. Tired. Far away.” She bumps my knee with hers. “It’s your wedding, Mel. You’re allowed to actually be at it.”

“I am at it.” It comes out sharper than I mean. I soften it. “Sorry. I’m running on four hours of sleep and a headache that started Tuesday. I planned this whole thing into the ground. Right now I just want to be on that plane.”

“You plan everything. It’s literally your job.”

She’s not wrong. Eight years of corporate events - product launches, charity galas, other people’s weddings with budgets that could feed a small nation.

I’ve built five hundred perfect days for strangers, and my boss has taken credit for every single one of them.

The joke at the office is that I could run an invasion if somebody gave me a clipboard.

Jessica watches me a beat longer than I’d like. “You sure that’s all it is?”

“What else would it be?”

She opens her mouth, then closes it, and decides on a smile instead. “Nothing. You’re just intense, that’s all. You’ve always been intense.” She squeezes my hand. “Go find your husband. Dance with him before he gets pulled into another twenty-minute story with the cousins.”

Leo is everywhere and nowhere. I look across the room for him out of habit.

He’s by the bar, head thrown back laughing at something, completely in his element.

He’s a good host, better at the party than he ever was at the planning, a hand on this shoulder and a laugh at that joke, and every time I find him across the floor he’s mid-story with someone I half recognize.

I’m the one who knows which vendor needs paying and where the spare boutonnieres are, the way I’ve known every small thing for months.

When we finally dance, he holds me close and hums along to a song that isn’t the one I picked, and I rest my cheek on his chest and decide that this, the warm weight of him, the steady thud under my ear, is the enormous feeling.

It’s quieter than I expected. Maybe that’s what real is. Quiet.

“You happy?” he asks into my hair.

“Yes.” And I am, mostly. “Are you?”

There’s the smallest pause. A half beat. The kind of thing you’d never notice unless you spent four years learning the rhythm of a person.

“Course I am,” he says. “Big day.”

He checks his phone over my shoulder while we sway. I see the screen light and go dark. I tell myself it’s the catering company, or his groomsmen, or a hundred ordinary things, because tonight is not a night for the small hard nameless thing in my chest, and I shove it down again where it lives.

By the time the sparkler send-off happens, I have stopped looking for the certainty. I have decided I’ll find it tomorrow, on a beach, when it’s just us and the water and no crowd, no spreadsheets, no folder named T. That’s where the marriage really starts. Not here. There.

“Plane leaves at midnight,” Leo says, loosening his tie in the car. “You actually packed the snorkel thing?”

“I packed the snorkel thing.”

He laughs and squeezes my knee and looks out the window, and I look at his profile lit up by passing streetlights, and I love him.

I do. I tell myself I do, and saying it inside my own head shouldn’t feel like rehearsing, but I’m exhausted down to the bone, and everything feels strange tonight, so I let it go.

***

The flight is long and dark, and I’m asleep before we even leave the runway.

I don’t sleep well usually. Tonight I’m gone the second my head finds his shoulder, the wedding draining out of me all at once, months of buildup collapsing into exhaustion.

His arm is around me. The cabin lights dim.

Somewhere over the ocean, I’m dreaming about green water and limestone cliffs, the thing I’ve wanted my whole life, finally close enough to touch, and I have no idea that the man whose shoulder I’m drooling on is awake.

I have no idea that he waits until my breathing goes slow and even. That he reaches into his jacket with his free hand, careful not to wake me, and lifts his phone above my head where I can’t see it.

I have no idea what he types.

I miss you already.