Chapter Twenty-nine
Silly little reluctant wife-to-be.
Mars
“Why did I say that?” Ceres, possibly, hyperventilates in my arms.
I run my fingers through her silken hair. “I need to get you a ring. Unless your necklace counts as one.”
“I can’t believe I told my mother I was getting married! To you . I—” she chokes on her words while I reminisce over the way she stumbled through telling her mother about her fiancé. She said I was sweet . Really sweet. An excellent listener. Kind. A great cook.
She sang my praises for ages. It was glorious.
“You need a wedding dress.” I hum, trailing a finger down the bumps of her spine. “I need a tux. And sunglasses.” Any public event one might shed a tear at requires sunglasses, for a Rogue simply does not cry in front of just anyone.
“ Mars ,” Ceres snaps, lifting her face to implore me.
I am unable to be implored. Pinching her chin, I smile. “Where should we go on our honeymoon, my dearest love? Somewhere quiet? Somewhere exotic? Simply the bookstore?”
Her damp eyes widen. “I…haven’t been inside a bookstore for years.”
“I know, precious.” I kiss her forehead. “That will change. My wife will enjoy bookstores again, to her heart’s content. Perhaps we can make our visits a weekly affair. Date night.”
“Bookstores every Friday…” she whispers, awed, then— unfortunately—she comes to her senses and snaps, “ Mars . I’m not marrying you! I can’t be your wife. I can’t even talk to my mother without being an idiot. You need to stop being delusional; I need to wake up from this nightmare.”
Moonlight paints her hair in a most becoming shade, so I draw several strands to my lips. “Are you going to invite your father as well? I need to know how large to make the carrot cake.”
She collapses against my chest. “Why are you like this?” Her shoulders sag. “Why am I like this? What is wrong with me? What is medically and clinically wrong with me?”
“Because something has to be mentally wrong with you for you to want to marry me?”
She huffs. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but yes.”
I arch a brow at my dear wife-to-be’s deflated back. “I am uncertain there is a right way to take that statement, Ceres.”
“Mars, please. Our relationship started with you walking into my house and bribing me into helping you plan a Flag Day festival. Since then, you’ve actually broken into my home with a lock pick set, and I’ve just let you.”
“Well, if you didn’t want me to visit unexpectedly, you should have been more clear.”
“I was clear. I stopped keeping my spare key outside. And you got the message. And then I was so lonely I actually got mad that you didn’t break in sooner.”
“Well, I mean… I’m sure all that is…normal? And absolutely mentally stable behavior.” It’s just book girlie behavior, really.
“We’re insane, not stupid,” she mutters. Pulling from my arms, Ceres flops against the blankets and pillows piled around us and covers her face with her hands. “Ugh.”
Cold, I look between my now-empty loving embrace and my reluctant fiancée. I stretch my fingers. I blink. “Ceres, dear.”
She grunts. Articulate.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but did you not provide your mother with an ode to my character’s charms at length?”
“I was stress rambling.”
“You were stress rambling lies? You don’t actually think I’m kind or a good cook?”
She drags her palms down her face and glares at me. “Does that matter nearly as much as the fact that sometimes I just wake up to you cooking in my kitchen? Unannounced? Without permission? After we’ve known each other for a measly few months? And this behavior started after barely a few weeks?”
“Your breakfast intake has risen exponentially. The number of meals you have in a given day has gone from point five to roughly two, on average. You’re healthier. Your life is better.”
Her arms cross. “I never said it wasn’t. I said I have to be mentally unwell to be chill with the way you’ve gone about it.”
My lungs fill as I open my mouth, but she’s not wrong.
And I have found the right way to take her previous statement.
Allowing breath to leave me, I comb my fingers through my hair.
“So, we’re both mentally unstable in ways that improve one another’s life.
Isn’t that a really good reason to get married? ”
Her glare gets more glare-y, and I suspect she’ll provide me with a sensible response that enlightens me to very good points on why we should, absolutely, not get married. Subverting all expectations, she quips, “Well, yeah . But, still .”
Oh-ho? How delightful.
I beam. “You are being illogical.”
“I am not . This entire situation is illogical. I should not be kinda okay with the idea of marrying someone I haven’t known very long who is an unconvicted criminal on a near-daily basis. I’m appalled with myself.”
“You’re appalled because you’re okay with it, not because you aren’t?”
She snatches a pillow, covers her face, and screams into it. I skillfully dodge the projectile when it comes flying toward me. Clearly, my love is having a moment . But that’s fine. She can have as many moments as she wants. I hope to enjoy them for the rest of our lives.
“I’m calm,” she says, puffing a stray hair off her forehead. “I’m rational. I’m fine. Everything is fine. This is fine.”
“Convincing.”
She throws another pillow at me. “We need to have a serious conversion. Pull it together.”
We are in a blanket nest on a trampoline. It would be very hard to be unserious at such a time as this, I think.
“Would you be moving in with me?” she asks.
Oh. Okay. We’re jumping right in. Of course. Why waste time? My heart doesn’t need a moment to keep itself from bursting at all. “I think that moving into your home makes the most sense.”
“We’ll need to convert my guest room into your office. And find a place for Gingerbread’s mansion.” Her body shakes, and I watch a hard swallow move her throat. “I might …have to downsize my book collection…”
My heart skips a beat. She’d…get rid of books for me? To make space for me?
I love her. I love this woman. I would die for her. I would fall on my sword for her sake. She can say whatever she wants about my brother as a joke. I think she’s just cured half my insecurities.
Lifting my hand, I grip my clothes over my palpitating heart, which might just be contemplating rupture. “I can build you a library,” I say.
“Putting another building on my property would raise taxes. We’d have to get permits. It’d be a whole thing.”
“I’ll take care of it, and we can cover it.”
Harsh hazel eyes flick to me, scan, narrow. “Rolling ladder?”
“Naturally.”
“Excellent. This union is sounding better and better by the minute, which is—of course—horrifying.” She reaches for her necklace and locks her fingers around it, pulling to choke herself as she fiddles with the metal heart.
“We’ve not talked about anything relationally important. We need physicals.”
“Physicals?”
“Like medical evaluations. We’re both virgins, but that doesn’t mean genetic diseases are off the table. We both need to know what we might be dealing with. That’s common sense, isn’t it?”
Is…it?
“We should also take a pre-wedding couple’s counseling class to sort out the most common issues ahead of time. Money habits. Expectations. Parenting styles. Children .” She pales in the moonlight. “Is two months enough time to prepare for that?”
I have information about pre-marriage counseling pulled up on my phone in moments.
“We’d have to get started fairly expeditiously, and see if we can’t have more than one session a week.
Shouldn’t be too difficult. I’m pretty sure I went to school with the person we would go to. I have loads of blackmail on Braden.”
“Don’t blackmail our counselor.”
“I won’t, unless it’s completely necessary.”
Her lip juts in her scowl. “That shouldn’t make me more attracted to you.”
I settle myself down beside her in the blankets and stare at the starry sky with her. “Yet, here we are.”
Her hand finds mine, and every muscle in my body eases. “Yeah,” she says, tangling our fingers. “Here we are.”
When I glance at her profile, I am wholly convinced she’s the most beautiful woman in the entire world. And I am strikingly unworthy. “Ceres?”
“Hm?”
“You don’t have to do this. If you can’t text your mother an explanation about your anxiety and how you’re still working through people-pleasing compulsions in a way she understands, then I’m not sure it’s time for you to rekindle a relationship with her.”
She faces me, scowl forgotten, eyes helpless. “So you don’t actually want to marry me?”
“I desperately want to marry you. But I need you to want to marry me, too.”
“What if I’m a naggy wife?”
“You’re not.”
“What if you get sick of me?”
“I won’t.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because. I don’t get sick of the people I love.”
She searches me, lips parted. “What if…”
“What if I fall even further? What if I can think of nothing but you? What if you become my world and my air and my reason for it all? Oh, love, it’s too late for all that.”
“What if I can never love you half as much as you love me?”
I smile, move in, and touch my lips to hers. “Then, my darling, I will have won at this game called life.”