Epilogue #2
I stared at Santos, not making a move out of the car.
Maybe I wasn’t as deconstructed as I wanted to think, because looking at him, thinking that he was my husband now?
It made me…giddy. It made me want to blurt out laughing for no reason.
I couldn’t think of one single moment when I’d been so filled to the brim with all this happiness. I didn’t know what to do with it.
The way Santos stared at me, all soft, his blue eyes twinkling with the same light I thought mine reflected, told me he must be feeling the same.
“Are we doing this?”
I grinned. “Always.”
The word had kind of become our motto. I feared that it would one day become too mushy, but I didn’t care. Until that day arrived, I was going to take advantage.
I was also going to leave the car first and be a bit extra, swaying my hips.
It was important to keep one’s husband’s interest, after all.
There was misogyny in the saying, but I was reappropriating it today.
More than that, I was refusing to have any big thoughts today, least of all when I was soon in the locker room, surrounded by everyone who had made it possible for me to be here today.
With my husband right behind me and the rustling of too many people getting out of their ties and suits for clothes that fit who we were more—and that wouldn’t give Erika an aneurysm because we were blaspheming the place by not following even the barest of protocols.
Only Kara and María had worn dresses. The realization hit as I tried to avoid all the ties flying through the air because people were handier than usual while getting ready today.
“Anything you like, love?”
I jumped.
Of course María had caught me staring. Kara had looked adorable in her pink dress with tulle fabric that ended a couple of inches above the knee, but María had completely stolen the show.
Sure, with my family, that had meant shocked faces and badly disguised gasps.
I’d wanted to go to a few of them to call them out, but Santos had kept me trapped next to him.
She had looked gorgeous, though, in a skin-tight dress that featured all her curves, with a slit up her mid-thigh and showing cleavage in a way that would’ve bordered on inappropriate with any other crowd.
“Too femme for me.” I winked.
I was getting better at feeling comfortable bantering with more people, see?
María chuckled and winked back. “I know, baby.”
Sergio tackled me next. At this rate, everyone was going to be ready—even the ones fighting with baby powder and latex suits—before I’d even started to take off my clothes.
I knew there was a tradition to wait for the married couple, but just because I’d accepted I was not as good with punctuality as I’d always liked to think, it didn’t mean that I wouldn’t at least pretend to care.
Santos definitely would. He was the main reason I’d had to accept my definition of punctuality might not have been too up to date.
“I can’t believe you’ve gotten married.”
I snorted. “You’re making it sound like there’s something wrong with me.”
I knew that wasn’t it, but getting Sergio flustered was par for the course, and it turned out that teasing people back was a perfect way to handle all this barely familiar happiness inside.
“Shut up!” he spluttered just as I’d expected. “You are perfect, and I love you. I just meant because you’ve been complaining about the whole thing for ages, I literally thought you were going to call it off last minute and it was going to be a whole dramatic thing.”
“Just when I’m getting more comfortable with the idea of not losing my inheritance?” I rolled my eyes.
It couldn’t be helped.
My relationship with my biological family would always be complicated, but I’d come to feel like it was okay. At least, it wasn’t the end of the world. It definitely wasn’t when I could come here and find the refuge I needed from it on a very frequent basis.
Santos wrapped his arms around my waist. I didn’t need to look to see that he was already geared up with a bulldog harness and a pair of leather pants because no one would be able to convince me that he didn’t have a bit of a fixation on Leatherman Extraordinaire Tony.
“If he’d tried to do that, he knows he wouldn’t have been able to sit for a week.”
I gulped. My rants about wedding planning and everything that came with the expectations of my family name might’ve been stopped more than a few times with threats like those.
Those, and the promise of what was about to come right now in the club.
Well, not right now, but as soon as everyone got their shit together, and we all got upstairs where all the magic should already be set up.
Sergio cocked his head to the side. “I thought you weren’t that kind of Sadist. Sir. Am I supposed to call you Sir? Sorry, that’s always lowkey confusing.”
Under the right light—the wrong light?—everything outside of being Little and doing his thing was lowkey confusing to Sergio, but I couldn’t completely fault him this time.
Santos wasn’t that kind of Sadist, the one who was all about discipline and bare-handed spankings over his lap.
He had spanked me in the traditional sense twice, maybe, with someone else there to oversee, but he could be creative when the situation called for it—or when he managed to get a few D-types on his corner, like he had now.
“Lose the gown, Ever.”
Another gulp. Another attempt to conceal the giddiness that kept threatening to burst out of me. “On it.”
“Good girl.”
Yeah, I might know that this level of happiness wasn’t sustainable long term, and I might know not everything was perfect, and I still had a lot of growth and figuring out my place in the world.
Right now, though, my place in the world was one without weights, one where I stripped down to ridiculously expensive lingerie and followed my mismatched group of people to see all the ways they’d planned to make me scream tonight.
There was nothing I would change about it, nothing that would make this better or more real.