Chapter 15 #2
“I have written this down because I am afraid I will forget it. I am going to say it to you in front of every person here who loves us. I have known you since you were eight years old. I learned how to skip stones on the dock of this house because I wanted you to think I was the kind of boy worth being friends with. I learned Latin because the teacher in eighth grade told me I would not be able to. I learned to fight at thirteen because a boy in our courtyard called you a name that does not belong on this lawn today, and I have never, in twenty-two years, regretted that fight. I learned to drink champagne in a boathouse on this bay when I was nineteen. I learned, on the same dock, the same night, that the rest of my life was going to be about one woman. I forgot it the next morning. I spent fifteen years forgetting it. I spent fifteen years grieving you, Aurora. I get to spend the rest of my life loving you. I think things turned out alright.”
A small wave of laughter went through the lawn, and a small wave of weeping went through it under the laughter.
Aurora was openly weeping now.
She did not try to stop it.
She held her own vow in her left hand, in her handwriting on a small piece of watercolor paper. She had been writing and rewriting it for two weeks. She did not look at it when she spoke. She did not need to.
“Halston,” she said. “You came back for me…”
She did not say any of the next words very loudly. The lawn was very quiet. The bay behind them was a sheet of cold winter blue. The Spanish moss did not move.
“You came back for me when I had stopped letting myself want you to.
You came back for us when I did not yet know what us was.
You bought my watercolor eleven years ago and you hung it on the wall of your father's library and you never told me. You came back for me, Halston. You came back for us. I will spend the rest of my life coming back for you, too.”
She closed the watercolor paper. She did not need the rest.
Halston hand on hers had begun to shake.
The officiant said the State of Texas words and pronounced them married.
Halston pulled Aurora in. He kissed her on the front lawn of the Iverson estate in Pinewood Hollow, between the live oaks, beneath the sky, with the gold ring on her hand and the new platinum band she had brought him on his.
*****
The reception was on the long terrace at the back of the house.
Yvette had directed the catering for two months and had hired three Creole-Texan chefs from her own family in Lafayette. There was gumbo and shrimp étouffée. There was a small carved silver platter of beignets at the dessert station that had its own line.
The cake was a small three-tier vanilla and lemon, the same cake Yvette had baked for the courthouse dinner four months ago, made larger and prettier and topped with a single white camellia.
Late in the afternoon, after the speeches, after Rhett had stood up and made a toast so funny the whole terrace was wiping its eyes.
After Folake had stood up and made a toast that ended and Maeve, you absolute bully, you were right, after Halston had quietly raised his glass to the framed photograph of Maeve and Cyrus on the small side table beside the cake, Errol stood up.
He had Yvette wheel out a wooden trolley.
On the trolley, under a soft cream cloth, was something tall and rectangular.
Errol pulled the cloth off.
A cradle.
Texas cherry wood, hand-carved, deep red-brown, with curving rockers and a small set of carved hummingbirds on the headboard. A wide, generous, simple cradle.
Aurora set down her glass of sparkling water and brought both her hands up to her mouth.
Errol cleared his throat looking at his daughter and son in law.
“I started this,” Errol said quietly, “the week after the storm. My gift to you.”
Halston set his glass down, stood and walked across the terrace to the trolley. He set his hand, very gently, on the carved rocker.
He looked at his father-in-law.
“Mr. Akande. Sir…”
“Don't sir me, son. Not today.”
“Errol.”
“There you go.”
Halston put his hand out. Errol, the father of the bride, took his son-in-law's hand. He held it.
“I'll teach my child,” Halston said quietly, “that his grandfather made this for him before he was born.”
Errol nodded once then stepped back to greet other guests.
Imari and Aurora walked over to the cradle and crouched in front of it, peering at the small carved hummingbirds.
“Aunt Rory.”
“Yes, sweet pea.”
“He carved birds on it.”
“He did, sweet pea.”
“The hummingbirds.”
“Yes.”
“My hummingbird is on it.”
“Yes, baby. Your hummingbird is on it.”
She did not have words after that. She knelt down on the limestone beside her daughter and she put one arm around Imari's small shoulders. She leaned her forehead against the small braided crown of her Imari’s head.
Halston stood watching them.
*****
That night, after the last guests had left, after Imari had been carried up to bed by her Errol because she had fallen asleep on the small leather couch, after Yvette had quietly locked up the kitchen and gone to her own rooms in the staff wing with a small private smile, Halston led Aurora up the marble staircase, down the long second-floor hallway, and into the master suite she had been sleeping in with him.
He closed the door behind them.
He set both his palms on the doorframe beside her shoulders. He looked at her and did not move.
“Mrs. Iverson.”
“Yes.”
“I want to take this dress off you very slowly.”
He kissed her.
He kissed her like they had all the time in the world.
He kissed her mouth, the side of her face, the small camellia behind her left ear which he then lifted freeing it with two fingers, and set it on the dresser.
“Halston.”
“Mm.”
“My back is killing me.”
He laughed against her temple. Low. Warm.
“That, my love, is because you are carrying our baby.”
He turned her around in his hands, slowly, until her back was to him. He brushed her natural curls aside off the back of her neck and laid his mouth against the warm skin beneath her ear.
His fingers found the small hook at the top of the dress.
He slid it open and drew the long zipper down her bare back, slowly, the back of his knuckles brushing her spine.
The ivory crepe slid forward off her shoulders.
He caught it at her arms. He let it slide further.
The dress pooled, slowly, at her bare feet on the cream wool rug.
She stood in front of him in nothing but a soft strapless ivory slip.
Halston exhaled like this was the first time he had ever seen her.
He turned her around to face him.
He laid his hand, very gently, on the curve of her belly. His thumb stroked, once, across the silk.
“Hi, baby,” he said softly to her stomach.
Aurora's eyes filled.
“I will say hello to you for the rest of my life, baby.”
He bent his head. He kissed the silk above his hand. He kissed it once, gently, like he was making a small careful promise. He raised his head.
He kissed her again. Slow. Unhurried. The kind of kiss a man gives his wife at the start of a wedding night with no clock running anywhere.
Aurora's hand went up into his black hair.
“Halston.”
“Mm.”
“Bed.”
He stripped his shirt over his head and pulled off his pants. He scooped her up at the waist and carried her the four steps to the bed and laid her down on her side on the cream linen.
Then he came down behind her along the same line, his chest against her back, his arm under her neck for a pillow, his other hand sliding around the curve of her belly from behind.
He pulled her in against him until the back of her thighs were against the front of his.
His cock was hard and hot against the small of her back.
She let out a small soft sound and tipped her head back against his shoulder.
His mouth went to the side of her throat. He kissed her there, slowly, the warm scrape of his beard against her shoulder. His hand slid up from her belly to her breast. He cupped her there.
Her breasts had grown in pregnancy. He weighed her in his palm. He brushed his thumb across her nipple, slowly. She made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost a sob.
“Halston. They are sore.”
“I'll be careful.”
He was careful. He learned, in the first thirty seconds, exactly how careful. He brushed her gently with the pad of his thumb, the lightest of pressures, and her hips pressed back against his without her thinking about it.
His free hand drifted lower. Past her hip. Between her thighs. He stroked her once, slowly, the slim white scar of his palm warm against her. She was wet already. She had been wet for him since the courthouse that afternoon.
“Halston. Now.”
He lifted her top thigh slightly forward. He guided himself between her thighs. He pushed into her slowly, from behind, in one long careful stroke that did not press on her belly at all.
Aurora's whole body went still around him.
He stayed there. Deep. Their joined hands flat on the bump between them.
“Aurora.”
“I'm good. I'm good, baby.”
He began to move. Not the long full strokes of their first night. Not the deep slow ones of the library. Something else.
Shorter, warmer, smaller, his hips moving in a tight controlled rhythm that did not jolt her, his mouth at the back of her neck under her curls, his free hand on her breast and then her hip and then back on their joined hands at her stomach.
The angle was different. He hit something low and unhurried inside her that made her thighs tighten around him and her breath go uneven.
“Halston. Halston. Oh.”
“I know, baby. I know.”
“I am not going to last long.”
“Then come, sweetheart. I have got you.”
She came on the next stroke. She came with a low surprised sound and her hand tight around his on her belly and the soft involuntary clench of her body around him. He felt it. He pressed his mouth flat against the side of her neck.
He drew one more long careful breath, and then a shorter one, then the rhythm of his hips lost the last of its control and he pressed her against him as he came, three long deep pulses inside her, his arm tight around her ribs under her breasts, his forehead pressed to the back of her head.
They stayed like that for a long time. He did not pull out.
Eventually he turned his head and pressed his lips, very lightly, to the small spiral of hair at her temple.
“Mrs. Iverson.”
“Mr. Iverson.”
“Pregnancy looks very good on you.”
She laughed.
His hand, between hers, stayed on the curve of her belly.
The bay outside the window was a sheet of dark winter water. The estate around them was sleeping.
Halston lay along her, his head against her shoulder, his hand splayed flat across the curve of her belly. He stroked it, slowly, with his thumb. He did not speak for a long time.
Eventually he said, into her shoulder, “Aurora.”
“Mm.”
“Thank you for marrying me.”
“Halston.”
“Twice.”
Aurora laughed into the top of his black hair.
*****
In the cradle in the corner of the master suite, where Yvette had quietly wheeled it before turning out the hallway lights, the small carved hummingbirds on the headboard caught the moonlight off the bay.
In a little under five months, the cradle would be holding a baby boy with his father's gray eyes and his mother's full mouth. His name would be one that had been chosen six months before he was born, written on a small piece of stationery and tucked into the front of one of Imari’s books on the nightstand, where Imari had been told she could read it but not say it out loud yet.
Atticus Iverson.
He had not been born.
But Aurora and Halston had already, in their bed of cream sheets on the second floor of the Iverson estate in Pinewood Hollow, very quietly named him.