Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
HE LOVES ME… NOT
HUDSON
The guests leave the way good guests do, without needing to be asked, probably why they are the only ones who earned invites.
Lucas with Paola, his hand at her back the way it always is, the unconscious touch that happens when someone has become so habitual to your body that your hands always know where to go.
He offered to drive Grams before I asked, or maybe Grams told him to.
Chandler cried through the departure the way she cried through the ceremony, with full commitment to the emotion.
Impressive. She closed the laptop screen on Theo somewhere in the middle of a hug, which means his last image of his sister’s wedding night was the inside of Chandler's elbow. I think she did it on purpose, and I don’t think he minded.
Toby shook my hand once, said something I didn't fully catch about being an outlier to a data set, and left.
These are, apparently, our people.
I ordered pizza for the group that we ate on the drop cloth I’d unfolded back into its full width.
The aisle doing double duty. Surrounded by the guttering remains of a hundred candles and what I can only estimate are several thousand daisy petals, and the city below us like it didn't notice what just happened up here.
I expected her to leave with the others.
Or shortly after. To brush the petals from her dress, reclaim her shoes from wherever she'd abandoned them near the end of the aisle, and take herself back downstairs with some version of ‘well, that was something.’ That is the reasonable outcome. That is the one I had prepared for.
But she didn’t. I don’t know why I’m surprised, when there is no decision I can expect her to make, that she does.
Rather than retreating downstairs to separate bedrooms, she sat back down, legs stretched out and shoes abandoned somewhere, face tilted up to the sky.
Checking, I think, to make sure the stars didn’t rearrange themselves in the minutes she looked away.
I won’t pretend I minded.
“He loves me,” she says, with great ceremony, plucking the first petal from a daisy she picked up.
The petal drifts to her lap. “He loves me, not,” she says with emphasis this time.
Another petal. For a while, neither of us say anything.
She just plucks the petals, each one meant to indicate more than it has any possibility to know.
But the silence we sit in isn’t resentment, it’s peaceful.
And the look on her face, it’s the precursor of a laugh, as she leans her back against the concrete wall, even letting her head roll back against it.
She looks at the bare stem for a moment like receiving the exact verdict she expected. Then she sets it down, picks up another one. Not plucking petals this time, she already has her answer.
After listening to her and Grams yesterday, there was no world where I could rob her of the gesture, no matter how crafted, of this moment.
I might be an asshole, but I’m not that asshole.
Paola was too eager to help me turn this space into something special.
Then I just had to convince Chandler, which was easy enough, though she seemed genuinely shocked when I showed up in the afternoon with the request. I asked Chandler about any family for Louisa, knowing that Lucas and Paola are the closest family I have besides Grams. I asked her to call Louisa’s brother, the only one she seems close to.
And Chandler didn’t seem inconvenienced in the slightest.
When all is said and done, her first wedding should be special.
One day, she’ll plan a real one, pick a DJ, a ring, but she will have this memory not as plainly as we signed the documents at the court, but amidst all the pretend we’re doing, this could feel a little real.
And for me, my only wedding will have been special.
Grams will have this memory, and so will I.
And when the ink is long dried on the divorce papers, this will have been enough.
She was mouthing the words with each step closer to me. It looked like a private prayer, some small act of rebellion against the cold, hard facts of this arrangement. Taking steps toward an unreal future, one we just can pretend exists for long enough for us to get what we want.
“How long did all of this take?” she asks eventually, gesturing at the rooftop, though I knew what she meant.
“I had help,” I respond, not eager to give away more than I have tonight.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s enough of one.” Or so I thought. But she picks up her head, a daisy chain she strung together as we sat here now atop her soft brown hair.
As her eyebrows are high on her inquisitive face, I concede to my new wife.
“I got the key to the roof this morning, Paola picked up the flowers, and Chandler handled the candles.”
“You didn’t have to do this,” she says, and I think it sounds like guilt more than gratitude.
“No, I didn’t.”
“It’s all so much more than I expected, more than necessary.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” I say it simply, because it’s true. It was necessary. The reasons are obvious and also, separately, none of her business at this point. “It was a good wedding.”
“It was a really good wedding,” she says, pausing momentarily, weighing the rest of what she says.
“Ya know, for a fake marriage.” Fake indeed.
But looking at her in the shimmer of star and candlelight, twirling a daisy between her fingers, as the ruby ring continues to catch my eye as a reminder that even if this is fake, so long as we are in this, she is my wife.
I’d heard The Greatest Showman more times than I had realized prior to the night she showed up.
I’d never seen it, so when the sound would come through the walls almost once a week, I could never place it fully.
Until she sat in my chair, watched the whole thing front to back, and sang herself through what looked like an anxiety attack.
It was the only thing that made sense for her to walk down the aisle to.
Assuming she would be anxiety ridden the whole way down.
The traditional wedding march for our nontraditional wedding felt inappropriate.
Not because this is some great whirlwind love story for her, but because of everything she is; boring would never be a word used to describe her.
In the plainest versions of herself, there is no part of her that is anything less than fascinating. That fact is no doubt what got me here.
And when time came to kiss her, it was every late night moan I swallowed down as she crept through the walls and lodged herself deep in my brain.
I used that to fuel every shower thought of her I’ll have from now through eternity.
The feeling of my fingertips against the bare skin of her back, unlike anything I could have imagined, the softest nectarine, and I feared pulling her too close would bruise her just as easily.
But as the I dos reached up to the sky, and Lucas declared us married, I realized she didn't just walk down an aisle, she walked right through the walls I’ve spent years building, leaving nothing but the raw, unfinished truth behind.
And as we sit here, it's more poetic than I consider most things to be.
Somewhere mingled amongst the occasional siren or laughter on the street below, we do something we never have.
We have a conversation. Without purpose, just casually strolling through the corridors of each other without an agenda.
No logistics or timeline. No reviewing facts we’ll need to perform back at each other for strangers. Just talking.
“You really drive an hour for a cookie?” I say through a laugh as she tells me about a specialty store that carries imported items from the United Kingdom. “I thought you were more American than that.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” She points the tiny daisy at me like a weapon, it’s about as threatening as she is. “I’m sharing. This is called sharing, Hudson.”
“I know what it's called.”
“Oh so you just don’t know how to do it.” She tilts her head. She's watching me clearly to indicate that this has not been an equal round of information. “You've been very quiet on the contribution side of things.”
“I've been listening.”
“Not the same thing.” Her voice sounds coated in champagne, which went well with the pizza. As is evidenced by the empty bottle that rolls away at our feet.
“I could argue otherwise.”
“You can argue anything, you went to law school. Though,” she pauses as she narrows her eyes and purses her lips.
“You probably could before that.” Her daisy weapon waves like she’s using it to convince me.
This is, apparently, serious. “It's technically our wedding night,” she says. “Tell me something.”
“What do you want to know?” I ask.
“Everything,” she says simply, like that's a reasonable answer. Who am I kidding, she doesn’t care about being reasonable. And then, at my expression, refining the ask. “Okay, fine. Tell me one thing you haven't told anyone in a while.”
The request calls to some childhood version of myself, someone I wasn’t prepared to have to look in the face.
I turn it over in my mind, knowing there's the obvious deflection.
I can say I'm a private person, which she already knows and doesn't find interesting or acceptable. I can tell her about some failed relationships, which may remind her why she should keep her emotional distance. Because eventually I’ll put the wedge between us anyway. There’s the version where I give her something true but small, a calculated disclosure that satisfies the requirement without actually costing me anything.
But I look at her, so full of interest, not judgement.
“I wanted to be an architect,” I say. Her face opens.