Chapter Thirteen #2
Aria steps forward. Her hands are wrapped around a bouquet of peonies that trembles faintly.
She's looking at me with an expression I can't decode and that fact alone is unusual because I can always read her.
Her mood by the sound of her footsteps approaching my office.
The exact threshold at which her carefully placed professionalism while dealing with me as my assistant for the last six months would turn to irritation though she'd try to hide it with painted on smiles, biting back curse words I'm sure she had to keep in her head.
Now I know all of that was because she didn't want to lose her job.
Her father's place at Brookhaven depended on it.
Now we're here. Miles away from a boss/employee relationship with failed coffee attempts and her perfectly curated reports done to please me and keep her job.
Now she's minutes away from being my wife.
"Hi," she whispers.
"Hi."
The officiant begins.
I hear approximately forty percent of what he says. Something about commitment. Something about partnership. Something about the bonds we choose and the ones we're born into—ironic, given the nature of ours.
She and I both repeat our vows to one another as the officiant instructs. Through sickness and in health… until death due us part.
It’s not what our secret prenup says but saying them to her doesn’t feel like a lie either.
The officiant asks for the rings.
Damien produces them from his jacket pocket with the smooth disinterest of a man who'd rather be anywhere else—except that his eyes flick briefly, involuntarily, toward where Everly is seated in the front row, clipboard still in her lap even now.
If anyone notices, no one says.
I slide the ring onto Aria's finger. Her hand is cold. I hold it a moment longer than necessary because the warmth of my palm against her frozen fingers feels like something I should be doing. Like the logistics of warming her hand is a problem I'm qualified to solve.
She slides mine on. Her fingers barely brush my knuckle and the sensation travels up the back of my hand like voltage.
"You may kiss the bride."
I've thought about this.
I've thought about this more than I'll ever admit to any living person, including Damien, and especially to any person with the last name, Kauffman.
The plan is simple. A brief press of lips that satisfies the crowd, the cameras, the board, and nothing more. Two seconds. Maybe three if it feels really necessary.
I step forward. My hand comes up to her jaw. I don't decide to do this—my hand decides for me, cupping the side of her face the way I've apparently been rehearsing in some locked room of my subconscious for days.
Her breath catches the moment I dip down–our lips less than an inch apart. I feel it against my mouth, and then I do.
I press my lips to hers and whatever plan I had dies on contact.
Her lips are soft in a way that has no business existing in the same world as boardrooms and trust clauses and dead fathers who write cruelty into legal documents. Her mouth opens—barely. It’s just a fraction but it changes everything.
My other hand finds the curve of her waist. No longer holding to the rigid performance I had calculated this would be.
I do everything I can to keep my hands steady.
To keep myself from pulling her tighter against me to feel her body against mine like I did in front of the steps of the Hawkeyes building eleven days ago.
She comes closer. Or I've failed and I’ve pulled her. Neither event matters because it’s happening either way.
Someone in the crowd makes a sound—like a whistle and then the crowd erupts with applause, laughter and cheering.
The sound is what finally breaks the kiss.
Because now I’m reminded that we have three hundred people staring at us right now, and what I want to do next with my bride is not for an audience.
I pull back.
Not far. Just enough to see her face.
Her eyelashes flutter back open, her eyes glazed and her lips are still parted. Her hand is fisted in the lapel of my jacket and she doesn't seem to know it's there.
"What was that?" she breathes.
I have no response.
The officiant says something I don't hear. People stand. Flowers are thrown. And then I remember that I'm supposed to turn, to walk back down the aisle, to perform the next piece of choreography.
Instead, I'm standing at the altar holding a woman's face in my hands and trying to remember what language I speak.
Damien's hand lands on my shoulder again. Firmer this time.
"Walk," he says in my ear. "Now. Before you do something the board can't unsee."
So I let go of her face, reach for her hand and lead her down the aisle, trying to figure out how the hell ten seconds changes everything.
*
The reception tent is enormous. It’s white, draped, lit by a thousand small lights that Everly called "strategic ambiance" when the contracting event company came out to put it all up and I asked if this was necessary.
It turns out that was a stupid question because she shooed me off the premises after that.
The dinner is coursed. The wine is French.
The cigars were brought in from somewhere illegal that Wes wouldn’t reveal.
The guests are behaving, mostly, because three hundred people who run in the same circles know the rules for events of this caliber with the press walking about armed with cameras, and ready for someone to make a fool of themselves.
Damien stands to give his toast and the tent goes quiet.
He buttons his jacket and picks up his glass.
"I've known Everett for fifteen years," he begins.
"In that time, I've watched him build an empire, terrify a board of directors, fire people with a two-word email, and once—I'll never let him forget this—was given a coffee with almond milk by accident, and after doing one spit take while on a video call with an overseas investor, drink the entire thing rather than admit defeat. "
Colston is laughing so hard he's gripping the edge of the table. Everly has her face in her hands. Even Archer lets out a sound that could generously be classified as amusement.
"It was almond milk," she says weakly.
"You were trying to poison me," I tease her and the room laughs.
The crowd laughs, though they don’t know the entire story.
"I’ve also watched him be alone. Not lonely… Everett doesn’t do lonely. He fills the space where a personal life should be with strategy meetings and acquisition targets and workouts that would hospitalize most humans."
The laughter fades. People are listening differently now.
"So when he called me to tell me that he was getting married, I did what any best friend would do." He pauses. "I asked if he was being blackmailed."
Laughter again, harder this time.
"He said no. Then he said her name. And how he said it—" Damien stops. Looks at me and then looks at Aria. "I'd never heard him say anyone's name like that. I knew it meant that this was different. That for once, my best friend found someone who wouldn’t let him be alone anymore."
The tent is silent.
"To Mr. and Mrs. Kauffman." Damien raises his glass. "May you have a wonderful life, and for the prenup to be ever in her favor."
The room erupts again with laughter and then everyone drinks.
Across the table, Everly is staring at Damien with an expression of furious admiration—the face of a woman who wanted to hate the speech and can't.
He catches her looking and winks.
She turns away so fast her earring swings.
I made a mental note to remind Damien that my sister is out of his league and off limits.
Henry is seated near the center of the table—the seat Everly chose for him last night. He's talking to a woman I don't recognize about something that has her laughing hard enough to spill her wine.
This is what Aria needed today and since she’s leaving a lot of her life to hold up her end of our deal, she deserved at least this.
Her father. Having the night of his life.
I did one thing right today.
The live band for the ceremony and cocktail hour switches out to the DJ with Zayne being the first to give a request and suddenly the dance floor is full.
Not with the dignified sway of a billionaire wedding, but actual movement.
The kind of chaos that only happens when the wine has been flowing for three hours and Levi has taken over the music lineup.
I don't dance, and Aria doesn’t seem to mind that I haven’t asked. We sit together at the head table, watching the room unravel.
"Your family is pretty fun for a bunch of "stuck up billionaires," she says, with her fingers making quotation marks in the air.
"Is that what the press calls us?"
"It’s a compliment," she teases.
"Yeah… sure… sounds like it," I say. "The press thinks all of us are stuck up?"
"Well… half of you." Her eyes roam around the ballroom as if to find each one on the dance floor, "Zayne, Christian and Levi seem to be left out of that list. Everly can be too. It just depends on the year. If she’s done a charity auction for rescue animals or she’s photographed on a multi-million dollar yacht.
"They’re beloved among the town folk. Is that what you’re saying? Which means that Wes, Archer, Colston and I are the black sheep?"
"Sort of," she shrugs."But you could change that with a little PR."
I turn to look out of the crowd. I’ve heard this before. "You sound like my sister. What do you think this wedding is for? We could have had a much smaller wedding and been done with it. Everly saw her chance and she knew I couldn’t veto any of it because of the image she’s selling to the board."
She rests her chin in her hand, elbow on the table, and watches Zayne convince two board members' wives to join some kind of line dance that looks legally actionable.
"Your father's having a good time," I say.
She's quiet for a moment. Then: "He won't remember this tomorrow."
The words land between us like a stone dropped in water.
"But tonight," she says, "tonight he knows exactly where he is and exactly who I am and he's happy." She straightens. Pushes a strand of hair behind her ear. "That's enough."
I don't tell her that I arranged for Brookhaven to allow extended hours. I don't tell her that the therapist on the van is being paid triple her rate for a weekend shift. I don't tell her any of the logistics because the logistics aren't the point.
The point is that Henry Taylor is laughing at a table full of strangers and calling them by name, and his daughter can hear it from here.
"It's enough," I agree.
*
Later, the champagne incident.
Levi is telling a story that involves hand gestures and increasing volume when his elbow connects with a server's tray.
The server—young, horrified—pitches forward, and a full glass of champagne arcs through the air in a trajectory that my brain calculates in real time as ending directly at Aria's chest.
I'm across the table.
I am across the table and somehow I am there before the glass lands—four steps I don't remember taking—and my jacket is off my shoulders and around hers in a single motion that has no logical explanation given the laws of physics and the distance between us.
The champagne hits the jacket. Soaks through the outer layer. Doesn't touch her.
The server looks like he's about to pass out.
"You're fine," I tell him. Then, to Aria: "You're fine."
She's looking up at me from inside my jacket—the shoulders too big, the collar against her neck, her face surrounded by navy fabric—and something about the image does more damage than the kiss did.
"You just ruined a Tom Ford," she says.
"He'll make another one."
"That was..." She adjusts the jacket around herself. "Very fast."
My hands are still on her shoulders. I become aware of this fact at the same time as Levi, who is watching with the expression of a documentary filmmaker who just caught something rare on camera.
I remove my hands.
"Reflexes," I say.
"Right." She's smiling. The small one. The one that's worse than the big one because it means she's keeping something to herself. "Reflexes."
*
Midnight.
The last car has disappeared down the drive. The caterers are breaking down the tent in near-silence, moving through the dark like ghosts disassembling a dream.
Aria stands in the foyer of the house in her wedding dress, my champagne-stained jacket still draped over her shoulders, holding her shoes in one hand.
We are married.
The word sits in the space between us like a third person in the room.
"Your room is upstairs," I tell her. "Third door on the left. Everly had it prepared."
She nods. "And yours?"
"First door. On the right."
Opposite ends of the hall.
"It's practical," I say.
"Very practical." She's watching me in the low light of the foyer, and whatever she's looking for in my face, I can't tell if she finds it.
She takes a step toward the stairs. Stops.
"Everett."
"Yeah."
"That vow." She turns enough that I can see her profile. The line of her jaw. The earring catching what's left of the light. "Did you mean it?"
I know what I'm looking at. And I'm not going to look away.
"Go to bed, Aria."
She waits. One heartbeat. Two.
Then she walks up the stairs, and the jacket slips down one shoulder. She doesn't fix it, and I watch her until she disappears at the top of the landing.
I stand in the foyer for a very long time and then head for my room,
First door on the right. I don't undress.
I sit on the edge of the bed in my shirt and trousers with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands, and I think about the way she said hi at the altar like we were meeting at a coffee shop instead of a wedding.
Like the simplicity of the word could collapse the enormity of the moment into something survivable.
Hi.
I said it back.
And then I married her.