Chapter 4 Baby, It’s Cold Inside? #2
He looked like a man who had not moved since he’d taken his position there, the way he went still when he was feeling something too big to let out.
He was in his tuxedo, the dark vest, and he was watching me walk toward him with an expression I didn’t have a word for yet.
Like he was memorizing it. Like he was going to need to recall this exact image for the rest of his life.
Somewhere between the entrance and the altar, my nerves burned off completely.
This was not a show. This was a Declan Kingman production, meticulous, intentional, and made entirely for an audience of one.
That was me.
I was the audience.
The cellist was playing and it took me most of the aisle to realize why the melody felt so familiar.
Then it landed. “Chunky Dunkin’.” He’d had someone arrange my song about skinny dipping with Declan “Chunky Dunkin’” for cello.
I made a mental note to find the cellist after the ceremony and tell them they had made a genuine contribution to music history.
My dad transferred my hands to Declan’s. His hands were warm, which surprised me every time. I didn’t know why. It had been a year and a half and his hands were always warm.
“Hi,” he said, quiet enough that only I could hear it.
“Hi,” I said back.
“Do you like it?”
I felt the tears finally tip over.
He reached up and caught them with his thumb, both thumbs, careful and unhurried.
“I love it,” I said. “I love all of it.”
The look on his face was worth every surprise and every re-routed bus and every fake Bingo convention website in the history of elaborate romantic deceptions.
“Then let’s get married,” he said.
We turned to Everett.
Everett Kingman, at a podium, with the authority of a man ordained by the internet and the full weight of his own very high opinion of himself, was genuinely one of the great things in my life.
“Friends and family,” he began, “I am deeply honored to be standing here for the second time in six months to unite one of my brothers with the love of his life.” He paused, and glanced between Declan and me.
“Which is not nothing, given how Declan once told me that marriage was, and I’m quoting directly here, ‘the kind of thing other dumb people do.’” He smiled.
“Kelsey Best happened to my brother, and I think we can all agree the results have been spectacular.”
I heard a murmur of laughter through the small crowd.
Three hundred people I barely knew but felt like I had to invite to my wedding were in Aspen were at a rave right now.
These sixty were the real wedding, and looking out at them I felt the rightness of it settle over me like the fur wrap on my shoulders.
This was what I’d wanted. Not the spectacle.
This. Gryff and Artie in the third row, Isak with his camera lowered for once, Jules in her green suit looking like she’d run a championship game and won, Chris and Trixie smiling like they knew exactly how we felt, Bridger sitting in the front row with his hands folded and his jaw working the way Declan’s did when he was keeping something in.
“My brother Declan doesn’t know how to be anything less than his best,” Everett went on. “Best defensive lineman the Mustangs have ever had. Best son. Best brother. And I say that with full awareness that Chris is right there.” He nodded in Chris’s direction. Chris pointed at him.
“So when it came time for him to fall in love, there was really only one direction this was going to go.” He looked at me.
“The first time Declan brought Kelsey to Kingman Family Game Night, she beat every single one of us at Uno in under forty minutes. She stole the lucky pillow. And in the process of doing all of that, she became one of us so completely that I genuinely cannot remember what game night felt like before her.” He paused.
“I love you, Kelsey. I’m so glad you’re officially stuck with us now. ”
I pressed my lips together again.
Penny and Jules each came forward to read a poem.
They’d been the ones to help us find them, the four of us around my kitchen table a month ago with Declan’s laptop open and Penny reading them aloud in different voices until we found the ones that sounded like something we recognized.
The memory of it made me smile. I had thought it would be a hard exercise and it had turned out to be one of my favorite afternoons of the year.
Jules read hers and then, before she stepped back, she did something I hadn’t expected.
She reached under the seat next to Bridger and brought out the lucky pillow.
Not to read from it. Not to explain it. She just set it on the empty chair beside Bridger, where it had always belonged, the embroidered green fabric bright under the fairy lights.
“In this house, we bleed green.” A pillow April Kingman had made with her own hands, for a house full of children she’d never see grown.
Jules went back to stand next to Declan. She didn’t look at anyone. Her chin was up and she was absolutely not crying, in exactly the same way Declan was absolutely not crying, which told me everything about where Jules Kingman had learned how to hold herself together.
I looked at Bridger.
His hand had moved to rest his arm on April’s pillow, not quite holding it, just touching it. He caught me looking and something passed between us that I didn’t have words for yet. The closest I could get was: I see her too. She’s here.
He gave me the smallest nod.
I looked back at my soon-to-be husband.
He was watching the exchange between me and his dad. And whatever he read on my face made him blink, once, hard, and bring my hands up and press them against his chest for just a moment. Like he needed the anchor.
I understood.
I squeezed back.
“Okay,” Everett said quietly. “I think it’s time for these two to tell each other what they’ve been trying to say for the last year and a half.” He cleared his throat. “Declan.”
Declan looked at me. He was quiet for a long moment, which was his way, and I had learned to wait in his quiet the same way you wait for the last note of a song to fully fade before you start the next one.
“The first time I saw you,” he started, “I thought you were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
And then I actually met you, and it turned out that was the least interesting thing about you, by a long margin.
” Something shifted in his face. “I spent a lot of years being very quiet and figuring nobody really minded. And then you came along and it turned out I’d just been waiting for someone worth talking to. ”
He paused. “You see the things I don’t say.
I don’t know how you do it. I haven’t figured that out.
But I don’t want you to stop.” His voice dropped a register.
“You are my north star. The thing I find first in any sky. I am going to spend the rest of my life navigating by you, and I want you to know that I know exactly what I’m asking for. ”
After a short breath he really hit home. “Which is everything. I’m asking for everything.” A beat. “I promise to give you the same.”
I was crying. I was absolutely crying. So was Jules, despite her best efforts, and Hayes had both hands over his mouth, and Everett looked like he was doing math in his head to keep himself together, which was very Everett of him.
Declan wiped my face again. I caught his hand and held it against my cheek for one second.
Then I took a breath like I was preparing for the bridge of the song of my life.
“You know I write songs for a living,” I said.
“So you would think vows would be the easy part.” I heard a small ripple of laughter.
“You would be wrong. I have written and deleted them approximately forty times. Because everything I wanted to say kept turning into something too big, too much, and I kept having to pull it back.”
I looked at him. “So I’m going to say the simple version, because it’s also the true version, which is that before you, I was very good at performing love. I knew all the right chords. I just didn’t know what the song actually sounded like.”
I felt my voice go unsteady and steadied it.
“You showed me. You did that in a hospital room in Aspen when you didn’t have to be there, and in a cabin on this mountain when you sat with me while I figured out what I was made of, and in a thousand quiet moments after that when you just kept showing up, exactly as you are, and letting me be exactly as I am.
” I squeezed his hands. “Your arms are the only place I have ever felt safe to be myself. And I am never leaving.”
One last beat into the best crescendo ever. “I promise to love you and to keep showing you what the song sounds like. Together. For the rest of our lives.”
Everett handed us each a ring, which he did with unusual solemnity for a man who everyone had seen in his underpants, even if it was on a billboard ad for Knightwear in Times Square.
I slid Declan’s ring onto his finger. He slid mine onto mine, and then held my hand for one moment, looking at it, like he was taking inventory of this specific version of the world.
“By the power invested in me by the internet and the great state of Colorado,” Everett said, “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” He grinned. “Kiss that girl, Declan.”
Declan cupped my face in both hands.
And then he kissed me, and the northern lights rippled overhead, and sixty people cheered, somewhere at the front of the aisle Wiener the Pooh let out three sharp barks of enthusiastic approval.
And then it started snowing.
“Hello, wife,” Declan said, when we finally broke apart.
“Hello, husband.” I was going to say those words every day for the rest of my life and it was never going to get old. “Have you told me I look beautiful yet?”
“Not today.”
“Declan Kingman.”
“You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”
“So are you,” I said, and he laughed, surprised out of it the way he sometimes was by a compliment, and I filed that away to fix for the rest of our lives.
We walked back down the aisle to the sound of our family, hand in hand, snow falling like in a fairy tale snow globe, and Pooh trotted alongside us, still wearing her cape, sleigh abandoned somewhere near the altar. She had very strong opinions about when a job was done.
At the entrance to the dome we stood together and greeted everyone as they headed out and up the path toward the ski lodge where the reception was waiting.
Gryff and Artie, Isak with his camera up again and filming, the twins elbowing each other, Hayes with an arm around Willa.
Nana, who cupped my face exactly as my mother had and told me I’d done well, and I felt that all the way to my bones.
Aunt Inanna caught my cheek in her fingers with terrifying speed and precision for someone of her age. I had been warned. I was not prepared.
“Has anyone seen Jessica?” Great Aunt Yvaine, scanning the line. “She just missed the whole wedding. Jessica?” She craned around in both directions. “Where has that girl gotten to.”
Great Uncle Jett steered her gently through the door. The mystery of Jessica remained unsolved.
When the last of our family had made their way out, it was just us.
Declan and me and our snow globe.
I walked back up the aisle, because I couldn’t help it, because I wasn’t done yet.
I stood under the northern lights and tipped my head back and let myself just be inside this thing he had built for me.
The cellist was packing up quietly at the side.
The fairy lights were still on. The snow at the base of the altar was starting to settle but the pine trees still smelled real.
I found the small bundle of wildflowers Jules had tucked at the base of the altar. Mountain flowers, the kind that grew in July up on Bear Claw, purple and white and simple. Not part of any florist’s arrangement. Just from the mountain itself.
I touched one petal.
“How did you do all of this?” I asked.
Declan had come up behind me and he wrapped his arms around me from behind, pulling me into the warmth of his chest. I leaned back into him.
“Jules,” he said.
“That’s not an answer, that’s a name.”
“It’s both.” I felt him smile against my hair. “Also, for the record, we only lost one reindeer.”
I turned to look at him. “How many were there?”
“Technically just the one.”
“Declan.”
“Flynn tried to put a nose on it.”
I stared at him. He looked completely serious. “Like, a fake light-up nose.”
“He thought it would add something.”
“To a live reindeer.”
“In his defense—” Declan paused. “No. I’ve got nothing. He has no defense.”
I started laughing. The kind that came up from somewhere low and didn’t really stop, the kind you could only do when you were safe enough to completely let go.
Declan watched me laugh with the expression he reserved specifically for this, warm and private and quietly delighted, like he was watching something rare.
“I wanted to elope this morning,” I told him, when I could breathe again. “I was so overwhelmed by all of it. It stopped feeling like ours.”
“I know.” He tucked a piece of hair back from my face. “That’s why we did this instead.”
“You knew before I did.”
“I love you,” he said. “I pay attention.”
I reached up and held his hand against my cheek. Through the dome ceiling, the northern lights shifted from green to violet and back, and I thought about how I was going to spend the rest of my life trying to write a song that sounded exactly like this moment and probably never quite getting there.
That seemed fine.
Some things didn’t need a song. Some things you just kept.
“We have a reception to get to,” I said.
“We do.”
I took his hand and we walked out of the snow globe together, back into the July sun, into the noise and the love and the enormous, raucous life waiting for us up the mountain.
Pooh trotted between us, cape slightly askew, completely unbothered.