Chapter 5 Best Kingman #2
The reindeer was moving with the specific dignity of an animal who was very put-upon and wanted everyone to know it.
The woman on its back was holding a wrapped present in one arm and the reindeer’s scruff at the neck in the other and looked like she had personally survived a significant amount of adventure in the last several hours.
“Jessica?” Kelsey said.
“Sven,” Flynn breathed, with the reverence of a man reunited with something precious. “You came back.”
Jessica dismounted with more grace than the situation perhaps called for and walked directly to Kelsey, present extended. Her shawl, or what remained of it, had been repurposed as a headband. There was a small pine branch in her hair that she appeared to be unaware of.
“I am so sorry I missed the ceremony,” she said.
“I went back to the hotel for Great Aunt Yvaine’s shawl and then there was a misunderstanding with the bus schedule and then a tree, and then Sven.
” She nodded at the reindeer, who was now eating something off the side of the building.
“But this is Great-Grandma Best’s teapot. I hope it didn’t break.”
Kelsey pulled her cousin into a hug, branch and all. “I’m just glad you made it. Come get some cake.”
Flynn had already made his way over to the reindeer and was having what appeared to be a sincere conversation with it, possibly an apology, possibly a negotiation. Both parties seemed cautiously willing to move forward.
Dakota appeared from the treeline a moment later, a horn in one hand and an expression of profound relief on his face.
He was Tex’s son, which made him a cousin of sorts by the particular math of extended Kingman family connections, and he ran the wild animal rescue up on the mountain that had supplied us with Sven in the first place.
He looked at the reindeer, and then at Jessica, and then back at the reindeer, in the way of a man recalculating something significant.
I had a feeling love was in the pine-filled air for more than just me and Kelsey.
Later, after the last dance and the final round of goodbyes, after Jules had hugged me for a moment too long and then immediately denied it, after Isak had made me promise the footage was for family only, after my dad had put his hand on my shoulder in that way he had that didn’t need any words to mean everything, we drove up the mountain road in the quiet.
Kelsey had her head against the window and her hand in mine and she was humming something low, not quite a song yet. That was how she processed things. She’d told me once that the hum was where the melody was before she knew what it was about.
I wondered what this one would become.
Mom’s cabin was decorated outside with flowers, and through the windows I could see lights. Jules, almost certainly. I was choosing not to think too specifically about what else my nineteen-year-old sister had prepared inside, on the grounds that some things were better left unexamined.
Kelsey stepped out of the car and stood looking up at it, and her whole face did the thing it did when something was too much and she needed a second to hold it.
“I’m so happy we’re spending the night here,” she said. “You’re going to have to thank your dad for letting us use it.”
“We really don’t,” I said.
She looked at me.
“Dad and I talked,” I said. “He cleared it with my siblings. It was always his plan to give all of us space on this mountain, and he figured we should get a head start since it’s already ours in every way that matters.” I paused. “It’s actually ours now, Kels. The deed and everything.”
Her bottom lip did something.
“This cabin is ours,” she said.
“Ours,” I confirmed. “We can expand it. Real bedroom. A shower I can fit under. Loft for the kids someday.”
“Not as many as Chris and Trixie,” she said.
“God, no.” I took her hand. “I just want a reasonable human number of children.”
“Two.”
“Two’s good.”
“Maybe three.”
“Maybe three,” I agreed.
She walked up the steps and I followed her, and I pushed open the door to the cabin where my parents had fallen in love on a snowed-in night and where I had proposed to Kelsey on a Thanksgiving and where we had told each other the truth of our feelings for the first time.
The inside was warm and lit soft. Flowers on the table. The good blanket from the chest that I knew Nana had driven up personally because she didn’t trust anyone else to know which one it was.
Kelsey turned around in the middle of the room and looked at me.
“Hi,” she said.
It kept meaning something new every time.
“Hi, wife,” I said.
“Hi, husband.” She crossed the room and put her hands flat on my chest. “I have been waiting all day to get you alone.”
“Me too,” I said. Which was an understatement on the order of calling the Rocky Mountains a slight incline, but I was working on that.
I kissed her, slow and intentional, my hands finding the back of her neck and staying there.
“The dress,” she said against my mouth. “There’s a zipper somewhere.”
I found it. Or I found what I thought was it, which turned out to be a decorative detail and not structural in any way. I tried the other side. Also decorative.
“How many buttons are on this thing,” I said.
“A reasonable amount.”
“Kelsey.”
“Forty-seven,” she said. “Give or take.”
I stared at the back of her dress. She was right. There were an extraordinary number of small buttons running from her shoulder blades to somewhere in the vicinity of her lower back, each one the size of something you might find in a sewing kit, and my hands were, objectively, not sewing kit hands.
“I can do this,” I said.
“I know you can,” she said encouragingly, which was not the same as it being true.
Three buttons in, I pulled one clean off the dress. It pinged off the floorboards and disappeared under the bed.
“Forget the dress,” Kelsey said. “I need you.”
She pushed me back onto the bed and I pulled her down with me and flipped up the skirt of her mini dress.
“I wish I’d gotten another bite of that wedding cake,” I said.
“It was delicious, wasn’t it,” she agreed.
“Oh look.” I glanced at the very appealing situation in front of me. “Here’s some cake. And it’s my wedding.” I leaned down and bit the cheek of her ass, gently.
Kelsey dissolved into giggles. “Your favorite flavor?”
“Not yet.” I slipped her white lace underwear off and tossed it over my shoulder.
She swung her leg over me, reached between us, and I stopped having any thoughts about cake at all.
“Mrs. Best Kingman,” I said. “You are very demanding.”
“Mr. Best Kingman,” she said. “Get to work.”
So I did.
I planted my feet and thrust up into my wife with everything I had, watching her face, which was the single best use of my attention available in any situation. She pressed her hands flat against the wall for leverage and I felt the grin pull at my mouth, which she caught.
“What,” she said.
“Nothing. You’re perfect.”
“Don’t get sentimental on me right now, I’m trying to concentrate.”
I was absolutely getting sentimental. I was also very much concentrating. There was no contradiction there.
She threw her head back and the dress was still half on and somehow that was making everything significantly better than if it hadn’t been, which I hadn’t anticipated, but marriage was apparently full of pleasant surprises.
I reached around and applied some structural pressure to the remaining buttons and they scattered across the room like confetti.
“Those were decorative,” Kelsey said.
“Past tense,” I agreed, and her laugh turned into something else entirely.
I rolled her nipple between my fingers and she arched into my hands, chasing more, and then her hand went between her own thighs and I watched my wife take exactly what she needed and it was the best thing I had ever seen.
“Husband,” she said, high and breathless. “I am very close.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve got you.”
Her whole body tightened and she cried out and I felt her squeeze around me, hot and perfect, and I followed her with everything I had, exactly where I wanted to be, in our cabin on our mountain on our wedding night with the woman who had spent the last year and a half teaching me what it felt like to have somewhere specific to be.
Kelsey collapsed onto my chest.
We lay there for a while not moving, her heart slowing against mine.
“Married sex,” she said finally, into my collarbone. “Ten out of ten.”
“Would recommend,” I said. “Would definitely sex again.”
“How soon?” She lifted her head and looked at me.
I thought about it seriously, because she deserved a serious answer. “Give me four minutes.”
She laughed, face crinkled up, and put her head back down.
Outside the cabin, the mountain was quiet.
Through the small window I could see a strip of sky going deep and clear over the valley, stars showing up now that the fireworks had faded.
Somewhere below us, what remained of our family would be finishing dessert or starting arguments or both, in that particular Kingman way where you couldn’t always tell the difference.
Up here it was just us. Our cabin. Our mountain.
My wife’s breathing went slow and even against my chest, and I held her, and I thought about my mother fleeing this same room afraid of a dog big enough to be a bear, and my father carrying her in out of a blizzard and how the line from that night ran straight to this one, through eight kids and a lot of years and more love than I had words for.
It was enough to keep. More than enough.
I pulled the good blanket up over us and let the mountain and our love for each other do the rest.