10. Silas
SILAS
The truck hums beneath us, a low vibration that matches my pulse.
Selene sits next to me, her hand in mine, fingers locked tight.
She grips me like someone who spent a month climbing out windows and hiding in closets, running miles just to feel my skin against hers.
The oak ring I carved is on her finger, warm from her skin.
A promise I made with my hands. Now I get to make it legal.
She wears white silk. Not a wedding dress, not exactly, but a slip of a thing she found in the back of her closet, something her mother bought her for a graduation party she never attended.
It clings to her hips, her waist, the curve of her ass, every place my hands have memorized through denim and cotton and bare skin.
She is still small. Still mine. Still the girl who screamed when I first pressed inside her, who bled and burned and grew around me until she could take every inch without flinching.
I cannot stop looking at her. The dawn light turns her hair to copper and gold, catches the flush on her throat where my mouth left marks last night in the construction site, illuminates the swell of her breasts beneath the thin fabric.
She catches me staring and smiles, small and secret, the smile of a woman who knows exactly what she does to me and revels in it.
"Nervous?" she asks, her voice soft, teasing.
I squeeze her hand. "No." It is the truth.
I am not nervous. I am terrified. Not of marriage.
Not of commitment. I am terrified that this is a dream, that I will wake up on the plywood with an empty bottle and an empty bed and the memory of her voice fading like smoke.
I am terrified that Stella will not come, that Dad will stand in the courthouse doorway and tell me I am not worthy, that the judge will look at our ages and our relation through marriage and refuse to sign the paper that makes her mine in the eyes of the world.
But I do not say any of this. I drive. The Hamptons streets are empty, the storefronts dark, the beach a gray line to our left where the Atlantic meets the sky in a blur of pewter and rose.
The courthouse appears around the bend, a brick building with white columns and a flag snapping in the breeze, and my heart stutters at the sight of a single car in the parking lot.
A red Mercedes.
Stella's Mercedes.
She came.
I park beside it, kill the engine, sit for a moment with my hands still gripping the wheel and my breath coming too fast. Selene's hand finds my thigh, her palm warm through my jeans, and the touch grounds me, centers me, reminds me that this is real, that she is real, that thirty days of separation and suffering and stolen hours have led to this moment and I will not let fear steal it from me.
"Silas," she whispers, and her voice is steady, sure, the voice of a woman who has chosen me against every obstacle and would choose me again. "Look at me."
I do. Her eyes are green in the dawn light, clear and bright and full of a future I can almost touch. No shadows. No doubt. Just her, and me, and the promise we are about to seal.
"I love you," she says. "I love you, and I'm marrying you, and nothing else matters. Not my mother. Not Richard. Not what anyone thinks. Just us. Just this. Just forever."
I lean across the console, cup her face in my hands, and kiss her.
Soft. Slow. A promise sealed with lips and breath and the taste of her tears, which have started again, silent and hot against my thumbs.
When I pull back, her eyes are glazed, her lips swollen, her breath coming in small gasps that make my cock stir against my zipper.
"Let's go," I say.
We get out of the truck. The air is cool, smelling of salt and cut grass and the faint chemical tang of the parking lot's fresh sealant.
Stella stands by the courthouse steps, arms crossed, her face pale and composed in the gray morning light.
She wears a navy dress, conservative, funereal, but her eyes are red rimmed and swollen and I know she has been crying.
I know she has spent the month wrestling with herself, with her pride, with her fear, with the love for her daughter that wars with her disapproval of me.
Dad emerges from the Mercedes's passenger side, his silver hair immaculate, his suit pressed, his face the color of old parchment.
He looks at me, then at Selene, then back at me, and I see the war in his gaze, the same war that has raged in him since he found us on the porch, since he threatened me with police, since he watched his son choose a woman over everything else and recognized the choice as one he might have made himself.
He extends his hand. I take it. He squeezes, hard enough to bruise, his grip a father's final warning and a father's grudging blessing, all contained in the pressure of calloused fingers against my own.
"Don't hurt her," Dad says, his voice low, rough, the voice of a man who has surrendered a battle he never wanted to fight. "Don't you ever hurt her, Silas. Or I'll finish what I started."
"I won't," I say. "I'll die before I hurt her. I'll kill before I let anyone else hurt her. She is my life. My everything. My reason for breathing."
He nods, once, sharp, and releases my hand. Stella does not move. She watches us approach, her arms still crossed, her jaw tight, her eyes flicking to Selene's hand in mine, to the oak ring, to the white silk that leaves no doubt about what we are doing here at dawn on a Tuesday in September.
"Mom," Selene says, her voice small but steady.
Stella's face crumples for a fraction of a second, a flash of grief and love and desperate fear, before the mask slides back into place.
"One month," she says, her voice cold, controlled, the voice of a woman who has made her peace with a loss she cannot prevent.
"You survived one month. I suppose that means something. "
"It means everything," Selene says. "It means we're real. It means this is love, not obsession. It means you can't stop us anymore."
Stella looks away, toward the ocean, toward the gray line where the world begins. "I never could stop you," she whispers, so quiet I almost miss it. "I could only delay you. And I don't know anymore if I was protecting you or punishing myself."
She turns back, her eyes finding mine, and I see the resignation there, the surrender, the fragile hope that I might be worthy of her daughter after all. "Make her happy," Stella says. "That's all I ask. Make her happier than I ever could."
"I will," I say. "I swear it. On my life. On my soul. On everything I am and everything I will ever be."
The courthouse doors open. A clerk emerges, a round woman with gray hair and reading glasses perched on her nose, her expression professionally cheerful. "Mr. Hayes? Ms. Brooks? The judge is ready for you."
We follow her inside. The courthouse smells of floor wax and old paper and the particular stillness of government buildings, a scent that reminds me of permits and inspections and the endless bureaucracy of building something from nothing.
The marble floors are polished to a mirror sheen, reflecting the fluorescent lights in rectangles of cold white.
Our footsteps echo as we walk, mine heavy and deliberate, Selene's light and quick, Stella's and Richard's a measured pace behind us.
The judge is a thin man with a sharp nose and kind eyes, his robe black and immaculate, his desk cluttered with files and a coffee mug that reads World's Okayest Golfer.
He looks up as we enter, his gaze flicking from me to Selene to the small group behind us, and he smiles, small and genuine, the smile of a man who has performed this ceremony a thousand times and still finds meaning in it.
"Good morning," he says. "Let's make this quick. I have a docket full of traffic violations and one very angry landlord waiting for me down the hall."
Selene laughs, a bright sound that cuts through the tension like a blade through silk. The judge's smile widens. He gestures for us to stand before him, and we do, side by side, her shoulder pressing against my ribs, her hand finding mine and squeezing with a strength that surprises me.
"Do you have rings?" the judge asks.
I reach into my pocket, pull out the small velvet box I have carried for three weeks, hidden in my toolbox, in my truck, in the hollow of a wall at the construction site where I knew no one would find it.
I open it. The emerald gleams in the fluorescent light, deep and green and alive, set in a band of white gold I hammered myself in the workshop behind Dad's office, late at night when I should have been sleeping.
Selene gasps. Her free hand flies to her mouth, her eyes wide and wet and full of a wonder that makes my chest ache with the need to give her everything, always, forever.
"Silas," she whispers. "When did you?—"
"Three weeks ago," I say. "The night after you climbed out your window and met me at the site. I knew then. I knew I was going to marry you. I knew nothing would stop me. Not your mother. Not my father. Not the world."
The judge clears his throat, amused. "Shall we proceed?"
We turn to face each other. Selene's eyes are level with my collarbone, her small frame dwarfed by my shoulders, my chest, the sheer physical mass of me that has always made her feel safe and claimed and slightly overwhelmed.
She looks up at me with a devotion that humbles me, that strips away every layer of dominance and control and leaves me bare before her, a man who would burn the world down and build it anew just to see her smile.
"Silas Hayes," the judge begins, his voice taking on the cadence of ritual, "do you take Selene Brooks to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, as long as you both shall live?"