Chapter 10 #3
“Warm. Happy. Safe. Like…like I could do anything if you just kept looking at me the way you did. Everyone makes it sound like love is supposed to hurt. Like it’s supposed to be this big, messy uphill battle, like that’s supposed to be romantic, and maybe for some people it is.
But for us it wasn’t like that. It was…it was the easiest thing I’d ever done, loving you.
Loving him.” The feeling itself was simple; it had been the world outside that had made holding on to what they’d had complicated.
But not Finn, never Finn. He’d made it so easy, as easy as breathing.
“Sorry if that sounds anticlimactic, but—”
“No. That sounds nice.” He cringed. “God, nice is such a stupid word. I don’t mean nice, I mean— Shit.”
“You see?” She smirked. “It’s hard.”
His smile was chagrined. “Everyone makes it sound like it’s supposed to be hard. It’s nice knowing it doesn’t have to be. That it wasn’t for us. For you. Him.” He cleared his throat. “Thanks. For describing it. I know this isn’t exactly fun for you, so—”
“It’s fine. Can I keep going?”
He nodded and reached for the bottle of whiskey, offering her a refill. She shook her head. Better not. She hadn’t wanted to do this sober, but being around Finn…Maybe it would be better to keep her head on straight.
“Life was good, and then one of your aunts, her husband got sick. Consumption. Tuberculosis. People could live months, sometimes even years with it, but for him it was aggressive. Within a fortnight, he was dead.” She felt a pinch of sadness, old grief echoing inside her.
“She was distraught. Someone trying to console her basically said that she should hold fast to the memories they made together. That she should find comfort in the thirty years they’d had with each other.
That many people weren’t blessed with that much time together.
It was a cold comfort. What your aunt said next really stuck with you.
It stuck with me, too, but you more so. Differently.
She said no amount of time together would ever be enough.
That they could have thirty lifetimes together, and at the end of them, she would still want more. ”
“Ah.” Finn ducked his head. “I think I see where this is going.”
“A week later, a week during which I would catch you looking at me when you didn’t think I was paying attention, a week during which I could tell you were lost in your head, you finally came to me, and you asked me to marry you.
” She swallowed hard, her throat aching.
“You said you weren’t ignorant of the fact that the choice you’d given me, the choice to be married in name only, wasn’t much of a choice at all, but you wanted me to have one now.
A real one. You didn’t want this to be about our families, our people, our responsibilities.
You said you wanted this to be about us and what we wanted.
For political, logistical reasons, our families had had us marry for a year and a day, but if my answer was yes, if I wanted to be with you, we could promise each other whatever we wanted.
If we wanted to promise each other forever, we could do that.
You wanted that, you said. Forever. Until death do us part didn’t mean much when time wasn’t promised, and you said you wanted us to be able to find each other in every life so that we could choose each other again.
Because, in your heart of hearts, given the choice, you knew you’d always choose me. It was the easiest yes I’d ever given.”
“How?” he asked, staring at her like she’d lost her ever-loving mind. “How was that easy?”
She shrugged weakly. She knew how it sounded. Absolutely bonkers. And yet— “I saw how her husband’s death killed a part of your aunt. She was going to take that loss to her grave.”
And now she knew firsthand that that kind of grief didn’t die when you did.
“So you were scared,” he surmised. “That’s why you said yes.”
“Anyone who loves someone and says they aren’t is lying,” she said.
“But that’s not the reason I said yes. I said yes because I didn’t know with any certainty what happened after a person died, and I might not have had much faith in forever, but I couldn’t imagine any version of me not loving every version of him. ”
Finn reached for the bottle of whiskey. Rather than offer her another glass, he unscrewed the cap and brought the bottle to his lips, taking a long pull before setting it down with an uneven thud.
“Jesus.” He braced his hands on the bar and leaned over, head hanging between his arms. “So you said yes. Then what?”
“Then, a week later, on the night of the Strawberry Moon—that’s the full moon in June—we went out—”
He jerked his head up. “Hold on. How long had we been married by this point?”
“Two months.”
Finn exhaled sharply. “Two months?”
He gaped at her.
“And a week.” She snickered at the look of sheer incredulity splashed across his face. “A prime example of why people should not be allowed to make decisions with eternal repercussions before their frontal lobes fully develop.”