46. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
I had rewritten my vows six times, and standing at the front of that room with every person either of us had ever loved arranged in careful rows behind me, I still did not feel ready when the officiant turned toward me and nodded.
Isla's hand sat warm inside mine, steady in a way mine was not quite managing to match. I looked at her instead of the folded paper in my jacket pocket, because I had learned, over six months of learning her, that looking at her steadied me faster than any rehearsal ever could.
"Nikolai." The officiant's voice was gentle, patient, the voice of a man who had clearly done this a hundred times and understood exactly how long a groom sometimes needed.
I did not reach for the paper. I had memorized every word of it a dozen times over across six drafts, and I found, standing there, that I no longer needed to check whether I remembered it correctly.
"I spent six years believing that the parts of me that survived that fire were not fit to be looked at directly, let alone loved.
" My voice came out steadier than I expected, though I could feel Isla's grip tighten slightly at those first words.
"I built an entire life around keeping my sleeves down and my door locked and every dangerous piece of myself carefully out of anyone's reach, because I had already decided, long before I ever met you, exactly how that story was going to end. "
The room had gone completely silent, the hushed silence of people leaning forward without meaning to.
"Then a woman hit me with a fire extinguisher in a hospital hallway and refused to apologize for it, and every careful plan I had for the rest of my life quietly began falling apart."
That earned a soft ripple of laughter, warm and immediate, and I felt something in my chest loosen along with it.
"You did not ask me to be less dangerous.
You did not ask me to explain the scars before you would look at them, or earn my way into your trust through some careful performance of safety.
You simply looked at every part of me I had spent six years hiding, and called the whole of it worth staying for. "
I glanced down at my own forearm, bare in front of everyone in that room, and back up at her face before I continued.
"I do not know how to be the kind of man who deserves that easily.
I am not certain I ever fully will. But I intend to spend the rest of my life proving I understood exactly what you gave me when you decided that, and I will not once take it for granted, not for a single ordinary morning we are lucky enough to share. "
I paused, steadying my own breath before the last of it.
"I have stood in rooms with a weapon in my hand and felt less exposed than I feel standing here in front of everyone we love with nothing to protect myself but the truth. I find I do not mind it. I find, in fact, that I have never wanted anything less to hide behind in my entire life."
Isla's eyes had gone bright, her jaw working the way it did when she was determined not to cry before her own turn.
I reached the final line, the one I had rewritten more than any other, and lost my place entirely.
"I promise to love you," I said, and then stopped, the next line simply gone from my memory as completely as if it had never been written there at all.
The silence stretched a half second too long. Somewhere behind me, Miles made a small strangled sound trying not to laugh out loud.
"In sickness and in health," Isla offered quietly, not unkindly, the corner of her mouth already fighting a smile.
"That is not actually the line I wrote."
"I know. You looked like you needed a lifeline."
The room broke into open laughter then, warm and immediate, Renee's laugh cutting clearly above the rest of it, and I felt my own mouth pull into something helpless in response.
"I promise to love you exactly like this," I said finally, finding the thread again, steadier now that the room had laughed with me instead of at me. "Imperfect, occasionally forgetting my own vows in front of a hundred witnesses, and entirely, permanently yours."
Isla laughed and cried at the same time, an ungainly, honest sound that undid me more than anything rehearsed could have, and somewhere in the middle of that sound the officiant pronounced us married and I stopped needing the paper in my pocket at all.
The reception unfolded in the kind of warm chaos I had spent six years actively avoiding, string lights strung low over a room full of people who had all, in one way or another, helped keep both of us alive long enough to reach it.
"You have to dance," Isla said, tugging my hand toward the cleared floor with the particular determination she reserved for arguments she had already decided to win.
"I do not dance."
"You danced at the engagement dinner."
"I moved my feet in a manner that avoided public embarrassment. That is not remotely the same activity."
"Same activity. Lower bar." She pulled me onto the floor anyway, and I let her, because refusing her anything on that night had never once been a real option.
I was, by any honest measure, a poor dancer, stiff through the shoulders in a way six years of careful control had never quite trained out of me, counting steps under my breath like a man defusing something.
"You are counting," Isla said, laughing against my chest.
"I am concentrating."
"You are counting. I can feel your lips moving."
"It is a private strategy."
"It is adorable, and I am never letting you live it down." She tucked herself closer, resting her head against my shoulder, and whatever remained of my self-consciousness quietly stopped mattering at all.
"Why did you agree to this, exactly," I asked, "knowing full well I would embarrass myself?"
"Because you would rather embarrass yourself in front of everyone we love than refuse me something small on purpose. I noticed that about you a long time ago."
"That is an alarmingly accurate assessment."
"I am a trained professional. Noticing things is the whole job." She tipped her head back to look at me properly, something soft and certain in her expression.
"Besides, you are not actually terrible. You are simply out of practice at things that do not involve strategy."
"Dancing has no strategy."
"Dancing has enormous strategy. You are just refusing to admit you have already won."
I laughed, low and real, and pulled her a fraction closer, no longer counting anything at all.
Matvei's toast came an hour later, glass raised, a sudden stillness settling over the room that told me everyone understood this would not be an ordinary toast even before he opened his mouth.
"I have known this man eleven years," he said, "six of them after a fire that should have finished the job for good."
He paused, studying the glass in his hand rather than the room.
"For most of those years, I assumed he intended to die precisely the way he lived, alone, armed, and thoroughly unbothered by the idea of either. I planned my own eulogy for him more than once, mentally, out of professional habit."
That earned a startled laugh, and Matvei allowed himself the smallest smile before continuing.
"Isla, I do not know what you did to him. I have asked him directly, and he could not explain it either, which for a man who explains everything is its own kind of answer."
He looked at me then, something rare and unguarded crossing his usually flat expression.
"I only know that the man standing at that altar today let every person in this room see both of his arms for the first time in six years, and did not once look away from anyone while he did it.
I have never been more certain of anything than I am that he found exactly what he spent those six years insisting he did not deserve. "
He raised his glass higher.
"To Nikolai, who I like considerably better now than I did as an armed and miserable bachelor. And to Isla, who accomplished what six years of my own patient nagging never once managed."
Laughter rolled through the room again, and somewhere near the back I caught Basin, quiet all evening, present in a way he rarely allowed himself to be anywhere, actually smile, brief and real, before returning to his usual careful stillness.
He offered nothing more than a single nod when he noticed me watching, and it was more than enough.
The night wore on the way good nights always did, dancing and toasts and Miles attempting a speech of his own that dissolved twice into laughter before he abandoned it entirely in favor of simply hugging his sister and calling it finished.
"I had an entire speech," he told me afterward, still catching his breath from laughing at himself. "It had structure. It had a beginning, middle, and end."
"What happened to it?"
"You happened to it. Watching you two is genuinely too much for a prepared speech to survive." He clapped my shoulder once, the same rough affection he had shown me in a firehouse apparatus bay months earlier, and wandered off toward the dessert table without waiting for a response.
Grace cried through most of the evening, quietly and without apology, dabbing at her eyes every time she caught sight of the two of us together.
David spent it reminding anyone within earshot that he had, in fact, delivered his toast as promised, dignified and only lightly threatening, and seemed prouder of that fact than of nearly anything else all day.
I found Isla near the edge of the dance floor in the last quiet minute of the night, the crowd thinning, the music softening into something slower nobody was dancing to anymore.
"There you are," she said, tucking a loose strand of hair back before I could reach for it myself.
"I have been looking for a moment alone with you since the ceremony ended."
"You had me the entire ceremony. You had me for the whole reception too, technically. I was standing right there for all of it."
"That is different. I wanted this moment specifically." I took both her hands in mine, the way she had taken mine a hundred times before, and found I no longer needed six drafts to say the thing I actually meant.
"I spent six years believing that everything the fire left on me made me something to manage carefully, not something anyone could look at whole. You never once treated me like a collection of pieces that needed managing."
Her eyes went soft, waiting.
"You are the only person who ever looked at all of me and called it whole."
She did not say anything back right away.
She simply reached up and pressed her palm flat against my jaw, steady, the same unhurried certainty she had brought to everything since the night she hit me with a fire extinguisher and changed the entire shape of my life without either of us understanding it yet.
"Say it again sometime when I am not standing here in a dress trying not to ruin my makeup," she said finally, her voice rough with everything she was holding back.
"I intend to say it for the rest of my life. Tonight is simply the first of many."
I took her hand, laced my fingers through hers, and led her out of our own reception into the quiet dark waiting just beyond the doors, past the last of the string lights and the last of the noise, neither of us looking back once.