Epilogue 2 - Hawk
Two years later
My brother finds me on the porch at dawn, clutching onto a mug and not drinking from it.
“You're up early,” Lucky says.
“I'm up at a normal time. You're late.”
He grins and leans on the rail next to me.
The fall colors are starting along the ridgeline, gold creeping into the green, and the meadow below the cabin is full of borrowed chairs, a wooden arch I built in the shed, and strings of twinkle lights running tree to tree.
Viv has been up here six times this week.
I lost control of my own home somewhere around Tuesday.
“You nervous?” Lucky asks.
“No.”
“You've sanded that porch rail twice since I got here.”
“It needed it.”
“Did it fuck.” He laughs. My brother is my best man, the only person at this wedding who knew me before the army gave me a bird's name. “She's the best thing that ever happened to you, bro. Try not to look like you're defusing something when she walks down that hill.”
By three o'clock the meadow is full. Our guests came up the mountain in a convoy, pickups and bikes and Marvin's old delivery van with the pies in the back, because my bride refused a wedding cake. Cherry, peach and apple, at Taryn’s request.
The guest list is everyone who can keep a secret, which in High Vale is everyone worth knowing.
The brothers wear their cuts over clean shirts.
Bethany is front row and eight months along.
Striker hovers behind her with a folding chair and a water bottle like a man guarding a state treasure.
Prez is silver-bearded and solid, arms crossed, and Doc is already deep in conversation with the town's old-timers. Wrench sits with Lila, his arm along the back of her chair, and Lila’s little girl is at the front in a yellow dress with a basket of petals, taking her flower girl duties seriously.
Savage is wearing a clerical collar. It looks out of place with his spiderweb neck tattoo and multiple piercings.
“No,” I tell him.
“Relax. Prez’s buddy Reverend Brown's doing the ceremony.” He adjusts the collar, wounded. “I'm just the backup. Ordained online, twenty dollars. If the Rev chokes on a canapé, this wedding does not stop. You're welcome.”
“Twenty dollars?”
“I would've paid forty just to see your face.”
When the wedding begins, Taryn comes over the rise on June's arm.
My bride is in white lace, a crown of flowers in her red hair, walking through the sun-dappled afternoon toward me, and June is smiling beside her.
The whole meadow stands and turns. Lila's already crying and Bethany's a lost cause.
Somewhere behind me Savage makes a strange wheezing sound like a kicked accordion.
The two of them stop in front of me, and my brother squeezes my arm.
Rev Brown keeps it short. Taryn cries through her vows and laughs through mine, which are six sentences long and took me a month to write.
I promise to bring her coffee every morning.
To always bake her favorite pie and look after her.
To make a family with her we can be proud of.
To try and look on the positive side, as hard as that is for me.
To build her the pantry she wants. And to love her forever, always.
“And I promise,” Taryn says, wiping her eyes, “to love you, grumpiness and all. And to never tell a soul what's in the secret recipes.”
The Rev pronounces us, and I kiss my beautiful new wife hard while the guests roar their approval.
Then comes the part Reverend Brown was warned about.
Every Outlaw walks to his bike, and on Prez's raised fist, twenty engines fire at once.
The thunder rolls down the valley and back off the far ridge, the only church bells this club has ever owned.
Birds go up out of the trees for half a mile.
In the front row, June doesn't even flinch.
She nods along like it's a hymn she knows.
There's one more club tradition. Prez calls Taryn up in front of everybody and presents her with a leather vest, soft black, stitched fresh.
PROPERTY OF HAWK across the back, the old way, the way it's been done since before my time.
Taryn turns it around and shows the crowd the front, where she's had a second patch sewn above the heart, small and neat.
HE'S MINE TOO.
My brother laughs so hard he has to sit down. My wife puts that vest on over her wedding dress and wears it the rest of the day, and I have never wanted anybody more in my life.
The reception runs into the evening. Marvin gives a toast that's mostly crying.
Doc waltzes June around the grass at quarter speed.
Bethany smiles from her chair as Striker brings her pie she didn't ask for and rubs her feet.
Wrench and Lila dance close and slow to the jukebox, her head on his chest, his eyes closed, as her girl falls asleep across two chairs with petals still in her fist.
Savage catches the bouquet. Nobody throws it to him. He just rises out of the crowd like a bear leaping for salmon and takes it clean out of the air, then stands there holding it, looking equal parts triumphant and terrified.
“It's binding. You’ll have a bride within a year,” June tells him solemnly, and he goes pale. It’s the best thing I see all day except my wife.
At sunset, Lucky lands the helicopter in the far meadow.
“Wedding present,” he says, handing my wife a headset. “I’ve had to fly rich idiots around for years. About time this bird did something worthwhile.”
Taryn climbs in wearing a wedding dress and a leather vest, laughing, waving to the whole town as we lift off.
We follow the ridgeline south while the valley turns to amber under us, and twenty minutes later Lucky sets us down beside a restored fire lookout, a little wood and glass room on stilts above the world, lamplight already glowing inside.
The club's other gift. Somebody, I suspect Viv, stocked it with champagne and enough food for a week.
Lucky lifts off and the silence after is total.
My wife stands in the middle of the glass room, mountains in every window going purple, and looks at me with her veil crooked.
“Come here, husband.”
I cross the room and kiss her slowly, her face in my hands, and the kiss turns hungry the way it always does with us.
Two years and the fire never once dies down.
I find the zipper of her wedding dress and draw it down her spine, and she shivers, and the white fabric bunches around her feet.
She's wearing lace underneath, pale blue, and stockings with a garter, and nothing has ever looked better on any woman anywhere.
I strip out of my shirt and she runs her palms over my chest like she's checking I'm real.
Then I lay my wife down on the bed and take my time.
I kiss down her body, unhook the lace, learn her all over again like it's the first night.
When my mouth finds her she's already wet, and I work her clit in slow circles, her fingers in my hair, her heels on my shoulders, until she comes with my name echoing around the room.
“Caleb. Fuck me. Now. I want my husband inside me.”
I settle between her thighs and push into her, both of us groaning, her body taking me like it was built to.
We move together in the dark glass room with the stars coming out in every window, deep and unhurried, my mouth at her throat.
When she tightens around me and breaks, crying out, I follow her, buried deep in her tight pussy, holding her like I’ll never let go.
After, she lies across my chest with her hand curled around mine.
“Husband,” she says, drowsy and pleased.
“Wife.”
“I like the sound of that.”
“You’d better.”
She laughs against my skin. Out the east window, far down the valley, the lights of High Vale come on one by one.
“Hey, husband.” She props her chin on my chest. “That vow of yours. The one about making a family.”
“I remember. I wrote it.”
“Want to start keeping it?”
I roll her under me, and her laugh turns into something even better.
I'm a man of my word.