Chapter 24
LEAH
In month twenty-six, we got married again on a Saturday morning with no red carpet.
The ceremony was held in the small courtyard behind the community arts center.
Marisol borrowed twenty mismatched chairs, Tess hung a string of white lights on the wooden door, and Evan was in charge of the rings—then forgot, ten minutes before we started, that he’d put them in his inner jacket pocket.
There were no label executives, sponsors, or industry journalists among the guests.
Asher’s bandmates sent a card; none of them rushed over to turn the wedding into a reunion show.
There was no team waiting outside to release exclusive photos, only Noah with his camera, taking a few shots of everyone at our request—photos that would never leave a private album.
I wore a simple ivory dress, my hair pinned up by Tess in the upstairs classroom. A schedule for next week’s student sessions was taped to the mirror, and lyrics I needed to review by Monday sat on the table. The wedding fit into the life I’d already built.
Asher stood at the far end of the courtyard in a dark gray suit, no stage lights to amplify his silhouette. When he saw me, he didn’t make a show of being surprised for the guests. He just held out his hand.
I walked that short distance myself.
The vows didn’t ask us to forget the first marriage. I promised I would stop swallowing what I actually wanted to say in order to keep the peace, and that I would stop taking over the parts that were his responsibility.
Asher’s vows were shorter. He said that from now on, when he felt afraid, jealous, or disappointed, he would tell me directly—that he wouldn’t leave me in the background anymore, and wouldn’t use words that sounded right to avoid giving real answers.
After we exchanged rings, the friend officiating announced that we were married. Asher stepped toward me, and we kissed before the applause began.
Applause rose from among the twenty mismatched chairs. No one called out his stage name, and no emcee asked us to turn toward the camera and do it again.
On the registration documents, I was still Leah Morgan.
Lunch was held at the long table in the courtyard.
Evan told a story about a blown speaker at one of our shows before we were known, and Marisol warned him not to turn it into a full-length speech.
The cake Tess brought had one side that had sunk slightly; Asher covered it with strawberries for her, which made that corner look more crowded than the rest.
At three in the afternoon, we carried the remaining chairs back into the classroom ourselves.
Asher took off his jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and helped Noah take down the lights.
No limousine waited at the door. Carrying two boxes of leftover cake, we walked the six blocks home from the community arts center.
The house wasn’t large. Upstairs, two adjacent rooms each held a worktable—mine had its own bookshelf and a lock on the door, and Asher’s guitar stood on a rack in the other.
The kitchen window looked out on a small stretch of sea.
In the entryway, my teaching bag and his performance jacket hung side by side.
In the first month after we moved in, we’d already argued once about where the bookshelf should go.
I wanted to keep the spot by the living room window free for students who occasionally came to rehearse; he wanted to put his record cabinet there.
In the end the cabinet moved upstairs, and the living room kept four chairs.
In exchange, I agreed to stop dropping his guitar picks into a drawer as if they were clutter.
Two lives hadn’t been pressed into one—they’d simply finally shared an address.
After the door closed, Asher put the cake in the refrigerator. I stood in the middle of the kitchen and watched him loosen his tie. There were two sets of keys in the entryway, two studio doors upstairs that each locked from the inside, and tonight we would walk into the same bedroom.
I grabbed the loosened tie and pulled him down.
When Asher kissed me, I tasted champagne and a trace of buttercream.
We bumped into the back of a chair and both laughed.
This kiss was more urgent, more familiar than the first tentative kisses after we started finding our way back to each other—but when I pressed my hand against his chest and said “wait,” he let go immediately and stood still.
I took off my shoes and pulled out the hairpins one by one. When the last one dropped into my palm, I reached for his tie again. “Now you can.”
We kissed our way upstairs. The bedroom had no wedding photos on the walls yet, only a new lamp on the nightstand and the sheets we’d put on together the night before. I stepped out of the ivory dress, and the ring on Asher’s hand grazed my waist, cool for a moment.
The familiar desire hadn’t disappeared just because the house and the relationship had changed, and it no longer made every decision for us. I reached to the nightstand for a condom and handed it to him; once he’d put it on, I pulled him close.
I straddled his lap, held his shoulders, and took him in slowly at my own pace.
When my body readjusted to that familiar fullness, my breath caught for a beat; Asher didn’t rush me—he just held my waist and waited for me to start moving.
Our kisses came and went, the sheets creased beneath my knees, and the two rings touched occasionally, their small sound folding into each other’s breathing.
As pleasure built, I gripped his back and told him to hold me tighter. He did—arms closing around me—and didn’t kiss me again until the trembling had passed. We climaxed almost at the same moment.
Afterward he took care of the condom and pulled the blanket up over our shoulders. We lay in our shared bedroom, the leftover wedding cake still sitting downstairs.
“Asher Vale,” I said.
“Mm?”
“You’re my husband now.”
He looked at me, the corner of his mouth slowly lifting. “That sounds good.”
I laughed and reached up to draw his face closer. He kissed me.
Over the next six weeks, Asher left three times to play theater dates he’d already committed to; I taught two more rounds of classes and began the next single with Tess. We woke up in different cities, and we bickered in the kitchen over which of us had forgotten to buy coffee.
When he was away, I ate dinner downstairs as usual, course materials spread across the dining table; when I was out recording, he adjusted his own setlists as usual.
Two separate schedules ran side by side on sticky notes on the refrigerator.
On Sunday evenings when we were both home, we shopped for the week’s groceries together and figured out whose turn it was to take out the trash.
One afternoon in month twenty-seven, I was in my studio revising a new song when my phone showed a forwarded email from Asher.
The sender was his label. They had heard my song in a publicly available video from the community songwriters’ night, and they were asking whether Asher would be willing to record it for his next project—and hoping his team could reach out to me to discuss licensing.
Asher had forwarded the original message with a single line at the top: They sent it to me.
When I walked next door, he was sitting at his desk revising lyrics. The page was dense with strikethroughs, his guitar leaning against the wall.
“You saw the email?” he asked.
“I did.”
“I haven’t replied yet.”
“Do you want to sing that song?”
“I do.” Asher glanced at the guitar against the wall. “I wanted to from the first time I heard it. But wanting to sing it doesn’t make it mine.”
“I’m not authorizing it,” I said. “I want to record it myself. Sing it myself.”
“All right.” He opened the reply window. “I’ll tell them you’ll record it yourself.”
He sent the short reply while I watched.
“I’m a little disappointed,” he said. “But I’ll handle it.”
I nodded. “Thank you for telling me.”
He picked up the lyric sheet he’d been revising for three weeks. “I’ll give them this one instead. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s mine.”
“Then keep working on it.”
“I am.”
I went back to my studio and closed the door. The black clothbound notebook sat in the center of the desk, its cover edges worn from years of use; the first page still held the sentences I had once written to speak for Asher.
I turned to the page with the new song, wrote the date below the title, and then wrote my own name.
Leah Morgan.
At the other end of the house, Asher ran through his chorus once, stopped, and crossed out the last line. He didn’t walk down the hall to ask me what should come next.
I didn’t look up to wait for him either.
Beneath my name, I kept writing my song.