20. Eve
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Eve
The wedding is small. Just family.
My family, which has quietly grown teeth and members over the last few months.
Mom crying before we even begin, before the music, before anyone’s said a word, just at the sight of me in the dress.
Dad walking me down a short aisle with tears he will deny under oath for the rest of his life.
Tyler standing up as Dean’s best man, because somewhere in the wreckage of all of this the two of them became brothers in every way that actually counts, the way Dean and Simon never managed in a lifetime of sharing a last name.
Rosalie is here, near the back, where she can see the exits, because trust is a thing you build one careful afternoon at a time and we’re still building.
Little Lily is on her hip in a dress with a bow bigger than her head, and she has decided, with the total confidence of a two-year-old, that Dean is Uncle Dean, and she announces it to the room at intervals in case anyone forgot.
A few people who earned the word friend. Becca, who still apologizes weekly for not seeing through Simon first, and who cries harder than my mother, which I would not have believed possible.
We say our vows in the private dining room at Nightshade, the one Dean built with his own hands, candlelight soft on our faces, the city alive and glittering in the windows behind us, every light out there burning steady and ours and entirely indifferent to how far we had to crawl to get here.
“I love you,” Dean says, and his voice stays steady even as his eyes shine in the candlelight.
“I’ve loved you since the night you laughed so hard at a terrible joke of mine that wine came out of your nose, and you were mortified, and I thought, that is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and I am in enormous trouble.
” Soft laughter rolls through the small room.
“I’ll love you through every day that comes after this one.
Every good one. Every terrible one. Every boring Tuesday and every anniversary I’ll probably remember a day late.
I choose you, Eve. I chose you a long time ago, in silence, when I had no right to.
I get to do it out loud now, and I’m never going to stop. ”
My turn. My voice shakes, but the words come out clear, because I’ve meant them longer than I’ve known them.
“I love you,” I say. “Not because you saved me, because I saved myself, and you’d be the first to say so.
But because you stood next to me while I did it, and handed me the matches, and never once told me to calm down.
Because you believed me when believing me cost you everything, when no one else would.
Because you looked at me, the jagged parts and the broken parts and the parts I’d spent years learning to hide so I’d be easier to love, and you didn’t flinch, and you didn’t ask me to be smaller.
You just stayed.” I squeeze his hands. “You’re my partner.
My best friend. The loud thing that drowns out the dark.
My home. I choose you too, Dean. Every single day. Out loud. Forever.”
We kiss, and the small crowd cheers, and somewhere Lily claps for reasons entirely her own.
Tyler wipes his eyes and loudly blames allergies. Rosalie bounces Lily and smiles at me across the room, a real one, the kind that took us three careful months to get to. My mother sobs gloriously into my father’s shoulder, and my father smiles so wide it looks like it might cramp.
This is what a family looks like, I think, watching all of it. Not the cold museum the Valentines built and polished and posed inside of for decades. This. Loud and mismatched and spilling over the edges with love that nobody’s measuring or rationing or holding over anyone’s head.
Later, much later, the loft above the restaurant glows with candlelight.
His idea, naturally. The sentimental fool spent an hour setting them out while I said goodbye to the last of our guests, a dozen white pillars and more, until the brick walls look lit from somewhere inside themselves, until the whole room is warm and gold and ours.
I stand in the middle of it in the white silk slip I wore under my dress, and he watches me from across the room with the look that has gone through my knees from the very first night and shows no sign of ever stopping.
“My wife,” he says, like he’s testing whether the word is really his to use now. It comes out of him reverent, almost disbelieving.
“My husband,” I say back, and feel the shape of it settle into place in my chest like it was always meant to live there.
He crosses to me slow, like we have all the time in the world, because for the first time since the church we genuinely do.
No threat in any corner. No clock running anywhere in the city.
No reason on earth to rush a single second of this.
His hands slide up my bare arms, over my shoulders, into my hair, tilting my face up to his, and his mouth finds mine, soft at first, then deeper, then asking a question I’ve already answered a hundred times and will answer a hundred more.
The slip slides off my shoulders and pools at my feet.
“I’ve pictured this,” he says against my mouth, his hands skimming down my sides until I shiver under them. “More times than I’ll ever admit to a court of law. The wedding night. You, finally, with nothing left between us and no one left to interrupt.”
“You’ve had me for months.”
“I know.” He drops to his knees in front of me, right there in the middle of all that candlelight, and looks up, and the look alone nearly takes me out at the ankles.
“Doesn’t mean I’m not going to take my time tonight.
We’ve got the rest of our lives. I intend to be thorough about the first night of them. ”
And he is. He takes his time like a man with a point to prove and forever to prove it in, like he means to map every inch of me and be tested on it later and earn full marks.
He kisses up the inside of my thigh until my hands find his hair to stay upright, and when his mouth closes over my clit my head drops back and a sound I don’t recognize as my own comes out of my throat into the quiet room.
He licks into me slow and pushes two fingers deep, merciless in his patience, reading every gasp and chasing the ones that break in the middle, the candlelight moving on the walls and the steady filthy murmur of him telling me how good I taste, how wet I am for him, how he intends to spend the whole night taking me apart.
When I’m shaking, right at the edge of it, he holds me there, draws it out, refuses to let me come until I’m saying his name in a register I’d be embarrassed about on any other night and am not embarrassed about at all on this one.
“Dean. Please. I swear.”
“I’ve got you,” he says, and only then lets me fall, his mouth and fingers working me through every wave of it while my knees give out completely and stop pretending they ever planned otherwise.
He lays me back on the bed like I’m the only precious thing he’s ever been trusted to hold, and then he’s over me, and I drag him down by the back of the neck because I need the weight of him, the whole warm length of him pinning me to the mattress.
“Look at me,” he says, the way he did the very first night, the way he does every single time it matters most. And I do.
I hold his eyes as he finally pushes his cock into me, slow, inch by inch, both of us going still at the fullness of it, at the way it manages to feel like the first time and the thousandth at once.
“I love you,” he says, fucking into me deep and unhurried, his forehead resting against mine.
“I loved you on a balcony five years ago and I never once stopped, not for a single day of it. Every dinner. Every car ride home. Every terrible thing that happened to get us here. All of it was you. It was always going to be you.”
“It was always you,” I get out, and it’s true all the way down to the floor of me, and I feel it everywhere we’re joined.
He fucks me slow and then less slow, the rhythm we’ve spent months learning by heart and could find blindfolded now, his hand sliding between us so his thumb can work my clit because he knows my body better than I do these days.
The candlelight moves over both of us. His name keeps falling out of my mouth and I stop trying to hold it in.
“That’s it,” he breathes against my throat, hips driving deeper, “come on my cock, wife. Let me feel it.” When I shatter this time it’s with my arms locked around his back and his name on my lips and tears at the corners of my eyes that have not one single thing to do with sadness, clenching around him until he loses the last of his control and follows me right over the edge, spilling into me with my name groaned into my throat, holding on like a man who has finally, finally been allowed to keep the thing he wanted.
After, we lie tangled in the sheets, the candles burned low, moonlight coming through the windows, the city spread out below us, all those lights burning steady and bright and ours to look at for the rest of our lives.
“Happy?” he asks, his fingers drawing slow shapes on my bare shoulder.
“Deliriously.” I tip my head up to find his eyes. “Don’t let it go to your head. There’s already so little room up there for anything but smug.”
“Far too late.” I feel him smile against my hair. “It went to my head somewhere around the words obviously yes.”
All of it runs through my mind, lying there in the warm dark.
The altar. The texts in a steamed-up bathroom.
The slap, the church, the honeymoon suite.
The fire and the threats and the wall and the crowbar.
The weeks of plotting a man’s ruin, the months of slowly rebuilding from the ash of my own life, the slow and then suddenly-all-at-once falling in love with the brother I was supposed to find the whole time.
I think about Simon in a cell, learning how little his name is worth without his mother’s money behind it.
I think about Kiara, somewhere of her own, answering at last for every door she ever kicked in. She had the baby behind bars, I heard, and her family took it in to raise, the one small mercy in her whole sad story, that the kid gets to grow up far from everything its mother set on fire.
I think about Hilda alone in Palm Beach, her whole empire of appearances finally crumbled to dust, telling some new set of strangers a story where she’s the wronged party and no one left alive to contradict her.
And I think about this. His arm around me.
A sapphire on my finger that means exactly what it says and nothing it doesn’t.
A future stretching out ahead of us with nothing in it I have to brace against. A restaurant downstairs with our name on the lease.
A little girl who calls him Uncle Dean. A family that grew teeth and grew bigger and chose itself on purpose.
“So did you,” I say, turning to find his eyes in the candlelight. “Earn this. We both did.”
He kisses me again, soft and slow and absolutely sure of it.
A year ago I stood alone at an altar in a dress that cost too much, certain my whole life had just burned down in front of everyone I knew.
I had it exactly backward. That wasn’t my life ending. It was the wrong life finally letting go of me.
For weeks I was sure revenge was the point, that watching Simon lose everything would fill the hole he tore in me. It didn’t. It felt like it for about an hour, and then I was just tired, standing in the ash with my hands empty.
This is the thing that fills it. The best revenge was never the fire at all.
It was getting to be this happy, in a room we built ourselves, and watching it last.
THE END