Chapter 17 #2
“Careful,” Uncle Dee said behind them, his sugar having crystallized.
He hadn’t abandoned the mic so much as floated it; his voice carried just fine without it.
Miss Glory materialized at his shoulder like beauty with teeth.
Miss Bea folded her fan with a snap that had shut men up since 1987.
Mo’nique, bless her ruthless soul, took two small steps, so she stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me, the line drawn manifest. From the corner of my eye, I spotted Blair, hot pink nails curved and ready to attack, if necessary.
“This is a public event,” I said, still calm. “You’re welcome to enjoy the music, the food, and the company. You are not welcome to harass my wife.” I added extra emphasis this time, just to make sure it landed.
Karen’s lip curled. “Oh, it’s wife now? How convenient. What’s the stipend? What’s the plan—divorce papers the minute the ink’s dry on probate?”
The part of me that knew how to keep a room from burning didn’t give the part of me that wanted to snap a chance to speak. “Walk away,” I advised. “You can decide later if you want to be family who supports her or family who makes her life smaller. But you won’t do the latter here.”
The cousin tried for a last snide jab. “Guess the Gibsons think they can buy everything.”
Blair smiled—a slow, terrifying reveal of a pearl-white opinion. “Baby, we don’t have to buy what walks into our arms.”
Marla’s mouth worked. For a second, she looked like a woman who’d lost the thread of her script.
Karen tugged at her elbow. They looked around, expecting allies, finding none.
People who would happily tsk-tsk behind closed doors didn’t want to stand on a summer night in front of the Sasspatch Society and pick a fight with joy.
They left the way they’d come, stiff and quick, catching their own skirts on the edges of someone else’s happiness.
I turned slowly back to Emmaline. Her face wasn’t triumphant. It wasn’t relieved. It had that expression I hated—braced, waiting for the hurt that always followed the scene. My hand found hers without asking. She let me pull her closer.
“You alright?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” I felt the words more than heard them. Then, after a beat that felt like a thing deciding itself inside her, “Thank you.”
“Always,” I said, and meant it so thoroughly it was almost dangerous.
Uncle Dee reappeared as if conjured, clapping his hands with the authority of a ringmaster slamming a whip. “Well then! As my old granny used to say, ‘If you can’t be polite, be gone. If you can’t be gone, be quiet. And if you can’t be quiet, we’ll drown you out with better music.’ Hit it, boys!”
The trio kicked into something sunnier, busier. The green breathed again, like it had been holding air too long. Movement picked up. Laughter restarted with a slightly manic edge—the way people laugh after they don’t get hit by a car.
We could’ve left then. No one would’ve blamed us. But Emmaline looked up at the lights, down at the ring on its chain, and then at me with a question I didn’t want to answer wrong.
“Stay?” I offered.
She nodded.
We didn’t dive back into the middle; we edged along the margins, letting folks pass us paper plates piled with home fries from The Commissary and a brownie someone had cut too big.
Grandma Elsie pressed a napkin into Emmaline’s free hand like a benediction.
Dad kissed the air near her temple and said something that made her blink fast and then breathe.
My brothers orbited with food and idiocy and terribly earnest advice, a family of planets stubbornly holding their sun in place.
When the music slid into another slow number, the crowd began a chant that started with the teenagers and gained dangerous traction among the adults. “Kiss, kiss, kiss!”
I could’ve shut it down. Chief stare. One hand lifted.
The chant would’ve died a bashful death, and we could’ve gone back to swaying like two reasonable people with boundaries.
But Emmaline’s eyes tipped up to mine, wide and unreadable, and she did a small thing that unraveled me: she rose on her toes a fraction, that unconscious micro-reach every human makes when what they want is a little higher than they are.
I moved slow. Not because I didn’t want to go fast, but because slow was the only speed that wouldn’t seem like taking.
I set my palm at her waist the exact way I had the first time—easy, asking.
I watched her face for no, for not here, for anything that wasn’t yes.
When none of those came, I closed the distance.
The first brush of her mouth was a sigh I’d been holding for a decade.
It wasn’t fireworks; it was a door opening onto a room that had always been in the house, and we’d been too afraid, too careful to look inside.
She tasted like lemonade, like sugar and tart and something that made my knees want to vote for surrender.
The crowd noise softened at the edges. The string lights blurred.
Somewhere, the mandolin found a harmony line that wasn’t in the original, and my chest answered it.
I didn’t haul her in; I didn’t devour. I kissed her like a promise, because that’s what I had the right to make tonight: not forever. Just this moment. This town. This line drawn around her that said safety.
When we eased apart, my mouth still tasted like sugar and lemons.
There was surprise on her face again—the same startled recognition that had flashed in the judge’s chambers.
It mirrored mine so perfectly I had to look away for a second, because if I didn’t, I was going to forget which parts of this were real.
Because the problem with pretending is how fast it stops feeling like it, and I was afraid I was already slipping over that edge.