Epilogue
Solenn
Another courthouse. Different purpose.
Just under a year ago I stood in a building like this one and told a judge that my husband couldn’t do the smaller thing. That he couldn’t just stand beside me. That I’d married him believing it could become real and found out the hard way that duty and love are not the same animal.
Today I’m marrying him again.
The ceremony takes five minutes. A judge who would plainly rather be at lunch. A clerk who has seen a thousand of these and cannot manufacture enthusiasm for one more. Tessa holding six-month-old Isla on her hip, pulling faces to keep her quiet while her mother commits to forever.
No Melanie.
Still unapologized. Still exiled. Her checks still arrive every month in expensive envelopes with cards that run from passive-aggressive to openly hostile, and every one of them goes back the way it came, uncashed.
There’s a drawer in Liam’s desk full of returned envelopes now.
A paper trail of a woman who has still not worked out that some things aren’t for sale.
One came in October with no check in it at all. Four lines, in that fountain pen, asking after the baby’s weight.
I read it twice and put it in the drawer with the rest, because the terms haven’t changed and they aren’t mine to change. She apologizes to me, in her own words, out loud, or she doesn’t come. Liam hasn’t asked me to move on it and he never will.
But I did keep that one separately.
Angelina I never heard from again. The anonymous texts stopped the week Liam told her what the next one would cost her.
He asked what kind of ring I wanted. I said something that fits. He almost cried.
The one he puts on my finger cost twelve dollars from a rack next to the register at a convenience store. Bright pink plastic with a fake stone in it that catches the courthouse strip lighting.
It’s perfect.
“Any final words before I make this official?” The judge is bored. I don’t blame her.
I turn to him. Put my hand along his jaw. Watch his eyes do the thing they do now whenever I touch him.
“Still with me?”
His whole face goes.
“For life.”
The gavel comes down.
Tessa cries. Loudly, and without apology, and while holding a baby who immediately starts crying as well out of solidarity, so the last thirty seconds of my second wedding are conducted over a duet.
“I’m fine,” she says, to nobody. “I’m not even involved.”
“You’re extremely involved.”
“I know exactly how involved I am, Solenn.” She hands me my daughter and wipes her face with the back of her wrist. “Somebody had to keep the pair of you alive long enough to get here.”
***
The house is quiet when we get back.
Not the penthouse. Never the penthouse. That went months ago and we bought something on the edge of town, smaller with a yard and a kitchen that has already smelled smoke more than once.
Somewhere that’s ours rather than his, where Isla’s toys are all over floors that nobody paid a designer to specify.
Tessa took her for the night. “Wedding present,” she said, with a look that removed any ambiguity about what she expected us to do with it. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“That’s a famously short list.”
“Exactly.”
The door shuts. His hand finds my waist.
“So.” Low. “Mrs. Sharpe.”
“Alston-Sharpe, thank you.”
“My apologies. Mrs. Alston-Sharpe.” He pulls me in. “What would you like to do with your wedding night?”
“I have ideas.”
“Do they involve a bedroom?”
“Eventually.”
His eyebrow goes up. “Eventually.”
I get a fistful of his tie and bring him down to me and kiss him the way I’ve wanted to since the clerk started reading, through the paperwork and the photographs and a drive home with Tessa making observations from the back seat.
He groans into my mouth.
“Solenn.”
“Bedroom. Now.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Full daylight through windows neither of us bothers to cover, because we have finished with hiding.
He gets me out of my clothes like he’s unwrapping something. Every button given its own attention. Every inch that arrives getting his mouth before it gets anything else.
“I’ve been thinking about this all day.”
“Just today?”
“Every day.” My blouse comes off my shoulders. “Every single day since you let me back through your door. What I’d do when I finally had you like this again. When you were mine again. Properly mine.”
“I was always yours.”
“Not like this.” He unhooks my bra and watches it go, and the sound he makes low in his chest lands somewhere well below my navel. “Not with a ring on you and nothing in front of us and no reason left to hold anything back.”
“Were you holding back?”
“You have no idea.”
He walks me to the bed and lays me down and then stands at the edge of it and just looks, and takes his time about it.
“What?”
Six months postpartum. A body that is not the one I had a year ago, with a map of silver on it and a stomach that has been somewhere. I should feel something about being looked at in daylight.
The way he’s doing it makes that impossible.
“Memorizing.”
“You’ve seen me naked.”
“Not as my wife.” His shirt comes over his head. “Not knowing I get this for the rest of my life.”
My mouth goes dry.
Six months of feeds at three in the morning and diapers and falling asleep on a sofa with a baby between us. I had genuinely started to forget what he looked like outside the fog of it.
I remember now.
“Come here.”
He comes.
His weight settles over me, familiar and brand new at once. His mouth finds mine. His hands go over me slowly, relearning, stopping everywhere that’s different.
“Tell me what you want.”
“You. Just you.”
“I can be more specific.” His lips go down my throat. “I’ve had six months to plan this. There’s a list.”
“Of course there’s a list.”
“Item one.” His mouth reaches my collarbone. “Kiss every inch of you.”
“Thorough.”
“Item two.” Lower. “Make you come twice before I’m anywhere near inside you.”
“Twice.”
“At minimum. I’m an overachiever.” His tongue circles my nipple. “Item three-”
“Liam.”
“Mm.”
“Stop describing the list and start doing the list.”
He grins against my skin. “Yes ma’am.”
He makes good on item two.
Twice with his mouth. Once with his fingers. By the time he finally, finally pushes into me I’m shaking and oversensitive and saying things that aren’t quite words.
“Still with me?”
Our phrase. Said into my throat while he moves in me, slow and deep and unbearably careful.
“Yes.”
“Say it again.”
“Yes. God. Liam-”
He takes the rest of it out of my mouth with a kiss and picks up his pace, and his hand comes down between us and finds exactly where he’s going.
“I love you.”
He says it on every stroke. Into my skin, into my hair, into the space behind my ear.
“I love you. I love you. I love you.”
I come apart with his name in my mouth.
He goes over a few seconds behind me, face in my neck, saying mine like it’s the only word he’s got left.
Afterward we’re tangled in sheets that will definitely need washing.
His hand draws idle shapes on my hip. My head is on his chest, going up and down with him. The afternoon light has turned everything gold and slightly ridiculous.
He says something into my hair about the smoke alarm in the new kitchen having a personal grudge against him, and I laugh.
And he goes completely still underneath me.
I lift my head.
It’s the same stillness from a smoking kitchen at twenty weeks, when he stood there with a wooden spoon and told me he’d never once heard me do that at him.
“Still counting?” I ask.
“Every one.” His arm comes tighter around my back. “I notice everything.”
“I have a confession.”
I lift my head again. “If there’s another ex-girlfriend I will end you on our actual wedding day.”
“Nothing like that.” He’s smiling at the ceiling. “I never told you about the list.”
“You have just told me about the list. Items one through three, in some detail.”
“Not that list.” He reaches over to the nightstand and comes back with a folded sheet of paper. “This one.”
I take it.
The paper has gone soft, the creases worn through from being opened and folded too many times. His handwriting covers both sides, small and precise and unmistakable.
The Courtship of Solenn Alston-Sharpe (Again) (Properly This Time)
I start reading.
Walk her home
Earn the doorway
One cup of tea
Paperback night
Make her laugh (real laugh, not polite)
First date (cooking competition - she wins, obviously)
The whole night (held, nothing else)
Say I love you every day until it stops scaring her
Hear it back
Forever
Nine of them struck through in his careful hand.
Ten is not struck through, and I understand why before I’ve finished looking at it, because ten is not the sort of thing a person gets to cross off.
And it doesn’t stop there.
Watch her read this list
Teach her to dance
Sunrise picnic
Build Isla’s first bookshelf
Road trip, no destination, just driving
Cook one thing that does not set off a smoke alarm
It goes all the way down the page and onto the back, in his handwriting, numbered, out to fifty.
Grow old
I stop at eleven and read it twice. Then I look up.
He’s watching me with the expression that still gets me in the chest, even now, even after everything.
“When did you write this?”
“The week after the hospital. You were asleep and I had Isla on me and I was trying to work out how a man deserves this.”
“There are fifty.”
“Fifty years’ worth.” He pulls me in. “At minimum. I’ll add more as we go.”
My eyes have started stinging.
“Item eleven is watch her read this list.”
“It is.”
“It’s crossed off.”
“I was confident.”
“You’re a smug bastard.”
“I prefer cautiously optimistic.”
I laugh, and it comes out dangerously close to the other thing. Happy tears, which make no sense and arrive anyway, going down my face while I hold a piece of paper covered in a man’s handwriting and his plans and his total unembarrassed certainty that we’ve got fifty years.
“Hey.” His thumbs come up to my face. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” I shake my head. “Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s right. That’s the problem. I don’t know what to do with myself when everything’s right.”
“You could try enjoying it.”
“I am enjoying it. That’s why I’m crying. Pregnancy took my emotional regulation and I do not believe it is coming back.”
He laughs and pulls me down onto his chest and gets the blanket over both of us.
“The list?” he says into my hair.
“The list.”
“I’ve got plans.”
“I noticed.”
“Fifty years’ worth.”
“Better get started.”
He kisses my forehead. Settles into the pillows. His breathing goes long and slow and gone.
I stay awake a while.
The list is still in my hand. Fifty items, fifty years, a whole life set down in his handwriting and numbered so he can’t lose track of it.
Through the monitor on the nightstand, Isla makes the small snuffling noises of a six-month-old who is warm and fed and entirely unaware that her parents have just promised each other forever.
Again.
The courtship never stopped.
Item eleven was watch her read this list.
He’d crossed it off in advance, the smug bastard. I’m going to marry him so hard.
I already have.
THE END