31. Wedding Night
Wedding Night
Vera Alvarez
The tenant association office empties slowly.
Rosa leaves fast, because Rosa always leaves fast.
She pauses in the doorway with the bottle and the expression of a woman who has been watching this particular situation develop since November and is allowing herself one moment of satisfaction before returning to being professionally restrained.
She looks at me.
Looks at Cole.
Looks back at me.
"Lock up when you're done," she says.
Then she is gone.
The office is quiet.
The folding chairs still out.
The corkboard still up.
The lamp on the table still on, casting the same low light it had the night we rebuilt everything broken here.
Cole is still standing where Rosa left him.
Tie loosened.
Sleeves rolled to the elbow the way they always are by the end of anything that mattered.
He looks at me across the room.
Just that.
Looks.
My husband.
That is a new word to carry.
"Well," I say.
"Well," he says.
I cross the room.
He meets me halfway.
We end up in the middle of the office, between the folding chairs and the corkboard and the coffee maker that has seen better decades.
He puts both hands on my face and kisses me.
The one underneath all the performance.
The one that has been there since the bar and the whiskey and the two inches of space in December when neither of us moved.
I kiss him back with both hands fisted in his sweater.
When we break apart he presses his forehead to mine.
Both of us breathing.
"Eighteen chairs," I say.
"Eighteen chairs."
"You counted."
"Twice."
I laugh.
The private one.
The one that comes from somewhere I don't manage.
He looks at me the way he looks at me.
Like I'm the most important thing in the room and he sees no reason to pretend otherwise.
"You're doing the face," I say.
"What face."
"The one where you're happy and you don't know what to do with it."
His jaw tightens.
"I'm thinking that you married me in a room with folding chairs and I'm going to spend the rest of my life making sure you never regret it."
My chest does the thing again.
Definitely not heartburn.
"Don't make me cry," I say.
"You'll never forgive me."
"Noted."
He kisses me before the tears can decide anything.
His mouth warm and certain and moving with the patience of a man who has nowhere else to be.
His hands moving from my face to my waist.
Pulling me flush against him until I can feel him hard against my stomach already.
I press closer just to hear the sound he makes.
He makes it.
Low. Controlled. Barely.
Good.
I turn around.
Deliberately.
I face the window and look at the yellow curtains doing their usual inadequate job of blocking the streetlight.
I feel his breath at the back of my neck.
His hands at my shoulders.
"Like this?" I say.
A beat of silence.
Then his palms slide down my arms, my sides, my hips.
He presses close, his cock hard against me from behind, and I lean back into him.
"Like this," he says.
His fingers find the zipper.
He draws it down slowly.
His fingers trace the line of my spine as it opens.
The dress falls.
He turns me around.
Looks at me.
The full hips. The soft belly, rounder now.
The thighs that touch.
He looks at it like evidence of something he'd been right about all along.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi," he says.
I reach for his sweater.
Pull it over his head.
His shirt underneath, untucked.
I work the buttons.
He lets me.
His hands rest at my hips, patient, while I take my time.
I push the shirt off his shoulders.
Run my palms flat down his chest.
The scar along his ribs.
I trace it once.
He exhales sharply.
I press my mouth to it.
His hands tighten at my hips.
"Vera."
"Don't rush me."
"I'm not rushing."
"You're thinking about rushing."
"I'm thinking about a lot of things."
I look up at him.
"Tell me one."
His jaw tightens.
"I'm thinking that you married me in a room with folding chairs and I'm going to spend the rest of my life making sure you never regret it."
"You already said that."
"I'm going to keep saying it."
I pull him toward the small couch against the wall.
The one with the patched cushion.
He raises an eyebrow.
"Dignified," he says.
"I know."
"Not quite the penthouse."
"No."
He looks at me.
"But it's where we decided everything. So."
I sit.
Pull him down with me.
He settles beside me and looks at me in the low lamp light.
The office around us.
The folding chairs. The corkboard.
The place where we rebuilt what was broken.
His mouth finds my throat.
My collarbone.
Moving lower.
His lips warm and deliberate against my skin.
I tip my head back and let him.
He takes the bra off slow.
His mouth returns immediately.
His tongue circling my nipple.
Drawing it in.
I grip the back of his neck.
The sensation threading straight down through my stomach and settling between my thighs.
He works the other nipple between his fingers while his mouth stays at the first.
Slow.
Like this is exactly what he wanted and everything else can wait.
I'm already wet.
Already aching.
"Cole."
He hums against my breast.
Not done.
His mouth moves lower.
Down my stomach.
To the waistband of my underwear.
He looks up at me from there.
Eyes dark. Mouth curved.
"Yes?" he says.
"Yes," I say.
He drags my underwear down.
Off.
Gone.
His hands spread my thighs apart.
His mouth finds me and I stop thinking in full sentences.
He licks me slow.
His tongue traces slow circles over my clit.
Pressure building immediately.
His hands grip my inner thighs, holding me open, keeping me exactly where he wants me while his mouth works me apart.
I grind against his face.
No subtlety.
No restraint.
The sounds leaving me would embarrass me later if later existed right now.
It doesn't.
There's only this.
His mouth. His hands. The low lamp light. The city outside.
He slides two fingers inside me and curls them.
The stretch and the fullness and his tongue still on my clit.
My orgasm comes fast and hard.
Crashing through me while his name breaks out of my mouth.
He stays through every second of it.
Works me through it until I'm pulling at his hair to get him to stop.
He kisses his way back up.
My stomach. My ribs. My breast. My throat.
Until his mouth finds mine.
I can taste myself on him.
My hands find his belt.
His zip.
Wrap around his cock.
He groans against my mouth.
Long and thick and hard and wanting and mine.
All mine.
I stroke him slow.
Watching his face.
The composure unraveling in the way I've learned to read.
His breathing going rough.
His forehead dropping to my shoulder.
"Vera." My name in his mouth like something precious.
"I know," I say.
He lifts me onto his lap.
My knees on either side of his thighs.
Facing him.
His cock between us.
His hands at my hips.
Steady. Not directing.
Letting me set the pace.
I reach between us.
Position him.
Lower myself onto him.
Both of us going still.
The fullness.
The thickness of him stretching me open.
His forehead pressed against mine. My hands on his shoulders.
Different from every time before.
"Okay?" he breathes.
"More than okay."
I start to move.
Rolling my hips.
The friction immediate and perfect.
His cock dragging through me with every slow grind.
His hands tighten at my hips.
Letting me use him.
Letting me take exactly what I need.
His mouth finds my breast while I move.
His tongue warm on my nipple.
I arch into him and ride him slow.
Building.
His hands eventually take over.
His grip directing my pace with the steady insistence of a man who knows exactly what he's doing.
His thumb finds my clit.
Soft circles.
Catching every roll of my hips.
"There," I breathe.
"I know," he says.
He stays right there.
His cock buried deep.
His thumb steady.
Both of us moving together.
The orgasm builds different from the first.
Deeper. Slower.
Like something that started in November and has been building through every almost-touch and every cliffhanger and every moment he chose to stop and every moment I chose to stay.
Cole watches my face while it breaks.
Like my expression is the only thing in the room that matters.
"I love you," he says.
Just truth landing where it belongs.
"I know," I say.
And I do.
I've known for a long time.
My orgasm hits and takes him with it.
He buries himself deep and comes with his face pressed into my hair and my name in his mouth and his arms locked around me like he has no intention of letting go.
We stay like that for a long time afterward.
His arms around me.
My head against his chest.
His heartbeat slowing under my palm.
The office quiet around us.
"Just this," I say quietly.
He laughs.
Soft. Warm. Unguarded.
"Just this," he agrees.
Neither of us believes it means only this anymore.
It means everything.
It means the building and the list in the drawer and the folding chairs and Mrs. Patterson's sixty-four stairs and a baby neither of us planned and a man who came back from the cold one December night because standing still wasn't working.
We dress eventually.
He fixes my zipper.
I fix his collar.
He takes my hand at the door.
We walk upstairs.
Not to the penthouse.
To my apartment.
My narrow hallway.
The lamp that flickers.
The yellow curtains from my father.
The shelf of paperbacks.
The dead succulent on the windowsill.
"The succulent is deceased, Vera."
"It's resting."
He looks at the succulent.
Looks at me.
His mouth curves.
"Come here," he says.
I cross to him.
He catches my face in both hands.
Kisses me.
Slow and warm and without urgency.
We stand in my kitchen for a while doing exactly that.
The building settling around us.
The city outside.
"Still yes?" he says.
"Still yes. Always yes."
He pulls me toward the bed.
We fall onto it in a graceless tangle.
Laughing when he settles beside me.
Laughing when I pull him close.
We kiss through it until the laughter fades into warmth.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi."
I touch his face.
Palm against his cheek.
Outside, the street does its ordinary things.
Mrs. Patterson is telling Rosa something through the floor above.
The building settles.
The city goes about its business.
Down the hall, in a narrow room in a rent-controlled apartment on Amsterdam Avenue, a life is beginning.
Unaware of the bar, and the card, and the flyer on the notice board.
Unaware of everything except the warmth and the quiet and the sound of two people who had been terrible at this and had done it anyway.
Who held on.
And meant to.