4. Az
— ? —
Az
Five Years Earlier
I’m getting married in a dress that cost forty-seven dollars.
“It’s not actually terrible,” Priya says, circling me like a shark evaluating prey. “Like, objectively, from a fashion standpoint, it’s not actively hideous.”
“Wow. The romance of your support is overwhelming.”
“I’m being honest! You wanted honest.” She tugs at the shoulder strap, which keeps slipping down. “Okay, that’s a problem. Got any safety pins?”
I have exactly three safety pins in my purse, leftover from a hemming emergency at work last month, and Priya uses all of them to reconstruct the structural integrity of my wedding dress while I stand in the bathroom of the Los Angeles County Courthouse and try not to hyperventilate.
This afternoon, I’m going to marry Eli Jackson, a man I’ve known for two years and loved for nearly as long. We’ve been living together for fourteen months in a one-bedroom apartment in Silver Lake with a cat named Whiskers who judges our life choices with equal disdain.
“You sure about this?” Priya asks, not unkindly. She’s in a blue sundress she already owned, holding a bouquet we bought from the gas station on the way here because I forgot actual flowers exist.
“I’m sure about him.” My voice comes out steadier than I expected. “The dress, the venue, the gas station carnations, those I have reservations about. But him? Never.”
Priya’s face softens. “That’s actually kind of beautiful, you disaster of a bride.”
“Thank you. I think.”
“Let’s go get you hitched.”
The hallway outside the courtroom has exactly four chairs, and Eli is sitting in one of them with his head in his hands like a man awaiting execution.
He’s wearing a borrowed suit, slightly too small across the shoulders, and his hair curls at the temples the way it does when he’s been running his hands through it too many times. His tie is crooked. His shoes don’t match his belt. He’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
“Hey,” I say.
He looks up, and his whole face changes.
It’s the only way I can describe it. One second he’s nervous and pale and maybe a little nauseated, and the next second he’s looking at me like I just walked out of a dream he didn’t know he was having. His mouth falls open slightly and he stands so fast the chair scrapes against the floor.
“Holy shit,” he breathes.
“The dress was forty-seven dollars,” I blurt out. “The strap keeps falling and Priya had to safety-pin the whole left side and I forgot to buy real flowers so we stopped at a Chevron and-”
“You’re beautiful.”
I stop talking.
“Az.” He crosses the hallway in three strides and takes my face in both hands, his thumbs brushing my cheekbones. “You’re so beautiful. I can’t… I don’t have words. I don’t have any words.”
“You’re a songwriter,” I manage. “Words are literally your job.”
“I quit. I’m done. I’m just going to stare at you for the rest of my life instead.”
Behind us, Priya makes a gagging noise. “Get a room. Specifically, get the courtroom. Judge closes at four.”
The ceremony is short.
The judge is a tired-looking woman named Patricia Alvarez who keeps checking the clock above the door. She reads from a script, we say “I do” in the appropriate places, and then she asks if we’ve prepared personal vows.
“Yes,” Eli says, at the exact same moment I say “What?”
He grins. “I know you didn’t prep anything. You probably didn’t even think about it until right now.”
“That’s… not entirely inaccurate.”
“So I’ll go first.” He takes both my hands, and his palms are sweating, which is oddly comforting. “Az. Azalea. I have a tendency to make things complicated. To overthink, over-plan, over-worry until there’s nothing left but noise.”
“You’re describing me,” I interrupt. “Are these vows about me or you?”
“Let me finish.” He squeezes my hands. “But you, you’re the quiet underneath all that noise. You’re the thing that makes sense when nothing else does. And I know I can’t promise you a big wedding or a fancy honeymoon or even a decent apartment with more than one functional sink.”
“The bathroom sink works fine.”
“Az.”
“Sorry. Continue.”
“I can’t promise you any of those things yet,” he says. “But I can promise that you’ll always have the best seat in the house. Front row, every show, for the rest of my life. That’s your seat. Nobody else’s.”
I have to blink very fast to keep from crying. “That’s your vow? I get a chair?”
“It’s a metaphor.” He’s grinning now, that crooked grin that still makes my stomach do something embarrassing. “You get the front row of everything. Every success, every failure, every stupid decision I make; you see it first. You see me first. Always.”
“I want that in writing.”
“This is a wedding ceremony. It’s legally binding.”
Judge Alvarez clears her throat. “Ma’am? Did you want to say something?”
I look at Eli, who is looking at me like I’m the sun and he’s been living underground his entire life.
“I didn’t prepare anything,” I admit. “I’m not good at speeches.
I run a flower shop because flowers do the talking for me.
But…” I take a breath. “I knew I loved you the morning after we met. When you came back with coffee because you couldn’t wait to ask to see me again. And then stayed to make eggs.”
“I was anxious,” he says softly.
“I know. That’s my point. You were anxious because you wanted it to be perfect.
You wanted to make it perfect for me. And nobody had ever wanted that before.
” My voice catches. “So my vow is this: I’ll never make you feel like wanting things is stupid.
I’ll never make you feel like you’re too much.
You can be as much as you want with me. That’s what I’m promising. ”
His eyes are wet. Behind us, Roz and Hank are crying too.
“Kiss each other so I can stamp the paperwork,” Judge Alvarez says, and we do.
The motel is four miles from the courthouse, just off the 10 freeway, and the sign outside advertises FREE HBO and HOURLY RATES in the same font, which feels like a statement about modern capitalism that I’m not awake enough to parse.
“I know it’s not the Ritz,” Eli says, fumbling with the room key. “But there’s a honeymoon suite at the back, and I called ahead and they said they’d put champagne in the mini fridge, and-”
“Eli.”
He stops. Looks at me.
“I don’t care about the Ritz.” I step closer, and his hands find my waist like they always do, like they were designed to fit there.
“I care that we’re married. I care that you wore that borrowed suit.
I care that my mom didn’t come and I’m pretending I don’t care about that but I actually kind of do. ”
His jaw tightens. “She’s an idiot. You know that, right?”
“She’s my mother.”
“She’s still an idiot.” He kisses my forehead. “My dad cried. Both my parents cried.”
“My parents will survive one motel stay.”
“Roz loves you. You know that.” His voice is fierce in a way that makes me love him even more. “And she cried so much Hank had to give her his handkerchief. It was disgusting and beautiful.”
I laugh despite myself. “He carries a handkerchief?”
“Apparently. He’s old-fashioned like that. Kept calling me ‘son’ and shaking my hand like we’d just closed a business deal.”
“That’s Hank.”
“I like Hank. Hank gets me.”
Eli finally gets the door open, and the room is…
well, it’s a motel room. Brown carpet, floral bedspread, a TV bolted to the dresser like someone might steal it.
But there’s a bottle of cheap champagne sweating in an ice bucket on the nightstand, and someone’s scattered rose petals on the bed in a lopsided heart shape.
“It’s perfect,” I say, and I mean it.
“You’re easy to please.”
“I’m really not. You just got lucky.”
He laughs, picking me up without warning, I make an extremely undignified yelping sound, and carries me toward the threshold. “I’ve always wanted to do this.”
“Eli-”
My head knocks against the doorframe. Not hard, but enough that I yelp again, and Eli freezes.
“Oh my God. Are you okay? Did I just give you a concussion on our wedding night?”
I’m laughing too hard to answer.
“Az, I’m serious, look at me. Can you count backwards from ten?”
“I’m fine, you disaster of a husband.” I’m still giggling.
“Priya’s word. She’s been calling you a disaster all day.”
“We’re married now. Her words are legally your words.” I pat his cheek.
He sets me down on the edge of the bed, hands cradling my face, examining the spot where I bumped my head with the intensity of a trauma surgeon. “No bump. No blood. I think we’re good.”
“I’ve survived worse.”
“I will never forgive myself for this.”
“Eli.” I pull his hands away from my head and hold them in mine. “I’m okay. I’m better than okay. I’m married to you in a forty-seven-dollar dress in a motel that charges by the hour, and my head has a slight bump, and I have never been happier in my entire life.”
He exhales, long and slow. Then he sits down next to me on the bed with the terrible floral bedspread, and we’re both still in our wedding clothes, his borrowed suit, my safety-pinned dress, and outside the window I can hear the freeway and someone’s car alarm and what sounds like either a very enthusiastic dog or a very small emergency.
“Hi, wife,” he says.
The word hits me somewhere deep. “Hi, husband.”
“That’s going to take some getting used to.”
“Yeah.” I lean my head against his shoulder. “But I think we’ve got time.”
He turns his head and kisses my temple where the doorframe kissed me first, soft and apologetic, and the neon from the parking lot paints a pink stripe across the floral bedspread.
“Hi, wife,” he says again, quieter, like he’s practicing the word against my skin.
“Hi, husband.” I tug at his borrowed tie until the knot surrenders. “We’ve got a honeymoon suite with free HBO and a bottle of champagne that’s probably sweating through the ice bucket. Are we going to respect the forty-seven-dollar dress, or are we going to ruin it on principle?”