Epilogue #2
I turn. The soil is cool and soft under my heels.
Petals brush my cheeks and catch in his hair when he presses up behind me, suit chest to my lace back.
He gathers mountains of white skirt with both hands, finds the almost-nothing lace I wore on purpose, and groans into my neck when his fingers slide through slick heat.
“You planned this,” he accuses, already freeing himself with one hand, already rubbing the fat head of his cock along me until I twitch. “You stood through vows plotting horticultural indecency.”
“I planned a wedding. This is a bonus track. Call it an encore before the encore.” I push back onto him, impatient. “Get inside me before someone toasts our eternal love and we have to pretend we’re dignified people who don’t fuck in flower beds.”
He sinks in with a shared gasp muffled by cream blooms. The angle is shallow and perfect, standing, laughing, urgent, my hands white-knuckled on a wooden stake Grandma June set decades ago.
One of his hands braces my hip; the other keeps the skirt from catastrophe or discovery.
Petals shower down when I tip my head back against his shoulder and the whole row shivers.
“Fuck, you’re soaked, wedding-dress soaked, my twice-married wife in the rows her grandmother planted, taking me between speeches like patience was never one of our vows-”
“Talk dirtier and move faster,” I hiss, reaching back to dig nails into his thigh through expensive wool. “We’ve got maybe eight minutes before Lupe does a headcount and notices the bride has eloped into the Café au Lait.”
He fucks me in quick deep strokes that rock me onto my toes, dahlias nodding around us like gossiping aunts who approve despite themselves.
The slap of skin is obscene and funny and perfect.
I bite my own wrist to stay quiet and fail anyway.
Small punched sounds keep escaping into petals, and he swallows the louder ones with his mouth on mine over my shoulder, kissing me messy while he thrusts.
The public-adjacent risk sharpens every nerve: distant laughter, a sudden cheer, the band starting something slow and romantic while we do the opposite of slow and the opposite of appropriate.
“Harder,” I demand, laughing. “If we’re going to hell for this, I want the express train.”
“Express train, yes ma’am. Filthy bride.
” He picks up the pace, careful not to send us sprawling into the next row, suit pants half-down, dignity fully abandoned.
“Gonna feel you come around me in your grandmother’s flowers.
Gonna walk back into that reception smelling like sex and pollen and claim it was the night air. ”
“Gonna come,” I warn, already shaking. “Eli, don’t stop-”
“Come apart on me right here in the flower beds. Get dahlia pollen all over this dress. I’ll buy you another. I’ll buy you a field. I’ll write a song called Petals on the Skirt and never play it sober.”
I shatter laughing and coming at once, fluttering around him in helpless waves while petals stick to my sweating chest and a cream bloom lodges behind my ear like a joke.
He follows with a bitten groan that vibrates into my spine, driving himself deep, forehead pressed to my shoulder as he empties through it, hips stuttering, one hand still gallantly managing fabric like a hero of low comedy.
We stay locked for three ridiculous seconds, breathing hard, surrounded by nodding flowers. Then the practical panic hits both of us at the same instant.
“Dress, come, cleanup. Oh my God we are adults-”
He produces a handkerchief from his suit jacket like Hank taught him a generational secret, and we do the world’s least glamorous postcoital triage between blooms, giggling so hard I snort and set off another shower of petals.
I straighten the skirt with both hands. He tucks, zips, buckles, fails to look solemn.
I pluck three Café au Lait petals from his hair, one from his lapel, and one from my cleavage with a look that dares him to comment.
His tie is crooked on purpose now. My mouth is swollen.
We look exactly like what we are: people who couldn’t wait for the honeymoon suite because the honeymoon suite was a metaphor and the rows were right here.
I smooth his lapel. Dust a last smudge of pollen from his cheek. The music swells, an old love song floating over the field, and my throat tightens in the best way.
“Regrets?” I ask, the question tasting like old motel neon and new forever and every year we lost and found.
“Only the years I wasn’t here,” he says, soft and sure, eyes wet and smiling.
I touch his face, lines at the corners of his eyes, gray threading his temples, every hard-won year we get to keep. “We’ve got the rest of them.”
“Yeah?” He kisses me once more, gentle now, tasting like cake we haven’t cut yet and sex we just stole from our own party. “Then let’s go pretend we were looking at the stars and discussing irrigation.”
“Terrible cover story. Lupe won’t buy a syllable.”
“Lupe ordained us out of spite. She expects chaos. It’s in the fine print.” He offers his arm like a gentleman who did not just fuck his bride between dahlia rows while their daughter slept fifty yards away. “Mrs. Jackson. Again. Shall we return to our adoring public?”
“We shall.” I take his arm, squeeze it. “And Eli, next time you want me in the dahlias, wait until the toasts are done. My thighs are vibrating through vows I already finished saying.”
“Next time I’ll put it on the run-of-show.
Right after cake, before the Doorstep reprise, after June’s bedtime.
” His grin tips crooked and young and mine.
“I love you. I love our weird sleeping kid. I love our judgmental goat. I love that we just desecrated horticulture and I would do it again before the bouquet toss.”
“I love you too. Even when you’re a menace to agricultural dignity and handkerchief logistics.”
We walk back toward the light and the music and the goat in the bow tie, dress straightened, secrets glowing under our skin like banked coals.
The rows close behind us as if they never saw a thing, blooms settling, soil keeping quiet.
Somewhere behind, pollen shines on white fabric like glitter we will refuse to explain to anyone with a camera.
We step back into the light together, married again, wrecked again, chosen again, and the band, as if cued by fate or Mateo’s playlist, slides into the opening chords of Doorstep. Eli’s eyes go soft. Mine do too. The rows behind us keep our secret. The years ahead can have everything else.
I mouth the chorus without singing it. He mouths it back.
Between verse and vow and the dirt still under my heel, I understand, again, finally, that coming home was never a single doorstep.
It was every row, every locked room, every greenhouse argument, every morning coffee recreation still waiting at dawn. It was this.
***
By dawn, the guests have gone and June is tucked into bed. Eli leads me to the back porch, where the morning light is just starting to creep over the hills.
“Coffee?” he asks.
“It’s six in the morning.”
“So that’s a yes.”
He goes inside. I stay on the step, wrapped in his hoodie, watching the sky turn pink. When he comes back, two mugs in hand, he doesn’t sit.
He paces.
Back and forth across the porch. Deliberate, theatrical, ridiculous.
“What are you doing?”
“Setting the scene.”
“We just got married. Again. The scene is set.”
“Not this scene.” He stops. Faces me. His face is caught between a smile and nerves, all Eli. “I want to see you again.”
I stare at him. “What?”
“I want to see you again.” He takes a step toward me. “And again.” Another step. “And-”
“Are you recreating the doorstep?”
“Maybe.” His mouth twitches.
“The morning after we met?”
“Possibly.” The smile wins this time.
“Eli, I’m already wearing your ring. Rings. Plural. We have a child.”
“I know. But I never-” He stops. Swallows. “That morning was the bravest thing I ever did. Standing on your doorstep, asking you if I could see you again. I had no idea if you’d say yes. I just knew I had to ask.”
“And now?”
“Now I know you’ll say yes. But I wanted to ask anyway.” He takes my hand. “I want to keep asking. Every day. Every morning. For the rest of our lives.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“Probably.”
“I love you anyway.”
“I know.” He grins. “So? Can I see you again?”
I look at him. This man. My husband. The father of my child, the singer who gave away my seat and learned to keep a place for me every day, the idiot who just paced my grandmother’s porch at dawn because he wanted to recreate the best morning of his life.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes. Obviously yes.”
THE END