Epilogue
Two Summers Later
Lina
* * *
“Step to the right! Step to the left!”
“Forward, forward! Back, back!”
With the diligence of a drill sergeant, Tita Tess’s microphone-amplified voice shouts directions to the two hundred people here, most of whom are on the dance floor, Todo Todo blasting over the DJ’s speakers.
The tent smells like summer, tequila, garlic, and salty ocean breeze. It feels like celebration and tastes like festivity. Laughter. Elation.
Georgia crashes into me from my left, and I inadvertently step on the train of her dress.
“Girl,” I huff at her, a little out of breath from the exuberance necessary for line dancing.
“I’m so fucking bad at this,” Georgia pants while trying to simultaneously lift the hem of her dress and spin clockwise.
“Stop being such a stereotype,” Emmanuel trills at her from my other side.
“ Me ?!” Georgia says pointedly to Emmanuel, who is currently hitting every single move while decorating them with extra spins and hand motions and hair tosses for flair.
“ Cha-cha na tayo ! One, two, cha-cha-cha!”
“We should’ve just done this at City Hall,” Georgia grumbles.
Oliver swoops in to save her, his tie and tux jacket gone, hair mussed, beaming from ear-to-ear. “And deprive our entire family of line dancing? Could you imagine the phone chains of chismis ?” He moves behind her and holds her in his arms while essentially doing all the dancing for her. “Haven’t my mom and sisters been practicing with you for months?”
“Can’t teach rhythm,” proclaims Tamika, who looks perfect as always. “You either have it or you don’t.”
“Easy,” Elias warns Georgia from behind us, when a wayward arm comes close to hitting Mia’s extremely swollen belly. “Arms by your sides.”
“Fuck you, Captain America,” Georgia hisses. “How the hell are you so good at this, anyway? You look like a giant fucking bear in the figure skating Olympics.”
“Hey!” he exclaims. “Language!” He places his hands on either side of Mia’s belly. “James, don’t listen to her,” he says to her stomach.
“Our parents made us take ballroom lessons when we were kids,” Mia tells Georgia.
“ Ballroom?! ” Emmanuel shrieks, now seamlessly incorporating vogue elements into the steps.
“Not that kind of ballroom,” Elias says. “White people ballroom.” Since our conversation in Oliver’s backyard two summers ago, Elias has become a learned scholar of Drag Race .
“I need a drink,” Georgia declares. “Can someone get me a drink?”
I laugh. “I’ll go. I need another, anyway.”
I weave my way through all the family friends and/or cousins and/or titos and make my way to the bar, where Oliver’s youngest sister Izzy is standing with a pair of seemingly identical twins who couldn’t look more different.
“Hey, Iz,” I greet her. “No line dancing for you?”
“Taking a break,” she says. “Lola Ging stepped on my toe,” she says, wiggling her bare feet at me from under her navy bridesmaid’s dress. “Lina, these are my very best friends, Annie and May Li. High school friends turned family friends.”
May, who’s in a simple, elegant dress and pearl earrings and Chanel slingbacks, with shiny black hair in perfect, soft waves, shakes my hand kindly. “So nice to meet you,” she says, her voice strong and serene.
Annie is almost literally covered in tattoos from head to toe, at least from torso to toe, in a slinky dress and gigantic metallic blue platform sandals. I don’t think she did her hair, but it flows long and loose behind her. She extends a tattooed hand. “Hey girl,” she says, voice on the huskier side. “Love your dress.”
Both of them are absolutely stunning.
“Thanks,” I tell Annie.
I order two margaritas from the bartender. “You guys having fun?”
“So much fun,” Izzy says. She gestures with her chin at Oliver and Georgia, both of whom have given up line dancing and are just grinning and turning in slow circles with their arms wrapped around each other. “They look so happy. I’m so happy for them.”
Annie’s wearing a devastating smirk, her eyes on someone behind me. “I’m about to have a fucking blast,” she says, before chugging the rest of her drink and slamming it on the bar. She plants a huge smooch on May’s forehead. “See you guys later. Nice to meet you, Lina.” She slinks away.
May shakes her head, pursing her lips.
“Oh! Aunt Betty!” Izzy suddenly says. She hugs an older woman who comes up to the bar.
She beams. “Iz! Isn’t this amazing?”
“We honestly can’t thank you enough for letting us do this here,” Izzy tells her. “Lina, this is our Aunt Betty. She and our Uncle Tony own this property.”
My heart warms. “It’s so lovely to finally meet you,” I say with a hug. “I stayed here for a week a few years ago. With some of the Flores family. Is it weird to tell you that week kind of changed the rest of my life?”
She grins. “Are you Domy’s girlfriend?”
“That’s me. Lina.”
Aunt Betty sighs. “There’s just something about this place, isn’t there? It’s so romantic. Perfect for the beginnings of love stories.” She gestures at Oliver and Georgia. “And their celebrations.”
I look down towards the beach, where there’s a bonfire and lounge chairs set up. I glance back at the guesthouse and its patio and railing. The beginnings of my love stories.
Speaking of which, where are my love stories?
Oh, here’s one. Frankie pops up from out of nowhere, her flower crown hanging from her head by its last bobby pin. “Lina,” she says breathlessly.
I carefully remove the bobby pin and crown, then kiss the top of her head. “What’s up?” I put the crown on the bar.
“Daddy’s looking for you. He’s really nervous. He wants you to help him practice his speech.”
“ Again ? We’ve practiced like ten times.”
She shrugs. “He looks like he has to poop.”
“Where is he?”
She points. “He’s in the guesthouse.”
I have to chuckle. “Can you bring this drink to Tita Georgia for me? I’ll go find your dad. Thanks, hon.”
I wave goodbye to May and Iz and Aunt Betty and start making my way towards the house.
Up the winding path through the hedges, where I first followed Dom under the moonlight. To the side of the house he pressed me against. Up the stairs that still groan their happiness, like they still can’t believe this shit, either. I open the door.
“Oh, thank fucking god,” my other love story says.
He stands in the kitchen—tall, dark, handsome, tattooed, absolutely fucking devastating in a tux, and… like he’s about to shit his pants.
“Dom,” I laugh. “Breathe, baby.” I close and lock the door behind me.
“This speech is garbage,” he says, dragging his hands through his freshly cut hair.
“It’s beautiful, Dom. It’s perfect. We went over it a hundred times to make sure it was.”
“But—”
“Dom, you do shit like this all the time. Talking to big groups of people. With, like, an annoying amount of confidence.”
He paces back and forth across the length of the kitchen. “I don’t know why I’m so nervous.”
I hop on the kitchen counter, on that same spot from two years ago. I lift the long skirt of my gown all the way up. “Dom.”
“Maybe because it’s my family? People I actually care about?”
“Dom.”
“People who will slaughter me if I do a bad job? Will never let me live it down and will bring it up every Christmas for the rest of my life?”
“ Dom .”
He finally stops pacing and looks at me. Looks down.
“Go turn off all the lights.”
His eyes go lazy. He licks his lips.
I spread my knees.
He turns off the lights and pulls all the blinds shut for good measure.
My love story steps between my spread legs and yanks me to the edge of the counter. Wraps my hair in his fist and pulls it back. “How much time do we have?” he asks before sucking my earlobe into his mouth.
“Probably seven minutes,” I gasp, but he’s already unzipping his pants and taking himself out and checking to see if I’m wet. I am. Obviously.
“We’ve worked with less,” he murmurs, right before tugging my panties to the side and pushing into me.
He seats himself to the hilt and we stay there for a just a moment, holding one another, just feeling and loving and loving the feeling. It feels even better than the last time we were in this exact spot, approximately two years ago. Because this time? This time is a celebration of a love story.
* * *
Maybe six and half minutes later, Dom doesn’t look nervous anymore.
* * *
Dom clears his throat. “Good evening, everyone.”
Frankie squeals in my lap. I wrap my arms around her and rest my chin on the top of her head. She entwines her fingers with mine.
Dom glances down at his paper once, then puts it down. Because he’s good at everything. Including wedding speeches.
“For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Dominic, ‘Domy’ to the Flores family, and I have the honor of being Ollie’s best man tonight.” Dom pauses for the thunderous round of applause and catcalling. It takes a few seconds. “If you had asked me twenty years ago if I’d be standing here giving a speech about Oliver finding the love of his life, I might have laughed. Not because he’s unlovable—obviously not—but because Oliver Flores was the most tightly wound, type-A, schedule-every-minute-of-his-life guy I had ever met. He made lists for his lists. He grew up with a spreadsheet for a soul. He believed in efficiency, control, and structure.”
Dom smirks at Oliver, who glares at him.
“Love? Love was too unpredictable, illogical—messy. Which is why it makes sense that when love finally found him, it came in the form of Georgia.”
He smiles over at her. She grins at him.
“Georgia, a hurricane in human form. Loud, colorful, full of life. She came barreling into Oliver’s world with absolutely no regard for his carefully laid-out plans, knocked them all over like Frankie scattering a pile of neatly stacked papers in my office?—”
“Hey!” Frankie yells.
Dom grins. “—and then had the audacity to make his life better for it. And Oliver fought it. Oh, he tried to keep things professional—because, of course, she was his employee first—but love doesn’t exactly care about the DOE’s HR policies. What started as frustration, as clashing, as fighting, somehow turned into something none of us saw coming: the perfect match. Turns out, Oliver didn’t need someone who followed his lists—he needed someone who would scribble all over them in glitter gel pen. Their story is proof that sometimes love doesn’t always arrive the way you expect it. Sometimes, it barges into your office, tells you to pull the stick out of your ass, and turns your entire life upside down.”
I catch the teachers over at the PS 2 table smiling. Emmanuel is visibly bawling.
“But love has never has just one path. Some people start as enemies, some as best friends.”
I see Elias squeeze Mia impossibly closer, his arms wrapped around her and his hands resting on her stomach.
“Some fall together like puzzle pieces that always fit, and some fight it every step of the way, resisting the gravity pulling them closer. Love can be a slow burn, flickering patiently over years, or it can be a wildfire, catching in an instant and refusing to be contained. Some crash into each other like Oliver and Georgia, and some, well… take a little longer to acknowledge what’s right in front of them.”
He finds me and gives me a panty-melting wink. “Love you, babe.”
Frankie and I giggle.
“But here’s the thing about love, the commonality amongst these paths—it’s not just about finding the right person. It’s about fighting for them. Love isn’t effortless. Love is a fight . It’s waking up every day and making the choice, even when it gets messy. It’s standing beside your person when things aren’t perfect, when the honeymoon phase fades and real life sets in. Love is pushing through the hard conversations, the doubts and the self-doubts, the struggles—not because it’s easy, but because they’re worth it. Because at the end of every fight, every disagreement, every hurricane, every mistake , you’d still rather have them by your side than be anywhere else. That’s what real love looks like. And that’s exactly what Oliver and Georgia have fought for.”
Dom smiles at me again after he says this though, and that’s when my own tears start to fall.
“Love is a series of lessons. You learn that it’s not just about grand gestures or poetic confessions. You learn that the insignificant moments are the most significant. They’re the ones that matter most—the way someone brings you dinner when you don’t have the time, the way they check the weather before you leave so you don’t get caught in the rain, the way they take care of you when you’re sick. The way they make your life easier without you ever having to ask. It’s soft smiles across a crowded room, late-night conversations whispered in the dark, or even shouting matches in an office where neither person realizes they’re falling in love between the arguments. It’s a million little touches. It can be pretending to be millionaires and attending fancy open houses, or drunk dancing in New Orleans, or Pirate Plunders and Lauryn Hill concerts. Love is in the everyday. It’s in the choosing and fighting and choosing to fight, over and over again.”
Oliver wraps his arm around Georgia, pulling her close.
“But no matter the path, love— big love—always leads to the same thing. Home. And home isn’t a place. It’s a person, it’s people. It’s a life built together. It’s family.”
Tita Gloria and Tito Ben dab at their eyes.
“And that’s why we’re all here tonight. Because love—no matter how it starts—ends in this. In finding and fighting for the people who become your home. And if love is family, if it’s about finding your people and holding on tight, then I can’t think of a better example than these two. So—” He looks around the tent. Takes them all in. Looks at Oliver and Georgia with a huge smile on his face. “Let’s all raise a glass?—”
Dom holds his champagne flute in the air, and two hundred glasses rise to meet his.
The entire PS 2 table stands, tears running down their faces. Frankie and I do, too.
“—to love in all its chaotically unpredictable and beautifully predictable forms, to the family we make along the way, and most importantly, to the two people who prove that no matter where it starts, love always finds its way home.”
The tent goes wild, an explosion of cheers and tears. Someone (who I’ve learned is probably Tito Batch) starts playing the guitar. Almost everyone is either stomping their feet or banging on a table. The whole tent is big love. The whole tent is family. Frankie turns in my lap and tucks her head under my chin while I squeeze. How fucking lucky am I? I think through my tears. “I love you,” I whisper into her ear. She only snuggles closer.
Dom makes his way to us after kissing the happy couple, moving through raucous applause and back slaps.
He moves to us, pulled by gravity. To me and Frankie, his people—small in number but big in love—and holds us tight. Steady, certain, unshakeable.
“You taught me that lesson,” he murmurs, his breath warm against my skin.
“Which one?” I ask, though I think I already know.
He presses closer, voice quiet but unwavering. Gentle, on the quieter side, yet deeply intense, like the sunrise on a tranquil lake.
“Love is worth the fight home.”