28. Home
Twenty Eight
Home
We didn’t leave the ceremony for some grand honeymoon suite. We went home — our actual home, the one with the kitchen counter that had once held a ring and a note, the one we were rebuilding into something new rather than simply returning to.
Sebastian caught me by the waist the moment the door closed behind us, still half-dressed in the clothes from the ceremony, and kissed me with none of the careful restraint of that first night back in winter — this time with the full, unguarded certainty of two people who’d done the actual work and earned the right to stop being careful.
“Mrs. Mercer,” he murmured against my throat, “again, on purpose, for the first time.”
“Say that again,” I laughed, breathless, already pulling him toward the stairs.
“Again,” he said. “On purpose. For the first time. I intend to keep saying it until it stops sounding new to you.”
We made it as far as the bedroom before the last of the ceremony clothes came off, and this time there was no carefulness left in it, no question waiting to be answered — only the easy, certain hunger of two people who knew exactly what they were choosing and exactly what it had cost to get here.
He knew my body the way he’d relearned everything else about me that year: patiently, thoroughly, with his full attention rather than the distracted half-presence of the years before all of this began.
“Tell me what you want,” he said, low against my ear, and I understood it wasn’t just a question about that night — it was the whole promise of the marriage we were building now, spoken plainly, waiting for my actual answer instead of assuming one.
I told him. He listened, and gave, and asked again, and somewhere in the tangled, unhurried hours that followed, I stopped keeping track of where the ceremony ended and the marriage began, because for the first time in longer than I could remember, there was no difference between the two at all — just this, just us, fully known and fully choosing, exactly as we’d promised.
Afterward, we lay in the dark, my hand tracing lazy circles on his chest, his fingers moving slowly through my hair.
“No regrets?” he asked quietly.
“About tonight, or about all of it?”
“Either. Both.”
I thought about the hard hat, and the mezzanine, and the year I’d spent learning to insist on my own name in my own life. I thought about the ring on the counter, and the badly cooked chicken, and every small Thursday call that had rebuilt something grand gestures never could have.
“No regrets,” I said. “I don’t think we’d have gotten here any other way. I think we needed to lose it to understand what we were actually protecting.”
“I love you,” Sebastian said, simply, the way he used to say it in a hard hat a long time ago, before either of us knew how much it would eventually cost, and how much more it would eventually be worth. “Fully. On purpose. For keeps, this time.”
“For keeps,” I agreed, and meant it with my whole rebuilt, hard-won heart.