20. Lucille #2
“I see you now,” he says, and his voice is hoarse from singing but clear enough to carry. “I see everything. Every moment I missed. Every time you reached for me. Every way you loved me that I was too blind to notice.”
“Hugo…”
“I’m never going to stop seeing you.” He takes my hands, both of them, holding them between us like a treasure. “I’m never going to stop noticing. I’m never going to stop showing up.”
“I know.” My voice is barely a whisper. “I believe you.”
“Then marry me again.”
The world stops.
“What?”
“Marry me again.” He’s smiling now, that devastating smile that used to make me ache with wanting. “We never had a real wedding. It was an arrangement, a transaction, two families merging their interests. I never asked you to be my wife. I just assumed you were because a piece of paper said so.”
“Hugo…”
“I’m asking now.” He sinks to one knee, right there in the aisle, surrounded by the whole room and a hundred cameras, and pulls a small box from his jacket pocket.
“Lucille Adler Kensington, will you marry me? For real this time. A vow renewal, a ceremony, whatever you want. I don’t care about the details. I just want you to say yes.”
He opens the box.
Inside is a ring, not my original engagement ring, which was his grandmother’s and chosen by his mother, but a new one. One he must have picked himself. A simple band with a single stone, elegant and understated, exactly what I would have chosen if anyone had ever asked.
“I know we’re already married,” he says, and there’s nervousness in his voice now, actual uncertainty. “I know this is technically redundant. But I wanted to do it right. I wanted to ask. I wanted you to have the choice you never got the first time.”
“Hugo.”
“Just say yes.” His eyes are bright. “Please. I’ll do anything. I’ll beg. I’ll stay on this knee until it goes numb. I’ll…”
“Yes.”
He blinks. “Yes?”
“Obviously yes.” I’m laughing now, laughing and crying at the same time, and I pull him to his feet because I can’t stand to have him kneeling anymore, I need him standing, I need him close. “Yes, I’ll marry you again. Yes, I want a real wedding. Yes to all of it.”
His face breaks into the most brilliant smile I’ve ever seen, and then his arms are around me and he’s spinning me, actually spinning me in the aisle while the crowd cheers and cameras flash and none of it matters, none of it has ever mattered, because I have him and he has me and that’s enough.
That’s everything.
He sets me down and slides the ring onto my finger, it fits perfectly, because of course it does, because he’s been paying attention this time, and I look at it sparkling under the stage lights and feel a calm settle in my chest.
“I love you,” I say, loud enough for everyone to hear.
“I love you too.” He cups my face in his hands. “I loved you before I knew how to show it. I’m going to spend the rest of my life showing it.”
“Good.” I pull him down for a kiss.
The noise around us is deafening, applause and cheers and what sounds like someone sobbing in the second row, but I don’t care.
I just kiss my husband, my soon-to-be-husband-again, the man who just sang me a love song in front of all those people and proposed with a ring he chose himself and somehow, impossibly, became the man I always hoped he could be.
When we finally break apart, he’s grinning.
“Was that too much?”
“It was absolutely too much.” I’m grinning too. “It was perfect.”
“I was worried you’d hate the public proposal. You hate being the center of attention.”
“I hate being the center of attention when I’m being judged. This is different.” I glance around at the crowd still on their feet, still clapping, still very much watching our every move. “This is… good attention.”
“Good attention from a crowd of strangers?”
“Good attention from the person who matters most.” I squeeze his hand. “You matter most.”
“I’m getting that embroidered on a pillow.”
“Please don’t.”
“Too late. Already happening. It’s going to be extremely tasteless.”
I laugh, and he laughs, and somewhere in the chaos a photographer captures the moment, the two of us in the aisle, rings glinting, faces bright with joy, looking at each other like the rest of the world has fallen away.
Later, I’ll see that photo everywhere. It’ll be on magazine covers and social media feeds and probably someone’s coffee mug. Hugo Kensington and his designer wife, the love story that almost wasn’t.
But right now, in this moment, I don’t care about any of that.
Right now, I just want to be alone with my husband.
I lean close, my lips brushing his ear, and whisper: “Take me home.”
His arms tighten around me.
“With pleasure.”
We make it out of the venue through a side door, avoiding the worst of the press, though cameras still follow us to the waiting car. Hugo shields me with his body, his jacket draped over my shoulders, and helps me into the backseat before sliding in beside me.
The door closes. The noise fades. And suddenly it’s just us, in the quiet darkness, with the city lights sliding past the windows.
“You planned all of that,” I say.
“Guilty.”
“The song. The video. The ring.” I look down at my hand, at the new ring sitting above my wedding band. “How long have you been planning this?”
“Since the vineyard.” He takes my hand and brings it to his lips. “I knew then that I was going to ask you again. I just needed to find the right way to do it.”
“In front of a packed theater at an awards ceremony?”
“In front of a theater full of witnesses who can hold me accountable if I ever mess up again.” His smile is soft.
“I wanted the whole world to know, Lucille. I wanted everyone to see that you’re not the jealous wife or the scandal victim or any of the other roles they tried to force you into.
You’re the love of my life. And I’m not ashamed of that. ”
My eyes are stinging again.
“You know the video footage was a little stalker-y, right?”
“It was romantic.”
“It was stalker-adjacent.”
“I prefer to think of it as thorough.” He pulls me closer, tucking me against his side.
“I noticed you. That’s the whole point. I noticed all the things I should have been noticing for two years, and I documented them, and I turned them into a song because that’s the only way I know how to say things that matter. ”
“The song was beautiful.”
“The song was true.” He presses a kiss to my hair. “Every word. Every note. You did stitch me together when I was falling apart. I did wear your love like armor. And I had no idea it was art until you were gone.”
I turn my face into his shoulder and let myself be held.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“For what?”
“For seeing me. Finally.” I lift my head to look at him. “For being willing to change. For not giving up when I tried to walk away.”
“You didn’t try to walk away. You succeeded in walking away. I’m just very persistent.”
“You’re very annoying.”
“That too.” He’s grinning again. “But you love me anyway.”
“I do.” I reach up and touch his face, tracing the line of his jaw, the curve of his smile. “I really do.”
“Lucky me.”
“Lucky both of us.”
The car pulls into our driveway, our driveway, the house that’s ours now in a way it never was before, and Hugo helps me out, careful with my train, careful with everything.
At the front door, he stops.
“What?” I ask.
“I want to carry you over the threshold.”
“We did that two years ago.”
“I want to do it again. Properly this time.” He scoops me up before I can protest, crimson silk pooling over his arms, and I shriek with laughter as he shoulders open the door and carries me into our home.
“You’re going to hurt yourself!”
“You’re not that unwieldy.”
“I’m wearing fifteen pounds of fabric!”
“Then I’m carrying you and fifteen pounds of fabric. My masculinity remains intact.”
He doesn’t set me down until we’re in the bedroom, and even then he does it gently, reverently, like I’m a gift he can’t believe he gets to keep. The Polaroid from earlier falls out of his jacket pocket as he shrugs it off, and I pick it up.
Me, in the crimson gown and the art deco earrings, looking at him like he hung the moon.
“For luck,” I say, handing it back.
“It worked.” He tucks it into the nightstand drawer. “I’m keeping it forever.”
“You’re very sentimental.”
“I’m very in love.” He sits beside me on the bed and takes my hand. “Is that okay?”
“That’s more than okay.”
“Good.” He kisses my knuckles. “Because I’m planning to be this sentimental for the rest of our lives. You might as well get used to it.”
“I think I can manage.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I pull him down for a kiss, soft at first, then deeper, the kind of kiss that promises more. “Now stop talking and take me to bed. We have a lot of time to make up for.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He reaches for the zipper of my gown, and I let him, and the crimson silk falls away, and we don’t talk for a long time after that.
Outside, the city glitters. The headlines are already being written, the videos already going viral, the story of our love already being told to strangers who will never know the whole truth.
But in here, in the quiet darkness, there’s just us.
And that’s all that matters.