Chapter 10 #2
“I was having a moment,” I say as I step next to him in line, we’re already near the front. Meaning another moment and he would be stepping up to the window without me.
“We don't have time for moments.”
“Noted,” I say. “I’ll be sure to schedule them with your assistant moving forward.”
“You’re fidgeting,” he says. His hand finding the small of my back, guiding me forward in the queue, and I can feel the tension in his palm.
The slight pressure that means settle, and I know this because I have been studying his hands for approximately seventy-two hours, even though this isn’t the moment they are going to start quizzing me.
His hands, and what he does with them, also isn’t likely on the question list. When you marry someone (even fakely) you need to understand the full vocabulary of them, and his hands are, it turns out, a full language I'm becoming fluent in. And he doesn’t even know he’s speaking it.
“I'm allowed to be nervous on my wedding day,” I say.
“It's not your wedding day. It’s your License-to-Wed day. Different thing.”
I stop moving and he nearly walks into me as I whip my face to stare at him. “Was that a joke? Did you just make a joke?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He continues us forward as we are only one number away from next up.
“This wholeee time, you’ve had a funny setting, and you've been withholding it!” I wonder if he can see the joy on my face from this revelation.
“Keep your voice down,” he says, but the corner of his mouth hasn’t settled.
It appears and then gets managed back into composure with ease like he decided that humor is something he only allows himself in very specific conditions.
I am apparently one of the conditions, though perhaps only today, on our ‘license-to-wed’ day.
“Do others know about this?” I’m practically giddy in a way that is distracting me from the ridiculousness of where we are currently standing and for what purpose.
“A select few,” he says dryly.
“I don’t even know what to do with this information… Wait,” I practically scream with excitement. “What other settings do you have besides grumpy and funny? Is there a third, oh my god, is there a whole dial of options?! This wasn’t in the file.”
His hand slides from the small of my back up along the curve of my spine with a slowness that feels like it’s drawing electric from my skin, and he leans down until his mouth is close enough to my ear that I feel the warmth of it before I hear the words, in a voice I have only previously heard through drywall and in the unhelpful early hours of the morning. (Or in my imagination.)
“If you’re good, Louisa, maybe you’ll find out.” And that shuts me up, which I know was his intention, because he’s used this tactic before. (Though not so bluntly.) But for all the tension that exists between us, it's a fine line between turned on and I hate your guts. (At least for me.)
Fine, there’s at least one more setting of Hudson’s personality that I will never get to fully experience.
The line moves forward and I wonder if all these people love each other.
I wonder if people are looking at us and wondering the same thing.
Or maybe that’s just what love looks like from the outside, two people moving forward in the same line.
Trying to get to the final goal of completing paperwork and getting a stamp of approval.
“Names,” the clerk says, without looking up from her screen.
She seems like she has been entirely unbothered by any human drama that occurs on the other side of her plexiglass window for the last thirty years and intends to remain so.
And just like he promised (did he promise?) when asked a question, he takes it.
“Hudson James Ellis and Louisa James Evans,” he says, answering for both of us.
The clerk looks up. Just slightly. “Huh,” she says. “Look at that. Meant to be.” Like this was a momentary break from monotonous stamping of licenses and instead checked some version of a bingo card she plays by herself behind the plexiglass. And then she just moves on.
While James is now a cool-girl celebrity name, for me, it’s the name my father was never able to give the second son he wanted. So they settled for it being my middle name.
“First marriage for both?” the clerk asks.
“Yes,” he answers again.
Hudson doesn’t flinch as she asks clarifying questions, not to confirm anything for immigration, just to complete this transaction. His hand finds mine on the counter. (For the audience, maybe for my nerves.)
“Groom on the left, bride on the right,” she says as she slides a form through the plexiglass slot.
He fills out his side with a quick, aggressive hand.
I expect him to slide it to me, but he doesn’t.
He just moves to the right. Filling each box with as much confidence as he did his own, handing me the pen to sign, which I do, and then slipping it all back to the clerk. (Almost like I contributed.)
“Everything seems in order,” she says. Slamming the stamp down to indicate by the state and this random government employee, we can be married.
“Congratulations,” she says, entirely dry and devoid of any real celebration, already looking past us.
“You have twenty-four hours before you can legally marry. The license is valid for sixty days,” she says, a rinse-and-repeat button she hits with each new couple she calls to the window.
And that’s it. We step away from the window and the state has decided that we are a legal possibility.
I don't know what I expected to feel. Something, surely. But the lobby just continues being a lobby, people with their own forms, their own appointments, their own reasons for starting their day in a building that smells like damp wool. The world doesn’t register the seismic shift of me (Louisa James Evans) becoming a legal possibility in the context of him (Hudson James Ellis.)
But here we are.
“Should we kiss?” I say. I don't know why I say it, the nerves, probably. The cumulative weight of the last few days pressing up against the absurdity of the moment, looking for somewhere to go.
“Now is not the time, Louisa,” he says, his tone is short and flat and clicked back into the Angry Neighbor? I know.
I don’t decide to do this before it happens, but I step into him.
A hug he is not offering and has never offered and would probably not have predicted as an outcome of this particular errand.
I just wrap my arms around him, carefully, with gratitude, as my cheek finds the lapel of his jacket. And he doesn't move at all.
“Thank you,” I say. I probably should have said it sooner. I know he says there are reasons this benefits him as well, and yes, I’m sure I will have to pay the piper when the time comes. But for now, we are here for me.
Then I feel it, the exhale, a long and slow one released against the top of my head. He pulls me the smallest possible increment closer, it’s the split second tightening of a hug being returned.
“Louisa,” he says, into the crown of my head. I tilt my chin up to see him looking down at me through his lashes, a setting on his dial I haven’t identified.
He clears his throat and steps back, gently. Reaches into his jacket pocket and holds out a key. “Here, you’ll need this.”