Whitford leaves. The brothers leave shortly after, with their new partners and meaningful looks in my direction that I ignore. The house empties until it is just us, standing by the windows in the golden afternoon light, married.
"Wife," I say. The word feels enormous in my mouth.
"Husband," she replies, and the way she says it, with ownership and tenderness and absolute resolve, rewires a fundamental part of my nervous system.
I take her hand. I lead her to the bedroom. Our bedroom, our bed, the place where I have held her every night for the past two weeks and which now belongs to her as completely as it belongs to me.
I undress her slowly. The white silk parts under my fingers, sliding off her shoulders, down her arms, pooling at her feet. She stands in the dying light, bare and golden, and I look at her, my wife, and the wordmineis so loud in my head it's almost audible.
She undresses me. Her hands are steady and deliberate, unbuttoning my shirt, unfastening my belt, pushing the fabric away until we are equal, both of us naked, both of us exposed.
I lower her to the bed. Her hair spreads across the pillows, dark on white, and I follow the line of it with my fingers, from her temple to where it curls against the sheets.
"Tell me what tonight means," I say.
She knows. I can see it in her eyes, in the flush spreading down her throat, in the way her thighs part as I settle between them. She knows what I'm asking and she isn't afraid of the answer.
"It means you're my husband," she says. "And I'm your wife. And whatever happens in this bed tonight is the beginning of everything you told me you wanted. A family. A legacy. Children who carry your name."
I press my forehead against hers. Our breath mingles. She wraps her legs around me, drawing me closer, and I can feel the heat of her against me, slick and ready.
"I want to give you a child," she whispers. "I've wanted to since the night you kissed me for the first time. I want to carry something that belongs to both of us, something permanent, something no one can take."
I enter her in one slow, deep thrust, making her gasp. I hold still, buried inside my wife, and the world reduces to this single point of contact, this joining, this beginning.
"Look at me," I say.
She does. Her eyes are wet, not with sadness but with the overwhelming intensity of the moment, and I feel an answering sting behind my own.
I move. Slowly. Deeply. Each stroke is a declaration, and she meets every one, her hips rising, her body matching mine with the intuition that has defined us since the beginning.
"My wife," I say, and she shudders.
"My husband," she replies, and I feel the words in my spine.
I increase the pace. She arches beneath me, her hands gripping the sheets, then finding my shoulders, my back, pulling me deeper. Her breathing fractures into sharp, rhythmic sounds that match the rhythm of our bodies, and I watch her face and I see the pleasure building, cresting, threatening to break.
"Let go," I tell her. "I have you."
She comes with my name on her lips, her body convulsing around me, her fingers digging into my shoulders hard enough to bruise. I follow her over the edge moments later, spilling inside her with a groan that comes from somewhere deeper than my body, from the center of whatever I am, and I feel her arms wrap around me and hold me while the world reassembles itself.
We lie intertwined. The room is dark now, the sun having set while we were otherwise occupied. The stars glitter beyond the windows, indifferent and magnificent.
"Rovin," she says against my chest.
"Yes."
"This is what I chose."
"I know."
"Not the security or the power or the name." She lifts her head, looks at me in the dark. "You."
"I love you," I say, and the words are unfamiliar in my mouth but they are true. The truest thing I have ever said.
"I love you, too," she says, and she says it like a fact, like something that has always existed and was simply waiting to be named.
I pull her closer. She fits against my body as though she was engineered for it, every curve and angle aligning with mine. I press my lips against her hair and breathe her in.
