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“You really want this, huh?” I asked Rhys.
He held my hand and nodded. “Yeah, I do.”
“Okay,” I said. I waited for the panic to crash over me like a wave, but it didn’t come. Rhys’s wide eyes eclipsed everything.
“Really?!”
I nodded, and he grabbed me and bounced me back on the bed, kissing me. Our champagne went everywhere and I made a face as the cold liquid fizzed on my neck.
Rhys chuckled. “Sorry, sorry.” He kissed the spilled champagne from my neck and then jumped up to get a towel.
“You can totally call the shots about what we do for it, I promise,” he said fervently.
“Are you nuts? I don’t want to call the shots. I don’t know a fucking thing about weddings.”
“Okay, okay, you can have fifty percent of control over it, how’s that.”
I nodded.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Can we—” I shook my head.
“What, baby, anything you want. Everything you want. Tell me.”
I twined our fingers together. “Can we have rings?” We hadn’t had any to exchange since we’d driven right to the courthouse from the barn where Rhys proposed. Rhys had brought it up a few times since then, and I had shrugged it off because it seemed so anticlimactic to just go into a store and buy them after the fact.
Or maybe it was because I hadn’t quite believed it would last.
But now I wanted them.
“Yeah, Matty, of course. I would love that,” Rhys said. “I want the whole world to know you’re mine just by looking at your finger,” he said, low, into my ear.
He put his arms around me and we rolled together. We were sticky with champagne, and Rhys’s nose was still cold against my neck. I had to pee, and my stomach was growling with hunger since I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Absently, I realized it would be my and Grin’s birthday in a few hours.
I’d never felt happier in my life.
Epilogue
THREE MONTHS LATER
I bit my lip and hesitated over the send button on my phone. Grin was gonna make so much fun of me.
Theres gonna be a car there for you at baggage claim tomorrow, I wrote.
Scuse me? Then a parade of crying-laughing faces and an emoji of a big diamond.
Theo already paid for it and if I try to say no don’t get me that he just stares and says ok but what if I did.
He sent a GIF of an enormous champagne fountain and C u soon.
Paying for part of our wedding had been a ridiculous drunken joke that Theo had made the weekend that we announced to him and Caleb that we were getting married. Remarried. We’d met for brunch at this place halfway between our houses. They’d been thrilled for us, and after brunch Caleb and Rhys had gone back to Caleb’s to work on music and Theo had come back home with me because he said this news deserved a toast.
Theo was giddy with joy and a lot of blueberry pancakes, and I was feeling strangely buoyant. We drank whiskey and apple cider and then wandered into the cemetery tipsy, where I asked Theo if he and Caleb would be our best men. His eyes got mad big, and he blinked at me and nodded. As we talked about the wedding, somehow we got from me meeting Rhys’s parents to discussing what dowry I could expect to get for Rhys from his parents.
“Well, he’s getting zilch from my parents,” I’d said, and Theo had declared passionately that he would provide my dowry in the form of matching burial plots in this very cemetery.
“Pick your future grave!” Theo crowed, and we dissolved into giggles. I remembered that as being the end of the conversation. When I woke up the next morning, though, it was to a string of texts from Theo talking about dowries and paying for the wedding and giving me a credit card number that he said I should put wedding-related expenses on.
I sent him a flurry of texts telling him he was an idiot and of course he wasn’t paying for shit for our wedding, as we were adults with jobs who were perfectly capable of paying for it ourselves. I was grouchy and hungover, and one of my texts might possibly have contained the phrase In case you didn’t know my husband’s kind of a big deal.
My phone had rung and I’d snatched it up, prepared to shut this whole thing down. But it wasn’t Theo, it was Caleb. He let me go through all the reasons this wasn’t going to happen, and then he sighed.
“Listen, Matty. Theo’s not close with his folks at all, and he doesn’t have any siblings. Since he left the band, there aren’t that many people he considers friends. He adores you and Rhys. Especially you. He’s wicked psyched that you guys are close now. Ow!” There was the sound of shifting on his end of the line, then a muffled, “You want me to not tell Matty you like being his friend while convincing him to let you drop rock star bucks on his wedding?” and then a pointed, “Anyway. It would mean so much if you guys would let him get you some stuff. It’s not about the money. He knows you could pay for it yourselves. It’s his emotionally stunted way of saying he considers you guys family.”
