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Rachel changed and we all got locked on Jamie’ and gingers downstairs. I thought she might need to catch up, but judging by the way she and Candace, Aubrey, JoJo and Aurnia stumbled down the stairs, giggling stupidly, and by the way their lips were all stained a bright blue, they’d been doing plenty of catching up already.
Doing her best Elvis impression—which between the bad American accent, the booze, and the massive wig that kept sliding around her head was absolutely, wonderfully terrible—Aurnia began the ceremony. Between the shouting and the drinking and the constant interruptions for cheering it was quite a shite show. Judging from Rachel’s beaming smile and the way she kept squeezing my hands and pulling me in for pre-emptive kisses, it was exactly how she would have wanted it, there beneath the spray-painted Eiffel Tower.
When Aurnia asked us for our vows, Rachel was ready.
“This isn’t at all what I was going to say at city hall,” she warned me. “What I was going to say at city hall was beautiful and thoughtful and sober.”
I grinned.
“Fuck city hall.”
Then Rachel repeated the words she’d said in our bed. The words that I wrongly saw as lies. They were never lies. They were always the truth. They were true then, in Vegas. True there, with our naked bodies against one another. And they were true now, professing our love for one another in front of all our family and friends.
“I ran all this way to you,” Rachel concluded, laughing as she started to cry, making a complete hames of her already messy makeup. “And you knew I wouldn’t know how to stop, so you just ran with me. And you’ll always run with me.”
Rachel accepted a tissue from Conor’s fanny pack.
It was my turn and I knew the words to say: “I love you, Rachel.”
Rachel nodded. Nodded and whispered, “That’s enough.”
I repeated, squeezing her hands in mine, “And that’s enough.”
We kissed. We spilled shots of whiskey on each other as we took them with arms snaked through the others. We lifted our arms up in the air and smiled as a packed Dublin Ink cheered.
We partied like it was fucking Vegas.
At some point in the night (or was it already morning?) Rachel and I were kissing up against some hard surface. Who can really pay attention to whether it’s a bed or brick wall or kitchen table when you’ve got a handful of a perfect tit, nothing between you and buttery-soft skin but a sparkly pasty and some feathers, and pillowy lips between your teeth?
Turns out it was a door. A door I was grinding my hips against hers against.
We were already pretty fucking locked so it took us a second to realise why the hard surface we were getting hot and heavy against was bucking back against us. The music was loud, the neon lights were flashing everywhere, and there was my fairly sizeable boner all to distract me.
“Door!” Rachel was shouting as she laughed.
“What?” I shouted back at her.
She thumbed over her shoulder as I heard a pounding fist.
“It’s the door!”
Rachel adjusted the feathers of her bodice as if they’d ever do anything more than just hint at coverage over those tits of hers and pushed me back as I tried to advance on her again. Can you really blame me?
We scooted aside enough to let in a young girl, probably about twenty, with thick dark hair that curtained scowling, angry, determined eyes. She was so focused on something, or someone, that she hardly gave us a moment’s glance. She elbowed past and stormed into the crowd muttering under her breath, “B minus! Fucking B fucking minus! That fucker!”
The two of us watched her go, parting the crowd with her little cloud of bottled fury. People turned to watch her disappear just like we were. She had something about her. Something magnetic. Something familiar. The music pulsed around us, the lights flashed, and slowly Rachel and I turned to look at one another. We frowned at one another, each not willing to be the first to speak.
I thumbed over toward where the girl had disappeared, leaving nothing more than a trail of turned heads behind her.
“Um, was that—”
Rachel shook her head. “It couldn’t—”
“But she looked so much—”
“I mean, almost exactly, but—”
“But no,” I said, laughing, shaking my head. “Definitely not.”
