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Luke
We walked out of the city hall chapel, onto the elevator smelling like everyone’s perfume, and out the doors to the sidewalk. The wind was whipping hard through the buildings of downtown Austin, smacking my tie into my face, and Cassie’s hair was billowing up, catching her earrings. No one said a word. There must have been a storm coming.
Cassie and I kept glancing at each other, not hostile but not nice, either, more like we were checking to see if the other was still there.
I couldn’t stop thinking about this neighbor kid I knew growing up. I couldn’t remember his name because it seemed like there was always some neighbor kid Jake and I were running around with in the summer while Dad was at the garage, Mitch or Mark or whoever, but he was the kid you always had to watch your mouth around. He’d pick up any word and poke at it until it seemed like the dumbest thing anyone had ever said. Jake and I could never say we loved anything, like Power Rangers or our dad or Ritz crackers, without the neighbor kid spitting, “Oh, yeah? If you love it so much then why don’t you marry it?”
It wasn’t like that, Jake and I would always tell him. We didn’t love crackers in the same way we loved people we would marry.
And yet there I was, married, and when it came time for the sake of the marriage to tell Cassie I “loved” her, even though I didn’t, there would still be a part of me that choked on the words, waiting to be taunted for them.
And there would also be another ounce of little kid logic that would want to point to someone as beautiful as she was right then, pushing the wild hair out of her face, and answer the taunts back. Well, I did marry her, motherfuckers. See? I did.
