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“It better be right now, then. Because my uncle didn’t just track my phone. He’s coming to get me on a fucking plane, and we only have a couple hours at most before he gets here.”
“Yes.” Rome takes my face in his hands. “Yes. That’s great. It fucking sucks that they’re coming for you, but I—I’m so excited.” He kisses me. Hard. Deep. Hot. His hand goes around the back of my head and pulls me in close, and for a few heartbeats, that’s all there is. Rome’s body against mine. His mouth, tasting me so deeply I could lose myself in it. The light from the sun. It’s everywhere, all around us.
“Let’s go,” I whisper against his mouth, the agony of time eating at me like an invisible poison. “Let’s go. Please, let’s go.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
ROME
Imarry Avery Capulet twenty minutes later in the tiny church structure erected on the far edge of the commune, with the walls letting in a whispering morning breeze and the roofless chapel open to the cloudless desert sky.
It starts with a dead sprint across to the trailer, where my dad’s wife, balancing a sleeping newborn in one arm, whisks Avery away and my dad digs in an old jewelry box with shaking hands. After a minute he surfaces with a plain white-gold wedding band. A tiny one with several tiny diamonds embedded around it.
“Here.” He tips it into my hand with both of his, like he’s been cradling diamonds. For all I know, this could be sterling silver. But what matters is that it belonged to my mother. I take it and hold it up to the light. My mother’s wedding ring. Not the enormous solitaire diamond ring my father bought her later—her actual wedding band, which my dad slipped onto her finger back when they themselves eloped and got married. He looks down at the ring in my palm and reaches down to touch it tenderly. “She would want you to have this.”
I’m not a crier, but I’ve got a painful lump in my throat. It’s hard to say what my mother would have wanted, and I can’t really ask her and expect some logical answer. She’s too far away now, too locked into whatever parallel universe her mind exists in. She’ll never see this. It’s a nice thing to believe, though. I close my fist around the ring. In a traditional wedding, the ring would be carried to the front of the church by a member of the wedding party. I’m not letting it out of my sight until Avery and I exchange vows and I slide this onto her finger.
My father goes outside to ring a bell out front of the row of trailers. The sound echoes out over the commune and people perk up, lifting their heads from what they’re doing. Chores and conversations are interrupted. One couple comes out of their tent half-naked. My half-siblings sprint around the bell post shrieking at the top of their lungs.
“There,” Indigo says, as she steps out onto the trailer porch with Avery. My dad’s wife is all color and flowing fabrics, and Avery?
Avery’s the most beautiful bride I’ve ever seen.
My stepmother has somehow rustled up a gauzy, sleeveless white dress and a flower crown. She’s swiped a shimmery pink blush over Avery’s cheeks, a clear gloss on her rosebud-shaped lips. My heart stops. If those fucking Capulets show up now, I’ll die with this sight before my eyes. That wouldn’t be the worst way to go.
But I’d rather make her my wife before that happens.
“Isn’t this bad luck?” Avery’s shy smile restarts my heart again. “You’re not supposed to see me on our wedding day.”
I try for a snarky joke. But words fail me. I take her hand instead. “I think the circumstances make it okay,” I tell her. And from the look in her eyes she knows what I mean.
Someone puts a bouquet of bright wildflowers in Avery’s hand, Indigo comes back out of her trailer with the baby in one arm, and my father leads the procession to the chapel like a medieval town crier. It isn’t far–a five minute walk and we’re standing before a glorious little wooden building with no roof and stained-glass windows that cast brilliant rainbows onto the bare earth floor within. The pews are made of felled logs, the aisle the same dirt we stand upon at the precipice. Before we go in the door a woman sprints up to meet my dad, putting a piece of paper in his hand.
“Perfect,” I hear him say. “Perfect. Thank you.”
“What is that?” Avery says. Her hand is locked around my arm.
“A marriage certificate.” That’s the only thing it could be. My dad probably marries people on the commune all year long. This way, they don’t have to go to the courthouse. “Ourmarriage certificate.”
Her mouth curls up into a contented smile.
We walk down the aisle together, led by my father. People from the commune fill the pews behind us, but we could be all alone for all I care. I appreciate the multiple witnesses, for sure. But in this moment, all I have eyes for is the woman I love.
I’m not letting go of Avery for one second. Not even long enough for a volunteer from the commune to give her away. She doesn’t need to be given away. She belongs to herself, and at the same time she’s already mine, in a deeper way than a wedding ceremony could ever suggest. And I’m not letting go of her for the rest of our lives.
We’re in a hell of a rush, the minutes ticking down, but time seems to soften in the chapel. A small mercy as our combined panic seems to slow and fade. My dad bows his head over a ratty Bible stuffed with notes. A sunbeam comes down to crown him, Avery and I reach for each other's hands, and all I can feel is her fingers resting on my palms and the breathing of the people around us. We’re all here, alive, right now.
We made it. We survived. And now, we’ll be married.
My stepmother comes to take Avery’s bouquet.
The last moments in that dungeon flash before my eyes.Tell me you love me. You don’t have to mean it.
I thought I’d die with her back in that basement. Chose to die with her. That was our plan. And here, in the holy silence of this moment, I’m stupidly, shamefully glad for every breath I’ve taken since then. I get to have this. I get to have her. And maybe it’s not for long, but fuck it. I’ll take every single, blessed second I can get. I’ll take looking into her eyes while she’s dressed in white. I’ll take the little quiver of her chin while my dad starts saying the wedding vows. I’ll take her saying I do.
It’s the quickest ceremony in the world, but it feels timeless. We’re in a slow, languid, light-filled moment, hearts beating hard, while I put my mother’s ring on Avery’s finger. It fits. It fucking fits. And Avery, with a sly grin, produces a men’s ring from inside her bra.
“Where—” I dissolve into laughter, the kind that makes everybody else join in, too. I haven’t laughed like this in years. It might as well be during this bizarre commune wedding ceremony, surrounded by my dad’s closest friends. My young half-brothers, half-naked at the front of the crowd, lose their shit.
