“To love and to cherish, from this day forward.”
And there was big tough guy, Jack Leroy, who beat people up for a living, who only grunted words if he absolutely had to, crying at our courthouse wedding—all because he was afraid to get his heart broken again.
I wouldn’t drop that fragile heart. I’d treat it with all the love it needed. I lifted my hand and wiped his tears from his face.
The judge beamed. “Who has the rings?”
Jack snapped out of it. “I do.” He patted his breast pocket, then reached inside for a small cloth bag with our rings inside.
“I’ll hold them,” the judge said. “Jacques, you go first again. Take the ring.”
He picked up his own ring and we all laughed. “Oh, shit. Yours. Not mine. My bad.”
“That’s okay,” she pushed us on with a good-natured laugh. “Jacques, please place the ring on Mara’s finger and say, ‘With this ring, I thee wed.’”
His hands had been shaking, but at this moment, he steadied. “With this ring, I thee wed.”
The subtle crystal black and white spikes slipped onto my finger with the perfect fit.
“My queen,” he whispered, shooting me the most genuine smile. My throat tightened and my stomach felt all wobbly and goddammit, who was this man? It was stupid and absolutely corny but it was his way to show how much I meant to him. If it was all I ever got, I’d have to accept it.
The woman in the front row swooned, trying not to interrupt.
“Now, Mara,” the judge prompted.
I took the ring out of her hand and wiggled it onto Jack’s finger. “With this ring, I thee wed.”
“In as much as Mara and Jacques have consented together in wedlock and have witnessed the same before this company and pledged their vows to each other, by the authority vested in me by the State of California, I now pronounce you married. You may now kiss.”
This was my moment: maybe the most important kiss we’d shared to this point. I needed to convince Jack to keep his heart open, to leave the door open for us to love. This wasn’t the time for messing around.
I needed to mean it.
I rested my arms on top of his as his circled my waist, and I let him have it.
I kissed him so he wouldn’t have any doubt. I kissed him so he could not only give me love, which he already tried in his way, but so he could receive it too. I had to show him he was worthy of love.
So the best way I knew how, I did.
THIRTY-FOUR
JACK
NOVEMBER
“No, but the parade is a metaphor—”
“Jackie, Iknowit’s a metaphor.” Mara flipped me a middle finger even though we sat right next to each other in our booth for two at a quiet health food restaurant in Santa Monica. I found something at the intersection of fancy and healthy to minimize the chances for Mara to have a reaction. “When is music not a metaphor, and especially emo music?”
“I don’t know, Fall Out Boy’s pretty literal. And what about Yellowcard?”
Things were tense during our ceremony, but here at dinner, we were keeping things light. Looking Mara in the eye and promising to love her brought up so many mixed feelings. I wanted to love her at some point, and that’s the only reason I was able to vow that I would love her.
As much as I wanted to pretend they were just words, they weren’t for me. And I didn’t think they were for Mara either. I was jealous of her ability to have hope after heartbreak. Did Bryce not decimate her like Sydney did me? Was she not ruinedby weird family relationships? How could she just pick up and go on?
And how the hell did she have faith in me?
“No, they’re not. They’re poetic,” she argued. “But their later work?—”
