Everyone must know.
If the ceremony had been streamed on my social media,everyone knewthatIhad married a woman ina Russian Orthodox rite.
The ramifications swarmed me.
It didn’t matter whether or not it waslegal.
If I’d wanted to marry someone last night for shits and giggles, I should have gotten married inany other traditionthan Russian Orthodox.
Lexi had crawled back over to the close side of the bed and was staring at me over the edge, blond waves of her hair framing her elfin face. “You don’t seem too happy about this.”
“I was very drunk last night. I’m mortified this was my idea.”
“Like I said, it isn’t legally binding. We can just rip up that marriage license over there to shreds, and it’ll be like it never happened. Or we can go back to the marriage bureau, and they’ll officially cancel the license. It’s the signing, notarizing, and depositing the license that makes it legal, not some priest saying stuff over us. I mean, heck. None of itmatters.”
“It’s not just that. My extended family and some other people who do matter areverydevout. As far as they’re concerned, we’requitemarried. Indeed, in the eyes of the Russian Orthodox church, we areverymarried. We are marriedfor life.”
“Yeah, but is that what you think?”
I held my head in my fists.“Yes.”
Her eyelids lifted, exposing white sclera all the way around her brown irises.“Oh.”
“Could you take me back through the evening in more detail?” I cradled the side of my aching head in my palm. “I seem to be missing parts of it.”
“Oh jeez, Nico. You wereblackoutdrunk last night?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“You didn’t look it. I mean, you looked schnockered, but not blackout-drunk.”
“Concealing drunkenness is practically a graduation requirement at the boarding school I attended.”
“Wow. I’m really glad I didn’t let you sign that license, and I’m even more sorry I let the priest do all that stuff. I thought it was no biggie.”
“Indeed. Just—start anywhere.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Okay, so we’re in Las Vegas, Nevada, in the United States.”
“Yes, I remember that part.”
“You stumbled out of that weird place called Billionaire Sanctuary that the doorman wouldn’t let me into.”
Snatches of vodka-soaked conversation from Demyan Volkov et al surfaced in my memory. His daughter. My uncle. “It’s a private club.”
“And I was outside on the street doing my performance art, busking.”
Here, the fuzzy memories began to fragment, but the epiphany that God had sent me an alternate bride floated in my head. “You were wearing a wedding dress, a big white wedding dress.”
“Yeah, and you saw the dress,I guess,and proposed. The first thing you said to me was to ask me to marry you. Actually, youtoldme to marry you, but we’ll call it asking for now.”
I remembered that part, too. The desperation for a bride,anybride except the one that my uncle and Volkov had selected for me, rose again. “Oh, God. I really did that.”
“And you insisted on getting married right away. I tried to get you to talk with your friends about it, but you insisted that we go buy a marriage licenseright then.And you said it had to be a Russian Orthodox priest.”
Shame, regret, and absolute humiliation warred in my head. “Of course, I did. You wouldn’t have known to find a Russian Orthodox priest.”
“And then you insisted on the baptism and olive oil ritual—what’d you call it again?”
