Or was I the sweet little ingénue who was prudishly embarrassed about being caught in a hotel room with a man, even though she was married to him?
No use trying to play against type. “I—I don’t know, Nicolai. What do you think?”
Vapid.I was vapid.
Jeez, how cringe was I going for here?
Nico smiled at me, hopefully picking up that I was acting. “Let’s go to the video, shall we?”
Ueli was still scrutinizing Nico and glaring at me.
Considering the weird lumps under the armpits of his suit jacket, having that heavily armed guyglareat me was a little disconcerting.
Nicolai cued up the video on his phone and held it out for Ueli to see.
I hadn’t seen our wedding video that Nicolai had watched earlier because he’d been sitting on the ground and his phone had been angled away from me, so I leaned out to see what we’d looked like.
The priest’s apprentice-guy who’d been our witness had also been holding Nico’s phone to film the ceremony. The moving pictures on the phone screen jittered.
Yep, there we were, getting married, just like I remembered. I’d wiped most of the mime makeup off my face with the baby wipes in the car, but a little bit of white pancake still smudged in my hairline. Somehow, the residual black greasepaint around my eyes formed almost perfect smoky eyes, like I’d meant it to look like that.
That was ridiculously lucky. I should have looked like a tweaking panda.
The ceremony was short and entirely unlike the wedding I’d seen at friends’ Catholic masses. The Orthodox priest kept shifting from Russian to English and back again.
Though the motions had been unfamiliar, they’d felt solemn, momentous, a pivot in my life.
But they were not. It was all just a show.
It was allfake.
In a close-up of my face, emotions flipped across my eyes and features, expressions that I practiced in front of the mirror when I’d been getting ready to marry Jimmy, wide-eyed moments of innocence, and devotion, and love.
Somehow, maybe due to muscle memory, those expressions rotated faster than I’d ever been able to when I’d practiced them before.
Hope. Starry-eyed joy. A little trepidation.
Longing.
My heart wept for that silly ingenue on the video who looked like she believed that the hasty wedding ceremony meant anything at all. Just give me half an ounce of something disguised as love, and I was a goner.
Jeez, I was stupid sometimes.
The priest prayed over our pawn-shop wedding rings and we exchanged them, sliding them on each other’s fingers with no vows.
Then, the priest settled crowns on our heads and spoke in Russian for a while, we drank from a shared cup of wine, and the priest led us as we perambulated three times around the altar together. When the priest took the crowns off, then he prayed over us and pronounced us husband and wife.
And that was when I freaked out.
So embarrassing to freak out during a solemn religious rite, and I totally did.
Dear Lord, what I would do to go back and not freak the heck out.
The stupid girl on the phone screen asked the priest and Nico, “But what about the vows? What about the kiss?”
Nico slurred his words only a little bit considering how totally wasted he’d been. “We don’t do that in the Orthodox Church. The blessing is the sacrament.”
Panic had blossomed in my eyes. “I thought we would say vows. I always thought I would say vows when I got married.”
