Rings.
I blink, and suddenly her hand is on my chin.
She kisses me.
Her whisper against my lips.
“I promise to love you every day for the rest of our lives together, twice as much on the days you forget how wonderful you are.”
And I am me for the first time on this day.
Her touch.
It’s just us.
Her and I.
And—
“Ouch!” I shout as claws dig into my leg.
Far away, people laugh as I glance down. Pebbles hangs from my leg, clinging to me as if I am the only safe place in the world.
I pick her up, lift her in my arms, where she snuggles at my chest, as always. My eyes wander from Pebbles up into Victoria’s eyes.
Victoria, who is now my wife.
And I am hers.
My wife.
I cup her cheek with my free hand and kiss her. Not with cat hair on my clothes, but an entire cat on my arm.
It’s a kiss that is only meant for her. To say all the things I can’t say right now.
Thank you, Mistress,I tell her in my mind.
“I have a surprise for you,” I whisper in her ear when we end the kiss and walk up the aisle to the exit of the ceremony room towards the ballroom.
Of all the things I have imagined, walking down the aisle with one of my cats on my arm and my wife’s hand in mine, to the clicking noise and flashes of several photographers, is so far-fetched that it feels like a dream.
“And when will I learn what it is?” she asks me.
“The moment you tell all these people to bugger off,” I say, and her mouth curves into a smile. A moment I wish to never end, but it does. Because people come to congratulate us. Famous people I have heard of. After all this time, I’m still not used to it.
“You think that cat will let go of you anytime soon?” she asks me after I have been damned to hug several hundred people with a cat clinging to me. Pebbles is just as exhausted as I am, because every second sentence was “Oh, such a cutie,” or a derivative of it, followed by touching.
“I don’t think so,” I say, and when I try to pull Pebbles off, she digs her claws into me.
Victoria sighs.
“Well,” she says, “Dance with a cat it is then. May I please have this dance, Mia Emilia Fitzroy?” she asks me.
I look at her, and right this moment, after all the fictional books I’ve read telling the tales of love, I finally know what love really is.
This is.
This is love.
