Chapter 37: I just have to admit that it’s all coming back to me.
Back to the future: Sixteen years ago. My wedding night.
We have a flight leaving for Phoenix the next morning; our honeymoon will consist of her doing some house shopping while I start practicing with my new team. Until we buy a house, we’ll be living in the finished basement of a new teammate, so this night, holed up together with all our luggage in a hotel less than a mile from the John Glenn Columbus International Airport, might be the only space and time we will have to ourselves for the next several weeks.
I’m tipsy, but I manage to get the door open anyway and sweep a giggling, slightly tipsier Jenny off her feet as I cross into the hotel room.
“Ani!” she squeaks when I pick her up. “What are you doing?”
“I thought this was what you were supposed to do — carry your bride across the threshold.”
“You carry your bride across the threshold of your first home,” she informs me. “Not across the threshold of a hotel room.”
I laugh. “Well, sorry, little miss wedding expert. I guess I’ve got some more carrying of you to do later.”
She doesn’t even let me make it to the queen-sized bed dominating the middle of the small room. Still in my arms, she’s climbing me like I’m a human jungle gym, gripping my shoulders, pulling herself up until she can reach my mouth, pushing a hot, insistent, alcohol-tinted kiss into me. And even though we’ve done this a thousand times before, even though we’ve been doing this since high school, my knees go watery and my heart races as a wave of heat cascades down my body.
I stumble forward on now clumsy, uncooperative legs, barely managing to land Jenny gently on her back before I’m leaning over her, landing nipping little kisses up her throat, across the line of her jaw, over to her ear.
Jenny reaches up, digs greedy fingers into my thick hair, pulls me down closer to her. Her lips, then her teeth, find my earlobe. I shiver involuntarily.
“Ani,” she whispers into my ear, hot breath tickling and sending another wave of heat coursing through my body, “we did it. We’re married. You’re my wife. After everything…”
When she trails off, I push myself up a few inches, study her face. Her brown eyes are wide, shining with tears again, just like during the ceremony.
“Yes, baby,” I say, stroking her cheek, pushing stray hairs from her face. “We’re married. Wife and wife.”
The tears spill over, sliding down her temples, leaving little rivers of mascara. “I wasn’t sure if we’d ever get to this night.”
I kiss her. I try to put all my tenderness, all my love, all my years of patience into my lips, my mouth, my tongue, so that she can feel my answer, know that I’m telling her not to worry, that she never needed to worry, that she’ll never need to worry again.
“Of course we got here,” I say when I break the kiss. “I always told you we would. We’re soulmates, right?”
She pulls me back down into another kiss, but there’s nothing tender about it. She ends it by tugging on my bottom lip with her teeth. “Get me out of this dress,” she says, voice husky.
It takes both of us working together, along with a series of giggles, to get her out of the form-fitting wedding dress. Along the way, we throw the blazer, vest, and tie from my tux unceremoniously onto the floor, and she rips at buttons without any regard for my expensive dress shirt.
When we’re both bare, I straddle her hips on my knees, careful to keep the weight of my big body off of her. Jenny’s skin is milk-white and marble-smooth, its only mar a birthmark above her left breast, the place where her mother used to tell her she was kissed by an angel. She’s perfectly proportioned, if a little too skinny, like a blonde-haired, brown-eyed china doll. I run the pad of my thumb over the birthmark, observing the contrast between my copper-colored skin and her pale skin.
My thumb trails down, circles her bare, pink nipple until it puckers upright. Her eyes flutter closed, and her cheeks flush with heat as she lets out a long, ragged breath from her open mouth.
“You’re beautiful, Jenny.”
She opens her eyes, wraps a hand around my wrist, tugs me towards her. “You’re beautiful.”
I resist her tug, shake my head. “I’m not. Dutch got all the beautiful genes. I got the King Kong genes.”
She tugs harder on my wrist. “You’re wrong. Dutch got the snotty genes. You got the beautiful, brave, strong, funny, talented, wonderful, kind, and loyal genes.”
I follow her tug this time, kiss her on one eyebrow, then the other, then her mouth. And even as I lower myself into the kiss, tongue brushing against hers and hands sliding down across her bare chest, ribs, hips, core… I marvel at the way we fit together, at the way our disparate sizes are somehow completely perfect, completely complementary.
She gasps when my long middle finger slides through her wetness. I tease her throbbing clit with the tip of my thumb, then cup her with my whole hand as I swallow her gasp with another kiss.
“Ani,” she says, the name vibrating as a moan against my lips. Fingernails scrape lightly up my back. “Please, baby… Please, I need to feel you insi — oh!”
She loses the ability to make words when my first two fingers slide inside her, and, God, I love her so much that I’m crying again, even as desire clouds over everything else. I push harder into her as her hips jerk and thrust against me. We breathe into each other, kissing all but forgotten except for the occasional graze of my teeth against her chin, her bottom lip. I can feel the coarse tips of hard nipples rubbing against my chest, and the sheen of sweat growing across both our bodies sticks us together momentarily as she pushes against me again.
The little noises I know so well, the breathy pants and moans and half-whispered curse words — because sex is almost the only time Jenny ever allows herself to curse freely — begin to emanate from her throat. It is the music of Jenny’s arrival; it is my favorite song, the track I want to play on repeat for the rest of my life. And it turns me on so much that I drop my head to her neck, close my eyes, lick up her neck as I add a third finger below. She lets out a high-pitched, wordless cry, and less than a minute later, soft wet walls clench and close around my three fingers. I thrust one last time, earning a louder cry of pleasure, and I go still as I feel Jenny’s fingernails decorating my back with eight purple half-moons. The dig of her nails hurts a little, but it’s the kind of hurt that feels so good that I hope I’ll wear the shape of her fingernails against my spine forever.
I pull out of her gently a few seconds later, but keep my hand between her thighs, holding her there, keeping her warm, the way she likes. Her legs clamp onto my hand, trapping it, and she wiggles close to me as I drop onto the bed beside her, catching my breath. She pushes her face into my side, drapes an arm across my torso.
The tickle of lips against my ribs breaks my skin out in gooseflesh. “I love you,” she says into my side. “Hold me.”
“Always,” I answer obediently, pulling my hand out from between her thighs and wrapping it around her back, squeezing her close to my side. “Til death do us part.”
“Til death do us part,” she answers, trailing a hand down my stomach and weaving the tips of her fingers through the thick, black hair below.
I turn my face, curl forward until I can kiss the top of her head, then relax back onto the pillow. And as I lay there in the darkening room, the sound of airplanes reminding me of our trip to Phoenix tomorrow, I find myself wondering, and not for the first time — how could someone so small end up taking up my whole world?
#
Back to the present
“…And do you, Grace, take Kyle to be your lawfully wedded husband, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy state of matrimony?”
“I do,” says Grace Adler. Tears glisten like jewels on her cheeks, and even I have to admit she looks very pretty in her elegant gown, with her red hair quaffed and pinned atop her head.
“Will you love him,” the minister says, “comfort him, honor and keep him so long as you live?”
“I will.”
My eyes and attention wander from Grace to Amy, who, in her springtime green bridesmaid dress, which comes down about mid-calf, and with her nearly black hair pinned up behind her, looks at least twice as beautiful to me as the bride does. She must feel my eyes on her, because her gaze flits down the aisle, and when she sees me, she gives a soft smile. The shy Amy smile. The gentle, open one. The Amy not being a hard-ass business woman smile. I smile back, repress a childish need to wave.
She looks away.
A thought occurs to me, and I lean down, whisper in Jenny’s ear. “Hey. How come you’re not up there? How come you’re not a bridesmaid?”
An older woman on Jenny’s other side turns her head to glare at me, and I straighten back up.
Jenny puts her hand on my leg, squeezes. “I’ll tell you later,” she whispers back.
She doesn’t remove her hand from my thigh. I don’t shift away from it, which… You know how they say “hindsight is twenty-twenty”?
Yeah. Well. Forgive me for having a moment of nostalgia.