🔥 BONUS CHAPTER 🔥

Wife

From The Summer of Yes by Aurora North

The wedding is over and we are alone in Eva’s house.

I did not, this morning, in the dawn of my wedding day, think those would be the words I would think first when the door of the beach house finally closed behind us. I had assumed I would think I am married or holy shit or did Mari really make Pete take a hundred and forty Polaroids during the reception or did I imagine that. But what I think, instead, with the door clicking soft behind us at eleven forty-seven on a cool October Saturday night with the bay-air coming through the open windows and the candles Eva left burning on the kitchen counter and the small wooden bowl of honey-coated almonds Mari left on the dining table next to a hand-lettered card that says MY LOVES — eat something before you start, M xx, — what I think is:

The wedding is over and we are alone in Eva’s house.

And then, immediately under it:

She is my wife.

Jade Maren is my wife.

Jade Maren-Vance is my wife.

I am Elara Vance-Maren.

We have not, in the seventy-six days since the breakwater, been entirely sure which order the names are going in. We have, in fact, fought about it once in the gallery and twice in bed. Eva had finally, two weeks ago, sat us down on her porch with a glass of Vermentino each and told us that the answer was: both of you, my loves, will use both names in the order each of you prefers, for the rest of your lives, and you will explain it to anybody who asks, and the world will catch up. And so today — at three forty-three p.m. on a cool October Saturday in front of forty people on her mother’s bayside lawn under the white tent at low tide with the gulls and Pete’s Polaroid going — we had become, officially: Maren-Vance and Vance-Maren. Both names. Both orders. Both ways.

The wedding ring on my left hand catches the candlelight as I close the door behind us.

It is a thin gold band, no stone, plain. The emerald is on the same finger above it now, stacked, the cushion-cut Eva-mother’s emerald that Jade put on me on the breakwater rock at four-fifteen p.m. on a Friday at the end of July and that I have not taken off since, even in the shower, even when I sleep, even today during the ceremony when the new wedding band slid on under it. The pendant — the small gold disc with the green sea-glass — is at my throat under the lace neckline of my dress. All three pieces of jewelry. Pendant, emerald, band. A whole architecture of yes, from June to October, on my body.

Jade turns. She is — God, she is so beautiful tonight. She is in the white linen suit. The same suit. The Bushwick suit. The breakwater suit. She has a peony in her lapel, pale pink, from Eva’s garden. The unbuttoned collar of the white shirt is open three buttons at her throat. The silver thumb-ring is on her hand. Her gray-greens are calm and tired and lit and she is looking at me, and her gaze is doing the slow long finally look it has been doing for ten weeks.

El. Jade. Wife.

I — I let out a sound. A small soft sound. Not a sob. Not a laugh. Something between.

Wife. Yes, Jade. El. Yeah. Take that dress off.

I look at her. I had not thought, before tonight, that the last sentence on our wedding day would be Jade Maren in her mother’s kitchen telling me to take my dress off. I had thought there would be — a moment. A speech. A small Jade-shaped welcome to the rest of our lives handover, the way she has been doing handovers all summer. There is none of that. There is just my wife — my wife — leaning back against her mother’s kitchen counter with her hands shoved in the pockets of the white linen pants and her gray-greens calm and dark and her mouth doing the small wry tip, and she is — she is over with the speeches. She has been making speeches for ten weeks. She wrote vows this afternoon. And now, finally, in the dark warm kitchen of her mother’s house at midnight on the Saturday of our wedding, she is done with words.

She wants the dress off.

Jade, I whisper. Are we — do you want me to — here?

El. Anywhere, baby. Kitchen. Hall. Bedroom upstairs. Beach. I have — I have waited seven years and three months, baby, and you are in a white silk dress with a gold pendant and an emerald and a wedding ring on you, and you are my wife, and I am — I am not particular about the room.

I — God, I am laughing-crying again.

The bedroom upstairs, Jade. I want to walk up the stairs in this dress, and I want you to walk up behind me, and I want — I want it slow, Jade. The whole night. All of it.

I take her hand. I lead her, slow, deliberate, the wedding dress whispering on the wide pine boards, through the kitchen and into the small dark hall and to the foot of Eva’s narrow back staircase. The staircase that goes up to the small back bedroom under the eaves — the one Eva has, all summer, been quietly preparing.

I put my foot on the first step. I lift the dress slow with my free hand, just enough to clear my heels, and I climb. The wedding dress was built for me by a dressmaker in Truro in August, in three fittings — a long bias-cut silk skirt and a low V back held by two thin cream-silk straps and a soft drape across the front that catches at my waist and falls. It is the dress I am going to be photographed in for the rest of my life.

Jade follows me up. Half a step behind. Her hand still in mine. I can feel her breathing — uneven, slow, waiting — at the small of my back, behind me.

I get to the top. I turn at the doorway of the small back bedroom.

The candle on the nightstand is lit. Eva. Eva has lit it sometime in the last hour on her way out, which means Eva drove up to this room on her way home, in her wedding-mother dress, in the cool October dusk, and she lit a candle for us, because that is who Eva Maren is. The bed is turned down. The white quilt is folded at the foot. The window is cracked an inch. The bay-air is coming in.

Jade comes up beside me. She sees the candle. She sees the bed. She sees a small folded square of paper on the dresser that Eva has clearly set out, and she presses her forehead briefly against the doorframe, and she says, soft: Mom.

I open it. Eva’s handwriting. Sharp, dancer’s hand, slightly slanted. Just one line:

My loves — eat the almonds first. Then everything. — E xx

I press my hand to my mouth. Jade is laughing, wet, behind me. Mom. Eva is concerned about — about our blood sugar, El. Eva is running it. Even now. She brought up almonds.

We laugh. We laugh in the doorway of the small back bedroom of her mother’s beach house on the night of our wedding for a full thirty seconds, soft and wet and both of us shaking, and Jade pulls me against her with one arm and presses her face into my hair and laughs into the crown of my head, and I press my face into the white linen of her shoulder.

She lifts my chin. She does not say anything. She kisses me.

She kisses me — slow, the slow open kiss from the breakwater, the slow open kiss from the Wythe, the slow open kiss from the Bushwick sidewalk — but slower this time, with the finally underneath it, with the I have you underneath it, with the forever underneath it, and her hand goes up to the back of my neck, into my hair, where the small comb of seed pearls Eva pinned in this morning is just barely holding, and she pulls slow and the comb comes loose, and my hair falls down my back in a slow heavy fall, and Jade makes a sound against my mouth and says, low: Oh, baby. The hair down. I have been imagining you with your hair down in this dress all day, El.

She walks me — slow, backward — into the room. Her hands at my hips. The wedding dress catching at my heels. The candle flickering at the nightstand. The bay-air at my back, cool through the cracked window, pebbling my arms.

She stops at the foot of the bed. She turns me. Slow. Her hands at my shoulders. Her mouth at my temple.

El. The dress comes off slow. I want — I want to undo every — take a long time, baby. Will you let me. Yes, wife, she breathes, against my temple.

I make a small sound. Wife, she says again, low, the word turning in her mouth. She tries it. She likes it. She is — she is playing with it, finally, after holding it for seven years.

She lifts her hand to the right strap of the wedding dress. She slides it slow off my shoulder. Just one strap. The dress shifts on my body. Falls a half-inch. Jade kisses the bare shoulder she has just uncovered, slow, open-mouthed, the way she has been kissing my shoulder for ten weeks every morning at the kitchen island while I have my coffee.

She lifts the second strap. She slides it. Slow. The dress falls.

It falls in one long whisper of silk down my body and pools at my feet, around my heels, on the wood floor of Eva’s back bedroom, and I am — I am in the small cream silk underwear and the cream silk strapless bra Eva and Mari took me to Boston to buy on a Tuesday in September, and the small gold pendant at my throat, and the emerald and the wedding band, and the sheer cream stockings with the lace tops Mari handed me this morning and said baby, trust me, I have been doing this for thirty-one years, you will thank me at midnight, and the cream satin heels I am about to step out of.

I step out of them. I step out of the dress, and out of the heels, and I am barefoot, in cream silk, in front of my wife, in my mother-in-law’s back bedroom, on the night of our wedding.

Jade has — Jade has stopped moving. She is just looking at me. The slow look. The Wythe look. The breakwater look, but slower, with all of it underneath. With seven years. With I am her wife. With I get to do this for the rest of my life. Her gray-greens are wet at the rims. Her hand is at the corner of her own mouth. She has, I see, momentarily forgotten how to breathe.

Jade. El, baby. God. God, baby.

She crosses the foot of space between us. She lifts both hands to my face. She kisses me — slow, full — her tongue in my mouth, her thumbs at the corners of my mouth, her body pressed against mine. Her hand slides down slow to the catch of the cream silk bra at my back. She unhooks it. She slides it off slow, watching my face. She lays it on the dresser next to Eva’s note, and she comes back to me, and she lowers her head, and her mouth — finally, finally, after a whole long day of vows and toasts and dancing — finds my breast.

I make a sound. I have made this sound a hundred times in the last ten weeks. Jade has been on me, slow and patient, every night and most mornings, and this should not be different. This should not be — new. But it is. It is. There is something in the way her mouth comes down on me tonight that is — new. It is I get to. It is forever. It is the slow ease of a woman who has stopped waiting for the thing and is now, finally, living in it.

Her tongue is slow. Her hand at my other breast is patient. She is in no hurry. Her free hand slides down my belly, slow, to the waistband of the cream silk underwear. She pauses there. She lifts her head. She looks up at me. El. The bed. Now.

She turns me. She walks me slow, both hands at my waist, her lips at the base of my throat, backward to the bed. She lays me down on the white quilt. The quilt is cool against my back. Jade looks down at me — Jade, in her white linen suit, with the silver thumb-ring catching the candlelight, with a peony in her lapel, my wife of eight hours and twenty minutes — and her face crumples, and she presses the heel of her hand against her own eye, briefly, and she breathes long and shaky, and she says, low: El. I just — wife.

She climbs onto the bed. She crawls up over me, slow, and she kneels astride my thighs, and she slowly starts to undo the buttons of the white shirt, watching my face. She has not yet taken the jacket off. She is doing this on purpose. She is doing this because we know what it does, when she undresses slow, button by button, with my eyes on her.

She gets to the last button. She slides the shirt out of her trousers. She shrugs the white linen jacket off, slow, dropping it to the floor, and the shirt off after it. She is in a pale champagne-silk camisole with thin straps that I have never seen before on her body, and the silver thumb-ring on her hand, and her dark hair loose against her shoulders, and her gray-greens calm and warm above me.

The camisole. New?

Mari took me. Last week. She said I needed something for tonight. Mari has — Mari has opinions about — about silk.

I lift my hand. I run my fingertips up the front of the cami, slow, across her flat belly, up between her small high breasts under the silk, to the dip at the base of her throat. Her breathing hitches. I trace the line of one strap. She closes her eyes, briefly. El. Slow.

She lowers herself. Slow. Her cami-silk-covered chest comes down on mine, and the warm cool slide of the silk on my bare skin makes me gasp, and Jade swallows the gasp in a kiss, and her thigh slots between mine and presses up slow into the cream silk underwear, and I roll my hips, just barely, against her, and she makes a low sound, deep in her throat, the that’s it, baby sound, the yes, finally sound, and her mouth comes back down on mine.

She kisses me for — I do not know — five minutes. Ten. Twenty. The candle burns lower. The bay-air gets colder. We do not notice. She kisses me slow and deep with her hand in my hair and her thigh pressed up between mine and the silk of her camisole sliding hot against my breasts, and I am so wet I can feel it through the silk, and Jade can feel it too, against her thigh, and at one point she pulls back and she laughs — soft, wicked — against my mouth, and she says: Oh, wife. Tell me what you want.

I open my eyes. Take it off, the underwear. Take it.

Yes, wife.

She slides slow down the bed. She hooks her fingers in the cream silk underwear, and she pulls slow down my hips, my thighs, my knees, and over my ankles, and off, and she drops them on the floor beside the dress, and she peels the cream silk stockings off too, one then the other, and the lace tops catch on her thumbs, and Mari was right about the stockings.

I am completely naked on Eva’s white quilt now, except for the pendant and the emerald and the wedding band.

Jade is still in the cream camisole and the linen trousers. She crawls back up. She lies down next to me — sideways, on her elbow — and she runs her free hand, slow, down the front of my body. The slope of my breast. The curve of my belly. The soft of my hip. The inside of my thigh. She does not, yet, go further. She is teasing me. She has all night.

Jade. Stop saying wife like that.

Tell me you do not love it.

I cannot. The truth is wife in her mouth at this exact angle is doing something to me that no one — not Sienna, not Vee, not Cleo, not Tess, not Rae — ever did. Wife is — it is new. It is the one thing none of the practice partners ever got to call me, and Jade is enjoying getting to be the only one who does.

I love it, I whisper.

El, baby. Look at me. There is — there is something I want to do tonight. That we have not yet done. I have been imagining it. I want to ask you about it now, before we go any further. So you can think about it. Yes?

I look at her. I think — we have done so much. In two and a half months. We have done every variation, baby, what is left.

Yeah, I say.

She breathes in. She breathes out. El. I bought a — a thing.

I freeze. A thing? Jade, are you —

A strap, El.

I close my eyes. I had, briefly, thought about this. I had thought about it three times in ten weeks, lying in the green-painted room next to my then-fiancée, and I had thought — would she. Would I. Would we want —

I had not, in ten weeks, brought it up. She has.

Jade. You bought —

El. I have been carrying it. In my bag. Tonight. I was not going to bring it up unless something in you moved that way. I did not want to make it a plan. I wanted to ask. Tonight. Wedding night. With this room and the candle and you in cream silk — yeah. I wanted to ask. So I am asking.

I open my eyes. She is propped on her elbow above me, her gray-greens calm and patient, her hand still light on the inside of my thigh, her face open and waiting and absolutely uncertain. She is — Jade Maren, my wife of eight hours, is uncertain. And the uncertainty is — God, it is the hottest thing I have seen on her face all day.

Jade. Yes.

She goes very still. Yeah?

Yeah, Jade. I want it. I want you to. Tonight. I have thought about it too. Three times. Maybe four.

She laughs, wet, against my temple. Of course you have, El.

I just — I did not want to bring it up.

Same, baby. Of course we are both. Where is it.

She sits up. She gets off the bed. She crosses to the small valise she had brought up earlier and stashed in the wicker chair by the window, and she crouches, and she pulls out a small dark cloth pouch, and she comes back to the bed. She kneels on the edge of it. She opens the pouch.

It is — okay, fine, I am not going to be coy about this. It is a small leather harness — black, soft, well-made — and a single silicone toy. The toy is reasonable. Not absurd. Not a prop. A real one. Soft. Warm-toned. It looks like the kind of thing two women buy together, slow and careful, with consideration.

Jade. Did Mari —

Mari did not, El. I went alone.

To where. Where did you —

Boston, El. Boston. Mari was not invited on this errand.

Was she bothered?

She was — yeah, she was bothered. She is getting over it.

I am laughing on the white quilt of Eva’s back bedroom, on my wedding night, naked, with my wife kneeling at the foot of the bed holding a small leather harness and a soft silicone strap, and I am laughing about Mari being bothered about not being invited on the strap-shopping errand, and Jade is laughing too.

She stops laughing. El. Are you — really —

Yes, Jade. Yes. I want it. Put it on. Now, baby.

She does. She takes the linen trousers off. The white silk underwear. She is naked from the waist down, and the cream camisole is still on, and she pulls the harness on slow, fitting it, the leather straps over her hipbones, the buckle at the front, and she fits the toy in the harness, and she sits back on her heels at the foot of the bed and she lets me look.

I look. She is — the cream camisole, and the harness, and the silver thumb-ring, and her dark hair loose, and the silicone in front of her in the candlelight — she is so hers, so new, so — I sit up. I crawl down the bed. I put my hands on her hipbones above the harness. I look up at her.

Jade. Look at you. Look at you, Jade. Wife.

She breathes in, sharp. El. Do not say it like that if you —

Wife. Wife. Wife. Look at you, wife.

She laughs. Wet. A little broken. Okay. Okay, El.

I lower my mouth.

I lower my mouth and I taste — for the first time, I taste the silicone, slow, and Jade gasps, a sound she has never made, because she can — through the harness, through the base — feel it. She can feel the pressure of my mouth at the base, where the silicone seats against her. I had not known this. I am learning it now, on the white quilt of her mother’s bedroom, on my wedding night. I take her slow, the way the practice partners had taken me, the way Cleo had taken me, slow and patient, and Jade’s hand comes down light into my hair. Her gray-greens are blown. Her mouth is open. She is not breathing.

El. Christ. El, I am going to come, baby, on the first thrust, if you keep doing that.

I lift my mouth. I look up at her. Yeah?

Yeah. Up here, baby. Up here.

I come up. She lays me back. She crawls slow over me. The silicone is between us, hot from my mouth, and her hand is at the side of my face, and her gray-greens are above me, and the candle is on the nightstand to our left, and the bay-air is cool on my skin, and she lowers her body slow until I can feel her, the harness pressed against me, the silicone at the dip of my belly, and she says, low, against my mouth: El. Tell me what you want.

Inside, I whisper.

Inside, Jade. Slow. Yes. Slow first.

Yes, wife.

She kisses me — slow, deep — and her hand goes down between us. She lines up. She pauses there. She looks at me. The flicker — left eye, right eye, mouth, eyes. Eyes on me. Whole time.

She pushes in. Slow. The silicone is — God, it is thick in the first inch, a fullness I have not felt in years and have absolutely never felt with a woman, and I gasp, and Jade swallows the gasp, and she does not move further, she just lets me feel that first inch, and her hand at the side of my face is steady, and she says, soft: Okay? More? Slow?

She slides in further. Slow. Slow. Inch by inch. She watches my face the entire time. She does not, until she is fully in, do anything else. She just lets me feel her, slow, until she is fully seated against me, her hipbones against mine, the harness pressed flush against my body, and I am so full I cannot breathe, and my eyes are wet, and Jade has gone very still, watching me, gray-greens calm, hand at the side of my face.

El. Are you — Good? Wife. Move?

Yes.

She moves. She moves slow. The first slow draw out, the slow press back in, and I make a sound I have never made, a low broken open sound, and Jade’s gray-greens darken, and she does it again, slow, the same long careful drag, and she is learning it. She is finding the angle. She is doing what she has done at every other thing all summer: she is learning my body, slow, in real time, and adjusting, and refining, and each slow stroke gets — better. Closer. Right.

I lift my hips up to meet her on the fourth stroke. She gasps. El — El, that is — Christ, baby, that is — that is the best —

She finds the rhythm. The slow steady rhythm. She does not chase it. She holds it. She has learned this, slow, from me, the way I have learned the slow patient unhurried thing from her. She holds the slow rhythm and she lets the heat stack, and her thumb comes up to my clit at the top of every slow stroke, and she works it slow, in slow circles, matching the rhythm of her hips, and I am — God, I am crying, crying, and she is whispering against my mouth — yeah, baby, yeah, wife, yeah, that’s it, take me, take me, baby, you are mine, you are mine, El, yes, wife, yes —

I come.

I come on her, slow and long, the door opening kind of coming, the long falling kind, the kind Cleo first showed me but bigger now, bigger, with the silicone full inside me and Jade’s slow thumb on my clit and her mouth at my temple and her gray-greens above me, and I am sobbing, openly, the I am her wife and she is inside me and we are married sobbing, and Jade does not stop. She does not stop. She works me through it, slow, gentling, easing, and at some point I come again on the same long drawn-out wave, just as the first one is finishing, the way she did me at the Wythe, and my whole body goes loose under hers, and she finally lets herself, she shudders against me, and her hand tightens at the side of my face, and her body presses fully against mine, and she comes, the friction at the base of the harness pressing her — she has been holding it for ten minutes, and she lets go, slow, against my mouth, and she is crying, the small hitched sound, and I —

I gather her into me, and her face goes against my throat, and her body collapses onto mine, and she is shaking, small, the I have you shaking, the seven years shaking, the I am her wife shaking, and I rock her. The way she rocks me. The way I have learned to rock her over the summer. The way Sienna first rocked me, on Day One, in her bed above the bookstore on Pearl.

I’ve got you, I whisper. I’ve got you, baby. I’ve got you.

We lie there. The candle on the nightstand is more than half gone. The bay-air is cold through the cracked window. Somewhere, far down the dune, a single gull is calling out, slow. The harness is still on. I have not let her up. She is sweat-warm against me and her camisole is rucked up around her ribs and she is — my wife.

After a long time she lifts her head. El. That was — the one, El. Better than the Wythe. Better than the engagement.

She kisses me. Slow, soft. The taste of me on her mouth. The silver thumb-ring on her hand, on the side of my face. After a while she lifts up, slow, and pulls out — slow, careful, gentle — and I make a small sound at the loss, and Jade hushes me, I know, baby, I know, and she settles the harness down to her thighs, and she crawls up beside me, and she pulls me into the curve of her shoulder.

We lie tangled in the white quilt. The candle is going low. The room is going dark blue at the windows. The pendant at my throat is still there. The emerald and the wedding band on my left hand are catching the dim light. Jade’s hand is on the small of my back, slow.

After a long time she says, low: Wife. El. The almonds.

I laugh wet against her shoulder. The almonds, Jade. Mom said. Almonds first, then everything. We are very out of order, baby.

We lie there for another minute. Then she kisses my temple, slow, and she gets up, and she pads — naked from the waist down, harness still around her thighs, the cream camisole rucked at her ribs — barefoot down the back stairs into Eva’s kitchen, and a moment later she is back. Up the stairs, slow. Carrying the wooden bowl. The honey-coated almonds.

She crawls back into the bed. She sets the bowl on her belly, between us. She holds one out to me on her palm. Wife. Eat, baby.

I eat. The almond is delicious. Honey-coated, lightly salted, warm from the kitchen, perfect. I take another. She takes one. We feed each other almonds, slow, in the candlelight on the white quilt, naked, with the harness still around her thighs and the toy still wet from me, and I think — Mari was right. Eva was right. We needed the almonds.

Mari and Mom, Jade says, mild, watching me eat, are running our wedding night. From a quarter-mile away. This is the rest of our lives.

We finish the bowl. Jade sets it on the nightstand. She lies back. She turns toward me. The harness is still on. She is, I see, looking at me with the wry mouth doing the small tip again. El. Round two.

Yeah, Jade. Round two.

And — slower this time. Slower, baby.

She crawls back over me — slow, deliberate, the harness brushing my thigh — and she kisses me, slow, with the taste of honey on her mouth, and her hand comes up to my throat, light, where the pendant is, and she presses it light against my collarbone, and she says, against my mouth: Mine. Yours. Wife. Wife. Forever, El. Forever, Jade.

She does it again. Slower. She makes good on the slower. She takes — God, she takes a long time. She is in no hurry. The candle on the nightstand burns lower and lower. The bay-air comes in through the cracked window. A small October moon is rising over the dunes outside. The white quilt becomes a wreck. Jade’s cream camisole goes off — I unhook it, I take it off her, I want her bare against me — and her body is — God, her body is — mine, in a way I had not understood until tonight. I get to keep her. This is the new thing. This is what makes it different from the engagement. The I get to keep her. The forever-and-actually-forever.

She makes me come three more times.

The third one, she turns me — slow, gently — onto my side, and she lies behind me, spoon, with the harness pressed against me, and she slow slides into me from behind, and she holds me there, slow, with one hand on my hipbone and the other across the front of my chest, and her mouth at the back of my neck, and she goes slow, slow, slow, and I — God, I am undone, I am — every time her hipbones meet me from behind I feel her wedding band cool against my belly, and I —

I come on the slow — the slowest — drag yet, with her face buried in the back of my neck and her teeth light at the cord at the top of my shoulder, and I am crying again, but it is the laugh-crying, the I love you, I love you, I love you crying, the we are doing this for the rest of our lives crying, and Jade laughs, soft, against the back of my neck — yeah, baby, yeah, wife — and she comes, slow, against me from behind, with my body pressed back against hers, and we lie there for a long time. A long, long time.

After a long time she pulls — slow, gentle — out of me again, and she sits up, and she undoes the harness, and she lays it carefully on the dresser next to Eva’s note, and she comes back to the bed, and she pulls me — slow — into her body, and she covers us with the quilt, and she holds me.

El. Wife. Sleep?

Yeah, Jade.

She kisses my temple. Slow. The candle has gone almost out. The room is going dark. The bay outside is silver under the October moon. She drifts. I lie with her arm under my neck and her body warm and full and settled against mine, and I close my eyes too, and I think:

Mrs. Maren-Vance. Mrs. Vance-Maren. Wife. Wife. Wife. Yes.

I sleep.

I wake up at six in the morning to the smell of coffee.

The coffee is — wait. Coffee. In Eva’s house. At six in the morning. Where is the coffee coming from. I open my eyes. The bed is empty beside me. The candle on the nightstand has burned out. The window is brighter than it was — pink, the soft pink of pre-dawn — and there is, definitely, the smell of coffee coming up the back stairs.

I sit up. I am wrapped in the white quilt. Naked underneath. The pendant at my throat. The emerald and the wedding band on my left hand. My hair is a wreck. I find on the floor by the bed Jade’s white linen jacket. I put it on. It is way too big. The sleeves cover my hands. The hem falls almost to my knees. I tie the belt around my waist. I pad down the back stairs, barefoot, in Jade Maren-Vance’s wedding suit jacket and nothing else.

She is in the kitchen. She is in the cream camisole and a pair of soft white pajama pants she must have brought up in the valise too, and her dark hair is pushed back from her temples, and she is at Eva’s kitchen counter, with the small French press, making coffee. The candle from last night is gone, blown out. The wooden bowl of almonds is on the counter, empty, we ate them all, I had not realized until this moment that we ate them all, Mari is going to be so smug. The kitchen is — Eva’s kitchen, but with my wife in it, in a cream camisole, making coffee at six in the morning of the day after our wedding.

She turns. She sees me in the white linen jacket. Her face does — God, her face does the thing.

El. Hi. El, baby. Jade. You stole my jacket. Yes. Wife. Wife.

She crosses the kitchen. She puts both hands at the corners of my jaw. She kisses my forehead. She pulls back and looks at me. She is smug. She is — she is, somehow, more alive at six in the morning than she was at midnight last night. She has slept, what, four hours. Maybe five. And she is — radiant.

The right amount of milk? I ask.

She laughs. Of course, baby.

She hands me the seagull mug. The seagull mug. She has — apparently — packed it. Apparently the seagull mug came up to Wellfleet with us, of course it did, and the right amount of milk is in it, and I sit down on the kitchen stool in her wedding-jacket and I drink the right amount of milk on the morning of the rest of my life, and Jade leans against the counter across from me and watches me drink it, and after a moment she says, low:

El. Mom is on her way. Eight a.m. She is bringing scallops. And Mari is bringing more pizzas, El, because Mari is worried about our blood sugar.

I burst out laughing into the coffee. Goddamn it, Mari and Eva have coordinated breakfast. Of course they have. Of course the small operation has continued running through our wedding night.

Jade. Jade, we have an hour. Round three?

El. Wife. Yes, wife. Round three. Of course, El.

She pulls me up off the stool. She walks me, slow, in the white linen wedding jacket, back up the back stairs of her mother’s house in the dawn light, and the wooden bowl is empty and the candle is gone and the harness is on the dresser and the strap is, yes, there, ready, and the room is gold and pink with dawn, and I stop in the doorway. I look at her. I look at my wife.

Jade. I love you. I love you, El. Wife. Wife.

She kisses me. Slow. We do not get to round three before Eva and Mari arrive at eight a.m. with scallops and pizza and Pete and Linda right behind them with another roll of Polaroid film, but we get most of round three, and the rest of it has to wait until we have eaten Eva’s scallops and Mari’s pizza and posed for Pete’s eighty-first Polaroid (this one of us in the kitchen, in matching white linen, both barefoot, holding the seagull mug between us), and Eva says, mild, into her wine, my loves, the bed upstairs has been wrecked, I will be changing the sheets myself, and Mari says, Eva, I will help you, the sheets are evidence, and Pete is patient, and Linda is laughing, and Jade — my wife — has my hand on the kitchen island under the seagull mug, and the silver thumb-ring is on her thumb, and the wedding band is on my finger, and the emerald is on my finger, and the small gold pendant is at my throat, and I am Mrs. Maren-Vance. I am Mrs. Vance-Maren. I am wife, and so is she, and we are, finally, fully, and the small operation is humming on around us, and the rest of our lives is —

Yes. Yes, this. Yes, her. Yes, all of it. Yes, forever. Yes, wife. Yes.

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