Rend

by Roan Parrish

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  I changed into comfy clothes while my mind drifted to my idea about bringing dogs into foster care facilities and I decided I would bring it up with Imari again after From Pianos to Paint launched. I was so distracted that I almost ran into Rhys coming back downstairs.

  “Hey, do you wanna go on a walk anyway?” I asked. It had become kind of our ritual. Susan said rituals were good in establishing patterns of our life together.

  It was nice to decompress after the hustle and bustle of the city, and stretch my legs after sitting all day. Besides, I’d found it was much easier to talk when we were walking, especially in the dark, especially with Max there as an easy distraction. Hey, I was working on it.

  “Um, sure, yeah, great.”

  “You okay?” I said.

  “Yup, I’m great. Lemme just…” He ducked past me and grabbed a sweater.

  We bundled up and pulled our boots on, then set off. The roads around our house were mostly plowed, but as we turned toward the cemetery, following our usual route despite Max’s absence, the snow was soft and thick on the ground. We walked in easy silence for a while, holding hands, heading toward the crypt where we usually sat as Max ran around.

  When we got there, Rhys said, “Hey, do you know what today is?”

  “Uh, Friday. And thank God, cuz I really need a weekend.”

  Rhys smiled and squeezed my hand through our gloves.

  “Yeah. Did you notice the date?”

  I tried to picture the home screen on my phone.

  “Oh shit.” February 2. “It’s our anniversary. Oh no, Rhys, fuck, I forgot. I’m so sorry.”

  Wow, you’re the worst husband in the history of husbands.

  “Aw, babe, no, no. I, uh, may’ve purposely not reminded you.”

  “What, why?” All sorts of doom and gloom explanations chased each other around my head, but I told them to fuck off because that’s what I did now.

  “Because…” Rhys took his glove off and stroked my cheek. Then he took my glove off and held my hand. “Because I wanted to ask you…Matty. Matt. Will you marry me?”

  “I…what? We’re already married.”

  Rhys smiled, like just my saying that made him happy.

  “We are. But no matter how much I wanted to marry you two years ago. No matter how much I meant it with all my heart when I asked you. I don’t think I truly understood what I was asking. And I don’t think you quite knew what you were saying yes to either.”

  He brought my hand to his lips and kissed my knuckles. His eyes burned with love for me like nothing I’d ever seen.

  “Now I think we both know.” He went on. “I think we’ve learned what being married to each other really means. So I…I want us to choose again. I don’t want this to be secrets and fear and rose-colored glasses. I don’t want you to be with me because you’re afraid it’s your only shot at happiness or for me to assume I know exactly what marriage is. I want us to choose each other with our eyes wide open.”

  He sank to his knees before me on the ground.

  “Rhys, get up, it’s all snowy!”

  But my eyes blurred with unexpected tears at the sight of him.

  “Matt Argento. I choose you. I choose being married to you and everything it entails. I choose you every day, and I want to choose you for the rest of my life. Now you have to decide if you choose me too.”

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  “You can take some time if you need to think about it,” he said, but he was beaming up at me, and he reached and wiped the tears from my cheeks with a cold thumb.

  “Shut up, I can’t believe you. You’re on your knees in the snow, proposing to me in a fucking cemetery, when we’re already married. The fuck’s wrong with you?”

  “Yeah, and you’re crying about it. So? Whattaya say?”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. This was ridiculous. Rhys was ridiculous.

  Also the most wonderful fucking thing that had ever happened to me.

  I tugged at his hand to bring him back up beside me.

  “Yeah, of course. Of course I choose you, you idiot. I always have. Fuck.”

  “Sweetest damn thing I ever heard,” Rhys said. And he kissed me, both of us clinging to each other, our cold lips warming as the snow fell.

  “Wait,” I said, as we piled through the door, giddy and freezing after making out so long in the cemetery that our asses froze. “Is this why Caleb stole our dog?”

  “Uh, yeah.” Rhys sounded guilty. “Well, I kinda had this whole thing in my head with rose petals and I was afraid Max would eat them, but then also I thought you would think I was ridiculous—”

  “You are ridiculous.”

  “—If I got all those rose petals, so I changed my mind, but Caleb was already on his way. Then I had this fear that you’d freak out over me proposing again, or go into a guilt spiral about forgetting our anniversary—”

  “Hey!” I smacked his arm. “So you thought, what, that you didn’t want to subject Max to my potential hysteria?”

  “Oh no, just saying. Actually, I think Caleb kinda wanted to take him home in the hopes that he would teach Solo how to be a real dog. Besides.” He unzipped my jacket. “I thought if you said yes to marrying me, this way I could fuck you on every surface without Max getting underfoot.”

  “That’s a much better reason.”

  “Yeah.” Rhys sighed, and leaned in to kiss me again.

  We got out of our winter gear, and Rhys was buzzing with energy. “Oh, I almost forgot,” he said. He pulled a bottle of champagne out of the fridge and brandished it at me with a grin. “I was optimistic.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. He poured us champagne and handed me the glasses. Then he snagged my sleeve in one hand and the bottle in the other and led me upstairs to the same room where we’d spent the night after we got married.

  Everything felt different now.

  “Champagne in bed.” He looked delighted, and I slid in next to him, handing him his glass. He clinked with me. “Thank you, Matty. For saying yes.”

  There was something about him when he was like this. So sincere and open and happy. He was magnetic.

  You put that smile on his face. You’re what’s making him this happy.

  “Thank you. For asking again,” I said. “I can’t believe you…” I stopped myself and took a deep breath. “I’m so happy you still want to be married to me.”

  Rhys’s face told me everything I needed to know. He kissed me softly, and we sipped our champagne.

  “I have an idea but I don’t know how you’ll feel about it,” he said.

  I tried not to feel dread at that and failed.

  “The first time we got married meant everything to me,” he said. “But I’ve wondered whether part of what made it not feel quite real to you, and made it so I didn’t think much about what it meant to be married, was that we didn’t do anything to mark the occasion. What would you think of having a wedding this time? Not a big foofy deal or anything,” he said at my widening eyes. “Just a celebration. A little party. Get-together. Thing.”

  I guzzled the rest of my champagne and reached over Rhys to grab the bottle and refill my glass.

  “Is that a very joyful yes?” he teased.

  “Um.”

  “We don’t have to, baby,” he said. “But I was thinking how nice it’d be to have everyone together. You could meet my family, like we talked about.”

  I’d spent the night after one of my sessions with Susan sobbing in Rhys’s arms, trying to explain the tangle of my feelings about meeting his family. The dread and the longing and the fear that, after all these years, another family would reject me. Rhys had understood, and we’d compromised. He’d agreed to leave the timeline open, and I’d agreed to work toward meeting them.

  �
��Caleb and Theo could be our best men,” Rhys went on. “We could have a big barbecue in the backyard, have some music. You could invite Imari and her wife. Hey, Grin could come!”

  I took a sip of my champagne, felt the delicate burn of bubbles along the roof of my mouth.

  “You really want this, huh?” I asked Rhys.

  He held my hand and nodded. “Yeah, I do.”

  “Okay,” I said. I waited for the panic to crash over me like a wave, but it didn’t come. Rhys’s wide eyes eclipsed everything.

  “Really?!”

  I nodded, and he grabbed me and bounced me back on the bed, kissing me. Our champagne went everywhere and I made a face as the cold liquid fizzed on my neck.

  Rhys chuckled. “Sorry, sorry.” He kissed the spilled champagne from my neck and then jumped up to get a towel.

  “You can totally call the shots about what we do for it, I promise,” he said fervently.

  “Are you nuts? I don’t want to call the shots. I don’t know a fucking thing about weddings.”

  “Okay, okay, you can have fifty percent of control over it, how’s that.”

  I nodded.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Can we—” I shook my head.

  “What, baby, anything you want. Everything you want. Tell me.”

  I twined our fingers together. “Can we have rings?” We hadn’t had any to exchange since we’d driven right to the courthouse from the barn where Rhys proposed. Rhys had brought it up a few times since then, and I had shrugged it off because it seemed so anticlimactic to just go into a store and buy them after the fact.

  Or maybe it was because I hadn’t quite believed it would last.

  But now I wanted them.

  “Yeah, Matty, of course. I would love that,” Rhys said. “I want the whole world to know you’re mine just by looking at your finger,” he said, low, into my ear.

  He put his arms around me and we rolled together. We were sticky with champagne, and Rhys’s nose was still cold against my neck. I had to pee, and my stomach was growling with hunger since I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Absently, I realized it would be my and Grin’s birthday in a few hours.

  I’d never felt happier in my life.

  Epilogue

  THREE MONTHS LATER

  I bit my lip and hesitated over the send button on my phone. Grin was gonna make so much fun of me.

  Theres gonna be a car there for you at baggage claim tomorrow, I wrote.

  Scuse me? Then a parade of crying-laughing faces and an emoji of a big diamond.

  Theo already paid for it and if I try to say no don’t get me that he just stares and says ok but what if I did.

  He sent a GIF of an enormous champagne fountain and C u soon.

  Paying for part of our wedding had been a ridiculous drunken joke that Theo had made the weekend that we announced to him and Caleb that we were getting married. Remarried. We’d met for brunch at this place halfway between our houses. They’d been thrilled for us, and after brunch Caleb and Rhys had gone back to Caleb’s to work on music and Theo had come back home with me because he said this news deserved a toast.

  Theo was giddy with joy and a lot of blueberry pancakes, and I was feeling strangely buoyant. We drank whiskey and apple cider and then wandered into the cemetery tipsy, where I asked Theo if he and Caleb would be our best men. His eyes got mad big, and he blinked at me and nodded. As we talked about the wedding, somehow we got from me meeting Rhys’s parents to discussing what dowry I could expect to get for Rhys from his parents.

  “Well, he’s getting zilch from my parents,” I’d said, and Theo had declared passionately that he would provide my dowry in the form of matching burial plots in this very cemetery.

  “Pick your future grave!” Theo crowed, and we dissolved into giggles. I remembered that as being the end of the conversation. When I woke up the next morning, though, it was to a string of texts from Theo talking about dowries and paying for the wedding and giving me a credit card number that he said I should put wedding-related expenses on.

  I sent him a flurry of texts telling him he was an idiot and of course he wasn’t paying for shit for our wedding, as we were adults with jobs who were perfectly capable of paying for it ourselves. I was grouchy and hungover, and one of my texts might possibly have contained the phrase In case you didn’t know my husband’s kind of a big deal.

  My phone had rung and I’d snatched it up, prepared to shut this whole thing down. But it wasn’t Theo, it was Caleb. He let me go through all the reasons this wasn’t going to happen, and then he sighed.

  “Listen, Matty. Theo’s not close with his folks at all, and he doesn’t have any siblings. Since he left the band, there aren’t that many people he considers friends. He adores you and Rhys. Especially you. He’s wicked psyched that you guys are close now. Ow!” There was the sound of shifting on his end of the line, then a muffled, “You want me to not tell Matty you like being his friend while convincing him to let you drop rock star bucks on his wedding?” and then a pointed, “Anyway. It would mean so much if you guys would let him get you some stuff. It’s not about the money. He knows you could pay for it yourselves. It’s his emotionally stunted way of saying he considers you guys family.”

  I’d stammered and umed my way through the next few minutes and finally pictured Theo’s face, so open and happy when we told them the news. How could I deny someone’s wish for family? So I’d said a tentative okay. When Caleb said, “Great, he’ll be so happy,” I heard an excited whoop from Caleb’s end and couldn’t help but grin.

  “Give him the phone,” I said, and then I forced all my gratitude into my voice as I said Thank you, because I didn’t want him to doubt it for a second.

  And that’s kind of how most of the planning had gone. Me initially saying What? No! We can’t! and then finally saying Yeah, okay. It got to the point where Rhys started teasing me about it.

  “Hey, babe, I have some wedding stuff you need to see. Do you wanna just say no twice now so you can say yes after dinner?” Then he’d wink at me and I’d scowl at him and he’d kiss the shit out of me until I didn’t care.

  And the fact was that I really didn’t care. I didn’t care about food or flowers or any of it. Luckily, Rhys didn’t take it personally and bent his substantial reserve of decisiveness to the task.

  Also luckily, musicians were a multitalented group, and Rhys turned out to know someone who could do just about everything. A few of his friends would, of course, provide the music. His friend Lou, who split time between New York and New Orleans as Caleb had once done, was an amazing cook and had offered to do the food. It was going to be a kind of kicked-up barbecue.

  Theo, of all people, offered to get us some flowers. Apparently he’d struck up a friendship with a woman who grew them and sold them at the Stormville farmer’s market.

  We’d forgone the idea of a wedding cake in favor of a bunch of different kinds of pie. And bar owner Huey had suggested that instead of a bar, we offer two signature cocktails, to keep the booze a bit more confined from those who were substance-free. Caleb was far from the only one in recovery.

  When Rhys asked Huey if he’d design the cocktails, Huey’s first response was, “I strike you as the kinda person who makes up cocktails?” Huey absolutely did not. He was in his late thirties, huge and massively muscled, all the sleeves and chests of his shirts straining to contain him. He had a shaved head and dark, intense brows over piercing blue eyes. His voice was rough and gravelly and declarative. No, he looked more like a bouncer or a bodyguard than a mixologist.

  And yet, a couple of weeks after mentioning it, he sent Rhys a text that simply said Cocktails covered, one for you and one for Matt. And that was drinks taken care of.

  We were having it in the backyard, so we were renting some tables and chairs, but mostly people would b
e milling around. Rhys had gotten obsessed with the idea of Max being our ring bearer and strapping a pillow to his back, but then he watched YouTube videos of dogs eating rings, dogs pulling entire cakes and roast pigs down off tables to run away from people trying to get the rings they carried, and dogs tripping grandparents while bounding excitedly to deliver rings, and decided Max should just attend as a guest.

  The one detail I cared about was the rings. I’d never noticed wedding rings except in passing, but ever since I’d mentioned them to Rhys the night he’d proposed they were all I saw.

  A wedding ring said that the person wearing it belonged to someone. That someone belonged to them. It was a reminder more tangible than words that they had been chosen.

  And I wanted one.

  I wanted one so much that when Rhys and I picked them out a month before the wedding I grabbed the bag from the jewelry store as soon as we got home and put mine on.

  “Hey!” Rhys had said. “No fair!”

  I’d found myself clutching my hand to my chest so he couldn’t take it away. His face had softened at whatever he saw in my eyes, and he’d kissed me.

  “You want to wear it now?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, but you have to let me put it on you.”

  He’d taken the ring off my trembling hand, kissed it, and slid it back on my finger while looking into my eyes. And I’d started crying. I was embarrassed, but Rhys just smiled at me sweetly.

  “I want you to wear yours too,” I’d told him.

  “Of course. Can’t have people thinking you’re married to someone else.”

  I’d slid the ring onto Rhys’s finger and shuddered. It was like every hickey and bite mark we’d ever left on each other magnified and solidified into something no one could misinterpret.

  “Now everyone will know you’re mine,” he’d whispered.

  * * *

  —

  Tomorrow was Friday, and Grin would be arriving around noon, Rhys’s family a few hours later. Saturday was the wedding. I couldn’t believe it was finally happening. I’d been kind of a wreck for days.