Page 26 of Smart Mouth
I look at him —this person, specifically, exactly this one— and think about a woman who drove twenty-four hours to be alone and found instead the thing she’d stopped believing in. The thing she’d quietly, efficiently, completely convinced herself she didn’t need.
“Cruz.” My voice is steady. I’m a professional. “I came to the Outer Banks to remember who I was without everyone else’s needs in the way. I found out something I didn’t expect.” I pause. “I’m better with you in the way. Specifically, only you and don’t read into that,” I add, to laughter, to his grin widening. “You see me. The whole thing, the lawyer and the mess and the fourteen years of careful and the woman who cries when she finally lets herself have something good.” I tighten my hands around his. “I spent a long time being enough on my own. I’m proud of that. I’m keeping it.”
I allow a long beat. “But I’m also keeping you. That’s the verdict. Final, unappealable, and frankly long overdue.”
Cruz laughs, bright and real, and the forty people behind us are doing various things with their eyes that they’d probably prefer I didn’t notice.
The officiant says the words.
Cruz kisses me before he’s supposed to —impatient, joyful, completely him— and I kiss him back because I’ve stopped building cases against things I want.
The ocean is loud.
The sky is doing the thing.
Behind us, Mia is definitely crying.
Later, the reception long and warm and full of Maya trying to take credit for all of it, we’re on the deck of our rental in the dark.
Same railing. Same stars. Same ocean.
Cruz has his sketchbook open across his knee, not drawing, just holding it. I have my feet tucked up in my chair.Ourchairs, alwaysourchairs now. And a glass of wine that I opened at whatever time I felt like it.
“Q2,” I say.
He looks over.
“You said marriage was a Q2 conversation.” I look at the water. “On the first night. On this deck.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “I was being conservative.”
“You were absolutely not being conservative.”
“I was being optimistic.” He reaches over without looking and finds my hand on the armrest, fingers loosely linking the way they did on the beach the first time— unhurried, inevitable, like tide. “I knew by Q1.”
“You knew on day two.”
“Day one,” he says. “Technically.”
I look at him.
He looks back at me with the expression I keep. The certain quiet one, the one underneath the grin, the one that isn’t for the two point three million strangers who know the performed version of Cruz Jackson and have no idea about the real one.
The one who’s just mine.
“Day one,” I agree.
The stars do their ancient thing overhead.
The ocean does its ancient thing below.
And Cruz Jackson, my husband, the hazard next door, the man who slowed down when he ran past me and left wine on a railing and asked before he kissed me and cried first at our wedding…
Keeps holding my hand.
