“Should we get married now?” she suddenly asked.
“Now?” I repeated.
“I mean today,” she said. “Then I could go to the doctor on your insurance. Do you think that might make you feel better? Then we could have an ultrasound, and you could see that everything was okay.”
I stared at her long enough to determine she wasn’t joking.
“It might,” I admitted.
“Well, let’s do it, then.”
*****
Twelve minutes.
That’s how long it took between the time we walked into the judge’s office and the time he handed us a signed certificate of marriage to take down to the clerk’s office for filing.
“Smile!” Chelsea’s camera flashed in my eyes.
“Come on!” I said with a roll of my eyes. “Will you cut it out?”
“It’s your wedding day,” she said. “There have to be a few pictures.”
“I’m in jeans, for Christ’s sake.”
“Well, Tria looks lovely, even if you need a haircut,” Chelsea said as she reached up and rubbed my head.
“You do need a haircut,” Tria agreed.
She smiled at me, and for a brief moment, everything was absolutely perfect.
Tria did look beautiful, just as Chelsea said. She was all decked out in a deep blue blouse and faded jeans that she claimed were getting too tight, and she couldn’t have been lovelier even if she had been in white satin or whatever. Even through the near shock of realizing what we had just done, I couldn’t stop looking at her.
People always say when a woman is pregnant, it makes her glow, and in the summer sunshine, Tria did just that. When she turned her smile on me, I felt like the light radiated from her and enveloped me in its warmth.
I reached out and wrapped an arm around her to pull her close. Still focusing on that smile, I kissed her softly, there on the courthouse steps, and Chelsea continued to snap pictures.
“Shall we go to dinner and celebrate?” Michael asked.
I glanced at him with a raised brow.
“I haven’t even gotten my first paycheck,” I reminded him. “Not until next Friday.”
“My treat,” Michael said. “Consider it a wedding gift.”
“You’ve done enough,” I said. I grabbed Tria’s hand and started toward the car.
“Liam!” Tria whispered harshly.
“What?”
“Stop being like that!”
“Like what?” I asked.
“You know what,” she insisted. “Michael wants to take us out to celebrate, and you won’t let him. He looks so disappointed!”
I looked away as I filled my lungs with air. She was right about one thing—I didn’t want to let him do it. I didn’t want him buying us dinner, even if he did have a legitimate reason.
Before I could open my mouth, I glanced at the faces staring at me, practically daring me to say no. I rolled my eyes again.
“Fine,” I said. I turned back toward Michael, who wrapped his arm around his wife. “Nowhere expensive.”
Michael beamed.
“Of course not,” he replied, and he ushered us all to the car.
True to his word, he took us to a reasonably modest, but still elegant, little tapas place. Tria had never eaten a meal made of appetizers before, and it was fun to watch her try to figure out what was going on. We toasted with a bottle of sparkling grape juice, and Tria giggled at the bubbles in her nose.
Mostly it was good to just watch her, which is what I did pretty much the whole time. As long as my eyes were on her, the knot in my stomach loosened up a little. It was when she excused herself to the bathroom and didn’t come back after thirty seconds that I started to lose it. Chelsea went to check on her, and I hovered just outside.
“She’s perfectly fine,” Chelsea said as she stuck her head out the door. “Go sit back down!”
“Stay with her, okay?”
“I will,” Chelsea promised.
I was still a mess until she was back at the table, and I wrapped an arm around her.
“Don’t do that again,” I growled.
“What?” Tria said. “Pee?”
“Take so long!” I snapped back.
“The stall was out of paper!”
I clenched my hands into fists. I knew I was being ridiculous, but I couldn’t help myself. I shoved the chair back, hauled ass to the curb outside the restaurant, and lit a cigarette. I felt Tria behind me before she reached out and touched my shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” I said as I spun around and wrapped my arm around her. Then I remembered what was in my other hand. “Fuck! You shouldn’t be around this!”
I tossed the cigarette into the street and watched the embers fly around in the wind.
“I’m not handling this very well,” I admitted.
“You’re fine,” she said softly. “I don’t expect you to be magically better after one session with a therapist.”
“I don’t want to go back,” I reminded her.
“But will you?”
“Yeah.” I sighed and touched my forehead to hers. She ran her fingers up over my temple and into my hair.
“We’ll schedule an appointment with the OB/GYN on Monday. Chelsea said she thought she could get me in quickly—it’s her doctor.”
I nodded, and Tria leaned her cheek against my shoulder.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “Everything is all right.”
I wished I could believe her, but I settled for faking it during dessert. We went back to Michael’s house, and the two of them quickly excused themselves to the movies.
Subtle.
“Are you okay?” Tria asked as I pulled off my shirt and dropped it on the floor. She came up behind me, picked it up, and shoved it into the hamper.
“I’m okay,” I said. Before she could say anything else, I latched onto her arm and pulled her toward me. I buried my face in her neck and snaked my arms around her. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” she asked.
“For being an ass,” I replied. “And for throwing clothes on the floor.”
“You are a slob,” she agreed.
“Sorry.” I pulled her tighter against me, and she wrapped her arms around my neck. I felt her fingers running through the hair on the back of my head.
“You really need a haircut.”
“I don’t have much reason to get one right now,” I said. “I’m not fighting, so I don’t think anyone’s going to pull it.”
Tria tugged gently at the strands.
“Yeah, but when you do it, I just get turned on,” I said with a laugh. I picked her up and dropped her down on the bed. I crawled over her and started nipping at her neck.
“You’re tickling!” she cried out.
“I know,” I said with a smile. I stopped and leaned back enough to get a good look at her. “My wife.”
Tria smiled, and her cheeks turned red.
“Kind of weird, isn’t it?”
“I don’t really feel any different,” I admitted. I tucked my head back against her neck. “You know I’ve been yours since I first saw you.”
“Have you now?”
I nodded.
Tria’s fingers moved around my back and shoulders.
“I love you,” she said quietly.
“I love you more,” I replied.
She giggled.
“I changed my name for you,” she countered.
“Hmm…Mrs. Teague. I do like that.”
“I do, too,” she admitted.
I hushed her with my lips as my hand worked the buttons of her jeans. I pushed them down far enough to get my fingers where they wanted to be, then proceeded to make her cry my name out over and over before I finally offered mercy.
I entered her slowly, pulled back, and entered her again. She surrounded me, engulfed me, and made me whole as I came apart inside of her.
All in all, it was a pretty good wedding night.
*****
The
usual quiet morning in my uncle’s household was interrupted with an early arrival to Sunday dinner. The voices, though the volume was low enough not to wake anyone upstairs, were heated and very familiar. I stopped my descent down the stairs and dropped my ass onto a step, unsure of what to do next.
I was supposed to be out of the house before this happened.
“He’s been here for days?” Douglass growled in a barely hushed voice. “My son has been here at your house for days, and you don’t even tell me? Seriously, Michael?”
“You aren’t going to help any of this if you go off on a tirade,” Michael responded with considerably more calm. “That certainly never helped in the past.”
“Nice,” he muttered back. “I don’t need that thrown in my face.”
Leaning out slightly to peer down the winding staircase, I could see both of them standing in the foyer, blocking my escape. My father was in tan pants and a light blue polo shirt, and he paced back and forth over the marble floor looking like he was in the rough, searching for lost golf balls.
“I’m not throwing it in your face,” Michael said, “but I am reminding you why you need to calm the fuck down. He’s upstairs, and this isn’t an executive meeting.”
“I know, I know,” Douglass mumbled. “I’m sorry, you’re right.”
They both walked off to the right and out of my view. As much as I knew no good could come of it, I quietly walked the rest of the way down the stairs and toward the entrance to the kitchen. I could hear them both drop down on the stools at the breakfast bar, and my father took several long breaths before he started talking again.
“How does he look?” he asked. “Is he okay? I mean, is he in trouble or anything?”
“He looks…okay,” Michael said.
“That doesn’t sound good.”
I shifted to the other side of the door, and I could see their dim reflections in a large landscape painting in the foyer. Michael’s hands gripped a coffee cup as he spoke.
“He called from the same area where the police picked him up the first time.”
“Shit—at that nasty warehouse? Where they found him with that dead girl?”
A brief flash, a vague memory of police cars, sirens, an ambulance, and the pale, expressionless face of a woman whose name I didn’t know flashed through my head. I blinked rapidly, but there was nothing else to the memory. There was nothing else except mental fog and heroin-induced apathy.
“That place was torn down years ago,” Michael said. “But he wasn’t far from the area.”
“Is he…is he doped up again?”
“No…no,” Michael said quietly. “He said he was tempted, but he wasn’t high when I found him.”
“Jesus Christ,” my father whispered. He gripped at his hair for a moment as he leaned his elbows on the bar. “I thought we were past that. I thought that trainer said she was going to keep him clean.”
“He’s all right, Douglass. He’s safe and he’s here. Be thankful for that.”
“I can’t believe you kept this from me,” Douglass said. “When we agreed you would keep tabs on him, this wasn’t what we discussed. Did your PI even know what was happening?”
“I was planning on telling you over dinner tonight,” Michael said. “The PI’s reports come to me weekly, and the last one informed me he was no longer in his apartment. He lost track of Liam for a couple of days, and by the time he figured it out, Liam was here.”
Another long sigh.
“So why did he call you? Why now?”
“Well, I have to admit it gets a little complicated at this point,” Michael said. The image in the picture frame blurred as a cloud passed over the house and lessened the level of light coming in from the kitchen windows. There was some shuffling around and the sound of more coffee being poured into mugs. “You remember the young lady who attended Ryan’s wedding?”
“Miss Lynn.”
“She’s expecting,” Michael said. “Sometime in November.”
A long pause ensued.
“I don’t know what to think of that,” Douglass said quietly. “I…I’m a little torn here, Michael. You’re the sensible one—what am I supposed to be feeling?”
“I don’t think I can answer that for you,” he said.
Silence.
As much as I wanted to walk around the corner and start throwing things, I didn’t. As much as I wanted to quietly tiptoe out of the house, I didn’t do that, either. I just stayed right there to the side of the kitchen entryway and stared at the landscape artwork, waiting for the sun to come back out.
“I don’t want to fuck this up again.” I could barely hear my father’s voice. “You have to help me out here.”
“You were overwhelmed before,” Michael said. “You have a chance to think clearly now.”
“I thought I was then,” he said. “How was I supposed to predict what happened? I just didn’t want him throwing his life away, but he did anyway. In the process, I lost the only thing I ever made that meant anything.”
“He’s not lost, Douglass. He’s still here.”
“He’s lost to me. He’s been lost to me for nearly a decade. I nearly lost Julianne, too.”
“Julianne lost herself.”
“Julianne was lost to grief,” my father corrected. “She died inside when she realized he wasn’t coming home.”
My chest clenched.
“It’s all my fault,” he said.
“You can’t change the past,” Michael replied. “You have to find a way to push forward. He’s here now, and I’ll keep talking to him, but you can’t expect him to just turn around in a day and say everything is okay again. There aren’t going to be any miracles here.”
“He’s here,” Douglass said. “He’s here; he didn’t die in the street. That in itself feels like a miracle right now.”
“There’s more you need to know,” my uncle continued. “They were married yesterday.”
“You have to be fucking kidding me.” There was the sound of the kitchen stool sliding across the floor and a hard, dark laugh. “Do you have any more surprises for me, Michael? Because I think I’ve had enough.”
“She’s good for him,” Michael said. “Young, but sensible. Probably more sensible than he is.”
The sun came back out, and I could see my father’s figure bent over the counter with his head on top of his arms. The stool was shoved out behind him.
“No prenup?”
“Honestly, Douglass, I don’t think she even knows.”
“That’s a no, then?”
“Of course not,” Michael snapped. “He doesn’t have the money for a lawyer, and he hasn’t exactly changed his mind about handouts—”
“It’s not a fucking handout. It’s his—all of it’s his. There isn’t any point to any of it without him.”
“Thanks,” Michael chuckled.
“You know what I mean.”
“I do, yes.”
“Julianne will be here in an hour,” Douglass said. “What am I going to say to her? She was a disaster after Ryan’s wedding, and now all this? I don’t even know where to begin.”
“He wasn’t planning on staying,” Michael said. “He was going to be out of the house before you arrived.”
“Do you think he’ll talk to me?”
“I don’t think so. Not yet—it’s still too soon. He’s seeing a counselor—give it a little time.”
“What about her?” my father pressed. His voice escalated. “Miss Lynn…err…shit. What’s her name now? Teague? Do I really have a fucking daughter-in-law married to a son who won’t speak to me? Is this really what I managed to do with my life? Multi-fucking-billions and nothing that actually matters?”
My throat bobbed as I swallowed, and I closed my eyes for a moment. I kept my hands clenched into fists to keep them from shaking, but I couldn’t do anything about the trickle of sweat running down the back of my neck.
“Keep it down!” Michael hissed.
“Sorry,” my fathe
r muttered. “This is just a bit too much. She’s going to have my grandchild, and I don’t even know what to call her.”
“How about you call her Tria?”
“Right.” He let out a long breath. “Will Tria talk to me?”
The tightening of my jaw should have been loud enough to alert them to my presence. Just hearing him say her name had me ready to start throwing punches.
“I don’t know,” Michael replied. “Liam wouldn’t like it; I’m sure of that.”
“Jesus, Michael. Can’t you throw me a bone here?”
“All out.”
My chest tightened as I moved around the corner and stood in the doorway. My father and uncle quickly looked at me, their eyes widening before they blinked.
“Liam,” my father whispered.
“Stay away from her,” I warned. “Don’t you say anything to upset her. If you say a fucking word to her, and she…if…if something happens, I swear to God, I’ll kill you.”
My hands were shaking, and even when I clenched them into fists, the vibrations just moved up my arms.
“I won’t,” my father said quietly. “I wouldn’t—I swear.”
His light blue eyes glistened as he spent a long moment looking at me.
“I never meant to hurt you,” he said.
I laughed, but the sound was anything but humorous. My father looked away from me and down at the floor, and Michael took a slight step forward before he whispered low.
“Douglass, don’t waste the few words you may have here.”
My father locked eyes with my uncle for a brief moment before he nodded and looked back to me.
“I’m sorry, Liam,” Douglass said. “I’m sorry for all of it. Everything that happened. I know if I had behaved differently…well…I don’t know what would have happened, but at least you wouldn’t have had to deal with it alone.”
“Fuck you,” I replied, sneering as I rejected his apology. “You think you can talk your way out of—”
Both of their expressions changed drastically as they simultaneously looked into the foyer behind me. I didn’t have to look to see who it was. I knew the feeling of Tria’s hand on my arm. I wouldn’t have said her touch calmed me, but I felt more centered.
“We need to leave now,” I said without looking at her.
“Not yet,” she replied.
“Tria, I’m not—”