Page 127 of Wild Then Wed
He shrugs. “Probably. I don’t care.”
Dom straightens the bow one last time, steps back, and nods at the mirror.
“You almost look like someone worth marrying, Hart,” he says, smirking.
I glance at my reflection.
The tux fits better than I expected—clean lines, classic black that makes me look a hell of a lot more put together than I feel. The white shirt beneath it is crisp, starched stiff at the collar. My shoes are polished, the leather dark against the floor. There’s a white rose pinned to my lapel—it’s the only soft thing about the whole look. My hair’s freshly cut, stubble trimmed close.
I look like a man that’s about to get married.
Which I am.
Sort of.
I adjust the cuff of my shirt and breathe in once, slow.
Dom leans a shoulder against the wall, eyes on me in the mirror. “How are you feeling, man?”
It’s a simple question. One he already knows the answer to, but asks anyway. He’s not asking if I’m nervous about standing at the altar. He knows I don’t care about the crowd or the fucking bow tie or what kind of cake we’re serving. He’sreallyasking what it feels like to stand here again, after all this time.
This is the second time I’ve stood in front of a mirror in a black tux, waiting to walk into a church and promise forever to someone.
And God, I’ve been thinking about that more than I’d ever admit. Not because I’m comparing them—Wren and Julia are nothing alike—but because every time I look at myself like this, I feel like I’m replacing her somehow. Even though this isn’t real. Even though it doesn’t count. That’s what I keep telling myself.
I never stopped being married, not in the ways that matter. Grief doesn’t hand you divorce papers. It just moves in and takes up space where your future used to live.
I didn’tleaveJulia. I didn’t fall out of love with her. I didn’t wake up one morning and decide I wanted something or someone else.
She was just gone.
And for years, I told myself that moving on would mean letting her go. So I didn’t. I stayed perfectly, painfully still. Not numb—never numb. Just…quiet. Careful. I stopped making promises. Stopped imagining a future. Stopped wanting anything that came after her.
That’s why I agreed to this. A marriage that isn’t a marriage. A vow without the weight. A way to fix things without having to break myself open again.
But then there’s Wren, who complicates all of it.
I don’t know when it happened. I don’t know when the lines started to smudge, when the edges of this thing between us softened into something unrecognizable.
I don’t think it was a single moment. It’s been the accumulation of a hundred small, unremarkable things that, when stacked together, became impossible to ignore. It’s the way she looks at me—really looks at me—without pity, without that quiet, aching need to fix me. Like I’m not a broken thing to be reassembled, but a man, whole as I am.
It’s the way she sees me—not the ghost of who I used to be, not the hollowed-out version that grief left behind, but the man I am now. The one I’m still learning to be.
It’s her laugh—unexpected, unfiltered, like she’s forgotten, just for a second, to be careful with her joy. Like it’s something she doesn’t need to ration, but spends freely, recklessly.
Somewhere between the courthouse steps and the pinky promises and the ice rink—between her gloved hands gripping mine and the way the string lights caught in her hair as I stumbled around like a newborn fawn on skates—something inside me cracked open.
I feel it now when I look at her. This inconvenient, undeniablethingthat takes root beneath my ribs every time she smiles or laughs. I don’t want it. I’ve tried to starve it, ignore it, outrun it.
But there it is anyway—persistent as a sunrise, quiet as snowfall, terrifying as a freefall.
Somewhere between “just paperwork” and “just friends” and all those “just kidding” moments that didn’t feel like jokes at all, she stopped being a stranger and she started being the person whose voice I listen for in crowded rooms. The one whose absence leaves everything feeling too big and too quiet.
We drew lines in the sand with such careful hands—logic, timelines, rules. But Wren moves through the world like the tide, eroding my defenses, grain by grain, without even trying.
Wren with her freckles and her laughter like a struck match in the dark and her terrible habit of reading my silence better than anyone has ever read my words.
And the worst part is, I don’t think she feels any of this. She’s clear. Steady. Unbothered. She’s always been better at knowing where the lines are and staying behind them. She agreed to one year, and I think she meant it. I think she’ll walk away without looking back.
