Page 142 of Wild Then Wed
I’m already laughing. I can’t help it. The sound of it—her laugh, the ridiculousness of it, the shock on her face—it’s too much.
“Wren Margaret Wilding,” I say, grinning like an idiot. “Did you just…snort?”
“That never happened,” she says quickly, voice muffled by her hand.
“Oh, it happened.”
She shakes her head. “You imagined it.”
“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life,” I say, still laughing. “You snorted. Like, full volume. From the chest.”
She drops her hand, still laughing, her eyes watery now. “You’re the worst.”
I don’t say what I’m actually thinking—which is that I’d tell a thousand bad jokes just to hear that sound again.
“You’re lucky I didn’t go with the one about the paper being tearable.”
She laughs again—this full, open sound that slips right under my skin—and her arms come back around my neck like they never left, like being close to me is second nature.
And I think—
Do you ever have moments like this? Where the world feels like it suddenly paused in your favor?
Moments that are made of cold air stinging your skin and someone else’s warmth seeping into your bones and under your ribs? Of a too loud laugh on a too quiet street, fingers tangled in your hair, the kind of quiet that isn’t really quiet because their breath is there, and yours, and the space between is just…alive?
You don’t realize it’s happening—not really. Life doesn’t change with a lot of fanfare. There’s no thunderclap, no orchestra swelling to mark the before and after. It changes like a quiet tilt, a shift in the light. The slow turn of a season. Like the moment between sleep and waking, when the world is soft at the edges. You don’t feel it until it’s already done.
And then you’re standing there, holding her, and you think:I didn’t know my heart could make room like this.
Not by force. Not by forgetting. But by something gentler. Something real, and whole, and quietly life-altering in its own right.
I slide my hands to her waist. Not tentatively this time. Certain.
She fits there. Not in some metaphorical, soulmates type of way. Just literally. Physically. My hands fit around her. She fits with me. And for a second I let myself enjoy it, the simple humanness of the weight of her body pressed to mine.
This doesn’t feel like pretending. Not even a little.
It just feels like her. And me. And this moment that somehow exists outside of everything else.
Her fingers start to play with the hair at the back of my neck—soft and absentminded, like she’s thinking about something else, but her body didn’t get the memo.
She smirks. “As far as fake husbands go, I think I did alright. You even come with jokes.”
I smile. “A whole set.”
“Well, you’ll have to pull them out more often,” she says, still teasing, but not all the way. There’s something in her voice that says she wants to stay here a little longer.
“I can do that,” I say. “I might not be able to give you a promise of eternal devotion, or a sonnet written in my blood or whatever it is normal husbands offer. But dad jokes?” I shrug. “Those I’ve got in spades.”
She grins at that. It starts in the corner of her mouth and slowly takes over her whole face.
I hold her a little tighter.
“And watermelon in the summer. Dancing in the kitchen.” I pause, clearing my throat. “With me. I can give you those, too.”
Her smile shifts. Not brighter—just softer, like it folds into her instead of blooming outwards. She lays her head on my shoulder without a word, and I rest my chin gently against her temple.
The world keeps spinning, but we don’t. We stay here—still, steady—like we’ve slipped out of time.
