Page 69 of Taken By the Alien Killer
“Let us remember love,” CynJyn counters, obnoxiously helpful.
The officiant hovers on the edge of a faint, clutching his book like a flotation device. “We… must restore… decorum.”
“We must restore truth,” Rayek says, not moving, not raising his voice. He stands like a cliff stands: unnecessary to announce itself. “She does not belong to him. Or to you. Or to anyone. She is not a treaty. I will not watch her turned into one while I pretend I came here to enjoy the music.”
Kaspian huffs a laugh he doesn’t have time for. “You don’t like music,” he says under his breath, and somehow it doesn’t ruin the moment. It makes it bearable.
The Feldspar matriarch is having a crisis of choreography. “This is obscene,” she hisses, folding her fan like it’s a blade. “The girl is?—”
“Alive,” Mama says, turning just enough that the older woman sees that Texas in her has teeth. “And speaking. Which is more than we can say for your fans.”
I forget to breathe and then breathe too much. The veil is suddenly the heaviest thing on my head. It shivers, a small, silvery quake, as if it knows it’s about to be unemployed. I let it be. I lift the bouquet and lower it, fingers slick with floral sap, and look at the man at the end of the aisle like he is the whole map and the road home.
“I’m sorry,” I say to Kaspian, and the relief in his face turns the apology into a blessing. “I can’t?—”
“I know,” he says, and he does. “I know.”
His mother makes a sound like a kettle screaming its last note.
“Purity,” she says to the air, to the gods, to anyone who will still sit with her at supper after this. “Purity!”
CynJyn leans forward, chin on knuckles. “Ma’am,” she says, sweet as poison, “purity is a cooking term.”
The orchestra, poor creatures, try to decide whether to stand down or soundtrack this slow-motion explosion. The concertmaster murmurs to the brasses; the brasses pretend to be shrubs. A drone drifts too close, catches Elise’s hairpins’ glare, and backs off rapidly like a very intelligent mosquito.
“I love him,” I say, out loud, because the day has already been picked up by the scruff. The admission doesn’t echo. It roots. It changes the temperature of the air between my teeth and the horizon. The people nearest me—Mama, Daddy, Sneed, Kaspian, CynJyn—already knew. The rest of the courtyard exhales like a creature discovering a new organ.
Rayek doesn’t smile. He doesn’t move. He absorbs the word like heat, and the only change is in his eyes, the way a tide pulls a little harder when the moon remembers it’s there.
“Then don’t marry me,” Kaspian says, simple as opening a door. He lifts his head and faces the officiant, his mother, the crowd. “The union is dissolved.” He says it with the weary courage of a man who has spent his whole life being a sentenceand has just decided to be a paragraph. “Let the record reflect that the fault is mine. I pursued duty instead of listening. I will not compound the error by demanding a life that isn’t offered.”
The officiant sputters. “That is… not… procedure.”
“Procedures,” Sneed murmurs, “are very good at describing what has already happened.”
Daddy lets out a laugh that’s half sob. “Hell,” he says, wiping at his eyes with the heel of his palm. “About damn time.”
Mama is crying without crying—eyes bright, chin high, spine a sermon. She nods at me once, and I can hear, as clearly as if she’d said it, the voice from every time I scraped my knees and learned to swear: You’ll learn. You’ll fix it. I love you more than any of this.
The Feldspar matriarch sits down the way a building collapses. Kaspian steps sideways, just enough to make a space where there wasn’t one—an aisle in the aisle. He looks at CynJyn again, and this time he doesn’t hide it. She blinks, startled, then bares her teeth in a grin that would make a bishop reconsider his vows. It’s not a promise. It’s a possibility.
I don’t run. I don’t fling the bouquet. I don’t make a speech. I simply take a step out of the script, and then another. The veil doesn’t fight; it slides, wise at last, and pools around my heels like an old idea that finally learned how to retire. I look up at the sky. It’s bluer than it has any right to be. A gull laughs at me and I laugh back.
Sneed steps into my path and I brace for a sermon. He doesn’t deliver one. He reaches up—careful man, careful fingers—and plucks a petal that has stuck to my cheekbone like a badge. “There,” he says softly, the way he used to fix my collar before I went in to apologize to a very forgiving minister after the goat incident. “Carry on.”
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“Don’t make me regret it,” he replies, but his mouth betrays him with the tiniest, tiniest curve.
I walk. The marble under my shoes is cool and rational. The jasmine has stopped shouting and started being beautiful. Mama presses her knuckles to her mouth and grins at me like a girl. Daddy blows me a kiss that would embarrass a less shameless man. The drone camera buzzes too close and CynJyn swats it like a fly. Kaspian’s mother whispers a prayer to an ancestor who was probably a decent person with fewer opinions.
Rayek stands where he stood, as if he has grown there. When I reach him, we are so close I can see the tiny cross-hatching along the edge of one of his scars and remember touching it with my mouth in a room full of old stars and dust. He does not reach for me. I do not reach for him. We stand in the center of the world and let the world rearrange itself around the truth we finally uncloaked.
“You were supposed to wait,” I murmur, voice shaking with everything that is not fear. “You told me you’d wait for me to say?—”
“You did,” he says. His eyes are steady. “You said it with your feet.”
I laugh, and it’s ugly and beautiful and real. “Fine.”
