Chapter 156 Perfection
ADRIANA
The bachelorette party had been exactly what it needed to be, which was small and honest and ours.
Hazel and I had stayed up later than we should have, eating things we probably shouldn’t have eaten in the quantities we consumed them, talking about everything and nothing. The conversation doesn’t need a particular destination to be worthwhile.
At some point Leo had appeared in the doorway in his pajamas, refusing to go back to the room Elijah had set up for the male contingent, which apparently included a handful of Alpha visitors who had come in for the occasion and were doing whatever it was Alphas did when they gathered without their mates.
Leo had decided their company was insufficient and ours was preferable, and none of us had argued with him.
He had fallen asleep between us on the sofa, one hand still holding a half-eaten biscuit. We’d managed to sleep at a reasonable hour, which I was grateful for when the morning arrived with everything it had planned for us.
The preparations moved efficiently. Hazel had organized most of it with the thorough, slightly terrifying competence she brought to everything, and my main job was to show up, get dressed, and not cry before the ceremony started, two of which I managed successfully.
I had no one to walk me down the aisle.
I had thought about this in the weeks leading up to today, turned it over, considered how it would feel to stand at the entrance of that room alone while everyone waited. I had decided, quietly and without making a production of it, that walking myself down the aisle was not a sad thing. It was an accurate thing. I had gotten myself here. I had walked through everything that had tried to stop me getting here. It was fitting that the last walk should also be mine.
What I had not anticipated was Elijah’s face when I appeared at the entrance.
He was standing at the front of the room in a suit that fit him like it had been made specifically to make the rest of the occasion irrelevant, and when he saw me he smiled in a way that reached everything — his eyes, his jaw, the slight relaxation of his shoulders — and then I saw the tears.
I genuinely thought I was imagining them because I had never seen Elijah cry, not really, not like this.
I walked to him.
“You look extraordinary,” he said when I reached him, taking my hand. “I feel like I’m marrying someone entirely new.”
“You’re marrying the same person who argued with you about Leo’s bedtime last Thursday.”
“That woman was also extraordinary.”
The priest began, and I gave my bouquet to Hazel and cleared my throat and looked at the paper in my other hand and then looked at Elijah instead, because I had been carrying these words for long enough that I didn’t need the paper.
“I didn’t know what I was walking toward the night you found me. I thought I was running away from something. I didn’t understand yet that the direction I was running in mattered as much as what I was running from.” I paused. “You showed me what it looks like when someone chooses you. Not because you need something from them. Not because it’s convenient. Just because you’re theirs and they’re yours and that’s the whole of the reason. I want to do life with you. I want to do it imperfectly and honestly and for as long as we get. You, and Leo, and our children. That’s everything I want.”
He held my hand tightly for a moment before he reached for his own words.
“You taught me things I hadn’t realized I’d forgotten,” he said. “How to laugh without calculating whether it was appropriate. How to let someone in past the part of me that was convinced letting people in was a reliable way to get hurt.” He paused. “You are the most genuinely brave person I have ever known, and I have known some brave people. The children and I love you. Though I should be honest — Liam and the twins are partial to me.” The crowd laughed at his little joke. Tears filled my eyes, happiness I didn't know I could possibly feel moving through all of me. “You have Leo’s loyalty, which is the more valuable currency.”
The crowd laughed. Leo, sitting in the front row with an expression of great dignity, appeared to agree with this assessment.
“What I’m saying,” Elijah continued, looking at me, “is that I love you. I will mess things up. I will work on it. And I will always come back.”
“I know,” I said. “I got the memo a long time ago.”
We exchanged the rings. And the priest said a few final words. The particular moment of stillness before he said what came next.
“I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride.”
“Finally,” Elijah said, and kissed me, and the room erupted.
The reception was long and warm and full of people I had come to love, and I spent most of it moving between conversations and checking on the children and finding Elijah across the room and having him find me back, which never got old.
Eventually the children needed to sleep, Leo most urgently because he woke up with headaches if he went to bed too late and that was not how I wanted his morning to go.
“Just let him stay a while longer,” Elijah said. “His parents are getting married.”
“His parents got married four hours ago. He needs his bed.”
“I’m his father.”
“Not the same as being his mother and you know it.”
He laughed and kissed me and then Leo was sorted and the twins were settled and somehow Elijah had maneuvered me into a car without my fully noticing.
“Where are we going?”
“For a drive.”
The night was clear and vast overhead. He parked in an open field somewhere outside the pack boundary and produced, from somewhere in the car, a bottle of wine he had apparently planned for and two glasses, and he poured mine and handed it to me.
“It’s fruity,” he said. “No alcohol.”
I took it and leaned against him and looked at the sky and felt the extraordinary ordinary weight of being exactly where I was supposed to be.
We didn’t talk much. We didn’t need to.