Wedding Bells Part 2: The Reception

[Jay Carpenter]

If the words sank in, they were shrapnel ricocheting inside a steel drum, never finding an exit while memories clung to the edges of his awareness like smoke, impossible to catch and choking him all the same. He squeezed his eyes shut, hard enough to hurt, but the images didn’t fade. They never did.

He swallowed against the rising bile in his throat, knowing that being sick wouldn’t purge it, just like drinking hadn’t numbed it, and fighting hadn’t silenced it. Pretending to move on failed. And somewhere, buried beneath the anger and exhaustion and pain, was the certainty that even death wouldn’t bring peace. His luck, there’d be an afterlife: an eternity to sit with his failures, his ghosts, and the faces he couldn’t save. Maybe even hell, where he’d finally get what was deserved.

But there was a whisper—faint, buried under all the noise, but still there. A reminder that he wanted to live... with her. It was a hollow kind of hope, more like a reflex than a conviction, a hopeless wish, thin and unreachable, but it was enough... it was enough. That whisper gave voice to the pleading question he asked Natalie, and her answer felt worlds away. He had as much hope as grasping another planet than succeeding, but after a long time, quiet began to settle. His breathing, jagged and raw, started to even out, though it still rasped in the quiet night.

Finally, he reached out, his hand practically numb as it slipped into hers.

[Natalie Grey]

All storms ended, and eventually this one did too. The cold crept in alongside the silence, but of the two, winter’s knives against her skin were a kinder torture. She leaned against his arm nonetheless, resting her head on the cap of his shoulder. Jay’s breathing eased by slow increments, but she was unsure what world he returned to, or by what resolve he made the journey. Natalie would accept whatever came, fight for him as many times as he needed her to, but she understood it was a shore upon which she might always sit a vigil alone.

The eventual curl of his cold hand in hers sent a shiver of feeling up her arm. Her numb fingers shifted to accommodate his naturally, interlacing in answer. After a moment of quiet, with just that touch between them, her gaze shifted to travel up the curve of his arm to the shadow of his expression. She wondered if he even realised he did it, or if it was something less certain; a call he didn’t know he heeded. But either way, home was home.

He was freezing. They both were, and she ought to be getting him up off the ground, urging him back into the warm. But instead when she shifted it was to wind her arms around his neck, the embrace fierce, her body pressed close. It was a selfish possession, entirely for herself. Because he was alive, despite all the odds they battled. She'd never paused to allow herself to feel how close they'd come to that loss in Mexico, or what it meant to her. Natalie was the kind of woman who could face hell and not bat an eyelash. But she’d never known fear like tonight.

“I guess this means you'll just have to owe me another fancy dance,” she eventually murmured into the top of his head, perfectly serious, though he’d know her humour by now. Her fingers gently smoothed where he’d torn at his scalp before she sat back on her heels. “You know, it’s getting quite the long list of debt. Probably going to take you a lifetime.”

Emily and Jared would understand their absence. Her expression was raw; she didn’t hide the tiredness, or the softness when she looked at him. She didn’t want to wear any mask with him, an intimacy she did not offer lightly. Attraction crashed them like magnets time and again, all the more fiercely for how they resisted the pull, but this was something sweeter, and more enduring. Certainly it was more hard-won. There wasn't another soul on this earth with whom she'd share the vulnerability. She pulled both his hands in hers, resolutely ignoring the cold that made them shiver, so she could help him to his feet.