STILL (Grip Book 2)

by Kennedy Ryan

  Well, most of them. Ms. James and Dr. Hammond are here. Rhyson stands at the altar as Grip’s best man, and Jimmi is already there as my maid of honor. Amir, Shondra, Kai and Aria, Luke, Charm—all here. Jade is noticeably absent, but I won’t let that cast a cloud over today, not with all these people here celebrating our love.

  “Are you ready?”

  My father’s question draws my attention. He’s handsome, and Rhyson looks more like him every day. I considered not asking him to give me away, but that thing I can never shake, that need for my family to be family compelled me to include my father. My brother has forgiven him. My mother is in marriage counseling with him, and seems to have set his infidelities to the side. Today is a day for steps forward, and as the first strains of “Wedding March” herald my entrance, I answer my father with a nod and step forward with my arm through his.

  The guests rise, some gasping when they see me framed in the arched entrance with my father, some teary-eyed like Ms. James and Kai, most smiling. It’s my mother’s face that almost makes my steady steps stumble. There is such pride in her eyes, like of all my accomplishments, marrying a good man—a man she didn’t necessarily see for me in the beginning but has come to respect—is my crowning achievement. When I consider what a failure her marriage has been in the past, how much pain my father has caused her, maybe me marrying for love, finding the true happiness I have with Grip is more than she knew to hope for.

  Finally I allow myself to look at my groom. People always talk about that first glimpse the groom has of his bride, but no one ever mentions the first glimpse the bride has of her groom. They really should warn a bride about this. No one told me my heart would float up in my chest and hover in my throat, or that the tears would instantly gather at the corners of my eyes when I saw him.

  Maybe no one else has ever had a groom like Grip.

  I always think of his as the face of a king, one sketched with an artist’s skilled hands. A careful thumb smudged the sooty brows over dark eyes that see so much and can give so little away. The regal rise of bone in his cheek and the taut line of his jaw, the luxe lips generously drawn and precisely lined take my breath away. The closer I get, the more in focus his features become. I see the wedge of thick lashes, the softest thing in a face comprised of rugged planes and carefully hewn angles.

  When he turns his head and our eyes meet on the threshold of forever, his jaw drops and he blinks quickly, like this first sight of me stuns him. The hours I spent searching for this dress when I should have been working were worth it. It’s not white or ivory, but the palest shade of blush ever to exist. It’s watercolor pink, so sheer a hue that it’s barely perceptible as color at all. It’s strapless, and the mermaid shape molds my curves, baring my shoulders, cupping my breasts, nipping at the waist, tapering down my hips and legs to flare just below my knees in wisps of organza as frothy as meringue.

  When my father releases me to stand in front of Grip, I look up, uncovered and exposed for his inspection. Instead of a veil, I opted for a simple shoulder necklace, a string of Swarovski crystals clinging to a silver chain that drapes across my throat and collarbone, dips just shy of my cleavage and drips between my shoulder blades. Grip’s eyes wander over my face, his smile growing wider as he catalogues the details of my appearance. When he sees my shoulders, his smile falters and his eyes zip to mine, startled and awed. Along the top of one shoulder, following the narrow bone, is calligraphy sketched so delicately the letters look like flowers blooming on my skin, proclaiming that my heart broke loose on the wind.

  He looks out into the audience until he finds Mateo, his friend who is the only one he trusts with his ink, and now the first person I’ve trusted with mine. Mateo gives him a wide grin and a thumbs up. A slash of white teeth is Grip’s only answer before he turns back to me, and breaching the invisible wall between bride and groom, not asking for permission or waiting for the preacher to grant it, he touches me. His fingers trail along my shoulder, along the words Neruda penned decades ago brought to life on my skin. The words that, shared on a Ferris wheel high above the ground, unlocked a door between us that has never really closed. A smile widens on my face at the pleased look in his eyes, exactly the way I envisioned when I approached Mateo about the tattoo as a surprise. Keeping Grip away from me for the last two days so he wouldn’t see it was the hardest part of planning this wedding.

  I barely hear the preacher’s words, barely register that a roomful of people is listening. It’s not until I hear the word “vows” that I remember I have to speak and this isn’t some dream where I soundlessly spectate. The things I’ve rehearsed for days are nowhere to be found in my mind. They’re like spilled grains of sand on the shore, lost. It doesn’t help that I insisted on going first, but Grip is the best writer I know—no way I’m going after him.

  “I had so many things memorized,” I say with a self-conscious laugh. “But I’m so overwhelmed, I can’t think of them.”

  I glance up at Grip, who looks at me like every word coming out of my mouth, though unrehearsed, is pure gold.

  “So I’ll tell you all the things I didn’t plan to say, but are true.”

  I pull in a steadying breath, willing my voice not to shake and my tears to wait until I get through this.

  “Grip, I guarantee that I will disappoint you at some point in the next fifty years,” I say. “I’ll infuriate you. I promise you’ll want to strangle me more than once.”

  A ripple of laughter through the audience makes me smile, makes Grip smile, too.

  “But you’ll be stuck with me,” I say, the smile sliding off my face and the tears pricking behind my lids. “Because I’m never letting you go. I’d be a fool to let you get away. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, the biggest heart I’ve ever known, the one who sees me when no one else does and hears me even when I don’t speak. I’m sure at some point I simply wanted you, maybe I even simply loved you, but we are well past that. Now I need you. You are as fundamental as the breath in my lungs, as much a part of me as the blood flowing through my body. To let you go would be to let go of life, and that’s how long you’ll have me. You’ll have me for a lifetime, a lifetime of laughter, disagreements, battles, triumphs. No matter what comes, know I’ll never leave your side.”

  I shift the simple bouquet of blushing tulips and white roses to one hand so I can swipe at the tears streaking down my face. My voice, my words hang in my throat for a moment, crowded with emotions even deeper than the words I manage to utter.

  “I vow to stand with you through every circumstance. I promise to pick you up when you fall, to cherish you beyond reason, and to love you without walls.”

  When I’m done, I release a heavy breath, relieved to have gotten through it with just a few tears. With a kind smile, the preacher says a few words and encourages Grip to share his vows.

  “I feel kind of silly now,” he says with an almost bashful grin, completely incongruous on his handsome face. “After that, something so obviously from your heart, I almost regret writing my vows.”

  Here goes. I’m so glad I went first.

  “But I know how much you love it when I write about you,” he teases, squeezing my fingers. “So this is my heart given to you in the words I wrote.”

  His smile fades until his mouth rests in a sober line.

  “My heart given to you completely,” he adds so softy, I’m not sure the congregation hears before he launches into what he has prepared.

  “It’s called ‘Still.’”

  You ask me today if I love you,

  if I take you as my own to have and to hold,

  and my heart replies yes.

  Always, evermore, even after.

  Still.

  Not just today before a crowd,

  but when we are alone, you and I,

  through years, through pain,

  My heart will answer again and again, still.

  Ask me in a million seconds, ask me in a billion years,

  Do you
love me?

  And I will say still.

  Ask me when we toil, when we rest,

  when we fuss and fight.

  With the taste of anger burning my lips,

  I will say still.

  Ask me when your belly is full like the moon,

  and our love has stretched your body with my child,

  leaving your skin, once flawless,

  now silvered, traced, scarred,

  I will worship you.

  My eyes will never stray.

  My heart will never wander,

  gladly leashed to you all my days.

  I am fixed on you.

  Our love is a great river,

  the Amazon, the Nile, the river Euphrates,

  and my heart is a violent churning

  in my chest,

  swimming upstream,

  defying every odd, accepting any dare

  To reach you.

  To rush you,

  to hold you,

  to keep you.

  You ask me if I love you?

  God, yes.

  My lover, you are the single star

  in a universe void before you came.

  And when the years have passed,

  and we have watched a thousand sunsets,

  and we are bent,

  our bodies crooked with age

  ask me again.

  In the twilight,

  in the shadow of the life we have shared,

  ask me if I love you,

  and my heart will answer

  before my lips can part.

  My love, my life,

  my heart never left your hands.

  Always, evermore, even after.

  Still.

  Behind me, I hear sniffing. I’m aware that the audience is moved by Grip’s words, but they cannot feel a fraction of the emotion drowning my senses until he is the only thing I can perceive with any clarity. Every other person, every other sound and sight is mist. The power, the passion of his words turned on me has left me undone, unraveled, a ribbon unspooled. I barely hear the words the preacher speaks, legally linking us together. It’s such a formality. The words we spoke to one another are what joined us. Our words, our wills bind us, and even with so many looking on, clapping, cheering that we are now husband and wife, I can’t make myself look away from him, and he can’t tear his eyes away from me. We are caught in this most exquisite intimacy, and neither of us wants out. We want to revel in it, to revel in each other, for the rest of our days.

  Part II

  “Dwell in possibility.”

  – Emily Dickinson

  28

  Grip

  The darkness is so deep, so dense, I can’t see my hand in front of my face.

  “For the record,” I tell Bristol from the passenger seat of her car, “when I said we should use blindfolds, I was thinking kinkier, maybe with some cuffs . . . maybe some anal.”

  “Anal?” Though I can’t see her face, her voice sounds horrified. “I told you your dick’s too big for anal. Not happening.”

  “I’m gonna take that as a backhanded compliment.” I laugh, reaching up to touch the thick cotton shrouding my eyes.

  “Don’t you dare take that blindfold off,” Bristol orders. “And you can take it as a compliment, insult, I don’t care, as long as we’re clear that your big dick is not going in my tiny asshole.”

  She says that now, but over the last year of marriage, there hasn’t been much I haven’t been able to persuade her to do.

  Except anal. It’s a work in progress.

  “Are we there yet?” I ask, tuning all my other senses to the environment to figure out where “there” is.

  “Are you seven years old? We’ve been driving for a grand total of ten minutes . . . but, yes, we’re almost there.”

  “Is this my anniversary present?” I lean back in the bucket seat of Bristol’s convertible. “Because I read that year one is paper. Is this paper?”

  “Um . . . in a way.” The mischief in Bristol’s voice tells me nothing except that she enjoys having the upper hand—for once.

  We come to a stop, and my senses automatically go on higher alert. I sniff the air, wondering if we’re going to a restaurant.

  “You told me your mom says you have extra senses from growing up in Compton,” Bristol says, a smugness in her voice that I fully plan to fuck out of her when we get home. “How are all those extra senses serving you right about now?”

  I sniff again, pulling in deeper draws of air.

  “I sense that you’re wet and you want me to fuck you,” I say with a straight face. “How am I doing so far?”

  The silence that follows my outrageous comment has my shoulders shaking because even though I was just joking, I know I’m totally right.

  “Bastard,” Bristol mutters before I hear the driver’s door open and slam closed.

  My head jerks around when my door swings open, and I do smell her. The unique clean scent that is Bristol’s invades my nostrils, and I want to sniff her like a stalker as she leads me by the arm along what I think is a sidewalk. Don’t ask me how I know, but when you grow up with so little grass and nothing but asphalt, your feet know sidewalk when they meet it. A bell dings over a door, and I’m pretty sure . . .

  “I smell Mexican.”

  The blindfold is wrenched from my eyes, and I come face to face with Mateo.

  “You’re half right,” he says with a grin. “The other half is black, on my mama’s side. Blaxican!”

  I glance around the tattoo shop where I’ve always gotten my ink. Bristol is already seated, a satisfied smirk on her face and an empanada halfway to her mouth.

  “Mateo told me his dad has a taco shop around the corner,” Bristol says around a mouthful. “And I thought this would be a perfect meal for our anniversary.”

  “When you said you’d handle our first anniversary dinner,” I say, sitting down in the chair beside her, “I kind of envisioned something a little more upscale.”

  I shoot my friend a remorseless glance. “No offense, Matty.”

  “I got you, ese.” He leans against the counter that holds the cash register. “But your wife knows what she wants.”

  Wife.

  Bristol has been my wife for a year. It feels like yesterday and it feels like forever, like we’re just getting started, and like we know each other more deeply than I ever thought possible. I want to slow the hours down because it’s going too fast. One day I’ll wake up and be at the end of this journey, like Mrs. O’Malley, and even after a lifetime with Bristol, I’ll bargain with God for one more day.

  “I had an idea for an anniversary gift to each other.” Bristol wipes the corners of her mouth with a paper napkin. “Something that will last all our lives.”

  “I’m guessing it’s a tattoo,” I say, looking around Matty’s tattoo parlor.

  “You’re very astute without the blindfold. I’m almost done eating so I can go first.”

  I frown because she has one beautiful tattoo on her shoulder of the Neruda line that galvanized our connection years ago, and I need to sign off on anything else. I mean, I have tattoos all over, but I’m a lot more careful with Bristol’s body than I am with my own.

  “What kind of tattoo are you getting?”

  “You mean what kind of tattoo are we getting?” She reaches into her purse and hands me a sketch. “This one.”

  It’s a pair of hands, one masculine and one feminine. Banding each ring finger is Matty’s trademark calligraphy of the word still. The letters wrap around each finger, sketched to look like delicate vine.

  “You like it?” Bristol asks, her voice soft, uncertain.

  After the wedding, she requested that I give her my vows, my poem STILL, in writing. I know she added it to a box where she keeps our memories—the leather book of Neruda poetry, the tarnished whistle from the carnival, and now the vows I wrote for her. I know STILL holds significance, but I never saw this coming.

  “You want to tattoo this
on our fingers?” I ask, just to make sure I’m clear. “The word still?”

  “Yeah. I have no problem making this permanent on my skin.” She smiles, but bites her bottom lip. “Unless our first year has made you reconsider forever.”

  As an answer, I slip my wedding band off my finger and into my pocket then turn to Matty, who’s already prepping his ink and needles.

  “All right, partner, do your worst.”

  I’ve gotten used to the discomfort that comes with tattooing—hell, I got my first one when I was only fourteen. Amir and I were Matty’s guinea pigs, and he had to fix that first one—a sadly disfigured angel—years later, after his skills improved. Bristol, though, has only gotten one tat, and she winces at the sharp needle pumping ink into her skin. Matty’s fast, though, and as gentle as he can be. After a couple of hours, we have matching tattoo bands on our ring fingers, not huge, but present enough to see even under our wedding rings. Matty has cleaned the tats and is prepping for his next customer while we eat the last of our cold empanadas and drink flat beer in the back room that serves as kitchen, office, and occasional bedroom for Matty and his staff.

  “It’s not what I expected.” I grin when her questioning eyes find mine. “But it’s perfect.”

  “Good.” She licks her lips and sets her bottle of beer on the small round table that’s covered in drawings; the tattoo artists must use it to practice on. “I did something today that I hope you approve of. I probably should have asked you first.”

  “Asked me first?” There aren’t too many things that fall into Bristol’s ask Grip first category. “What’d you do?”

  “I removed my birth control.” She twists her lips, unaware of the freak-out she just set off with her words. “Well, technically my doctor did. It was really simple. She just—”