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Bethany winked at me from across the solea. I took a deep breath and looked at the faces in the pews once more.
Everyone I loved most was in this building.
Waves of love floated up from my family. There weren’t many times in your life when everyone showed up to pour out their collective support. To stand up with you to say,this is good. This is blessed. We’ll be there with you.
It was an embarrassment of riches, receiving this much love.
Who am I to deserve this?
I turned to the altar to blot away stinging tears with my knuckle, ignoring George’s poor attempt to repress a smirk. I never understood why people cried at weddings, and now look at me. It was my least favorite of the seven sacraments.Wasn’t it all just fluff?Yet all these people came here today.
None of them would stand for fluff.
Decca and I had treated this so casually. When we talked about the wedding, it was with only the most minimal of planning. She’d invited her friends over a text message. We hadn’t thought anything about clothes or flowers until George showed me the boutonniere he and Bethany had procured from one of their preferred funeral vendors. We’d eat at my cousin’s restaurant after. Mommade a baklava. It had almost been a joke. It wasn’t arealmarriage, so it would be foolish to makerealplans, to celebratefor real.
We’d both acted as though this marriage was nothing more than our own trashy reality TV show.
We were so wrong.
Now that I was here, and it was happening, there was no disguising what this was. A real marriage. Decca was about to become my real wife. And I wanted it… her… more than I’d wanted anything. I wanted our souls to be joined forever. To sacrifice for her. To love her as my own flesh and get to work building our skeleton. It was no coincidence that Christ began his earthly ministry at a wedding. That the Church was the bride of Christ.
The low, clear alto of the chanter’s voice echoed off the marble walls of the church, bringing me back to the present.
The guests stood, and I turned to face the end of the aisle as Decca crossed the threshold, beginning her slow, awkward walk to the altar on the arm of my father.
I laughed in relief as I met her eyes. Her smile broadened, and she shrugged, already apologizing for herself. As if she was anything less than perfect.
Whatever I’d expected her to wear on her wedding day, it wasn’t this. White was a shocking choice. I’d never seen her in anything but black. She looked beautiful. Like Audrey Hepburn in a cupcake.
She’d swept her black hair back in a big, vintage-looking updo that matched her old-timey dress and little jacket. Her poufy skirt was short enough that I could see a pair of tiny white shoes peeking out, making her ankles wobble when she stepped.
Maybe, just maybe, it would all be okay.
The ceremony itself was a blur. Vasili thrust a large white candle into my hand. Not a unity candle, a heavy Orthodox wedding candle that I’d have to hold for most of the hour-long ceremony.Decca handed her small bouquet to Bethany before accepting her own candle.
We’d rehearsed this; the candle, the chalice, the crowning. All we had to do was stand there, drink some wine, stand there some more, walk thrice around the table, and we were married.
There were no spoken intentions, no readings from Saint Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, no Pachebel’s Canon in D. Just a long, quiet ceremony with a lot of Greek chanting. Knowing Decca, she’d translated and memorized every last word so she would be able to mentally follow along with the sacrament. She assured me she didn’t disapprove of anything. Good thing, since there was absolutely no changing or customizing any word or detail of the ceremony that had remained the same for centuries.
I suspected that was the part Decca liked the most, the history of it all.
I was still in a daze, unaware if time was racing or standing still, when Father Vasili introduced us as husband and wife and gestured for us to kiss.
Decca’s head jerked to me in shock. She hadn’t expected a kiss. How could she have? It wasn’t officially part of the ceremony, so it wasn’t in any of my books that offered the translation of the service. I hadn’t thought to tell her. We could have practiced, so it wasn’t obvious to my grandparents and cousins thatthiswould be our first kiss.
I assured her with my eyes. I tried to, anyway. I wasn’t so sure about this myself. She nodded, and took a deep breath, throwing back her shoulders.
I tried not to grit my teeth as I watched my wife brace herself to kiss me.
The light shifted—maybe it was another one of Christ’s wedding miracles—and the rest of the room blurred into obscurity. Deccaand I were alone, standing in a single beam of pure, clear sunlight streaming in between all the broken panes of colored glass. Reds and ambers, blues and violets surrounded us, shielding us from the rest of the world. My hands encircled her waist and our lips met in the center of that light. Her lips were soft and warm, confidently pressing against me as her hands reached up and clasped behind my neck. Our bodies were so close. Our breath hot.
My lips parted and moved against hers. I swallowed down her soft sigh. We fit together so perfectly, her mouth molded under mine, her heat and magnetism locking us together for what seemed like minutes. Hours. The contact was monumental. Surely the earth had stopped spinning. Tonight, I’d get a news alert on my phone that the Richter scale measured a record-level seismic event.Somethinghad happened.
I opened my eyes. Slowly, unwillingly, I peeled my lips away from hers.
Both of us were unmoving. Wide-eyed in disbelief that a kiss could be like that.Ourkiss. So powerful and provocative.
I didn’t want to turn and face the others. We were safe here in our beam of light. But marriages didn’t exist atop the head of a pin. I couldn’t be her husband only on the steps of the solea. Like bones, souls only knitted themselves together after stress and hardship.
