i held on as tightly as you held onto me.
TAGGING: Marley Rose & Sam Evans
TIME FRAME: Monday, March 30, ~11am
LOCATION: Myrtle Beach International Airport → Sam’s House
SUMMARY: It took six years - over six years, really, - but somehow, someway, they found their way back.
MARLEY ROSE
They got married on a Tuesday. Which was probably weird for most people as a lot of the weddings you see usually happen over the weekend, a Friday, or a Saturday, or a Sunday. But, they wanted Tuesday. It was summer, after all, so it wasn’t like they really needed to worry about anyone missing school for it. It gave them more freedom, and Tuesday seemed like just the right day to make the magic happen.
It wasn’t like they’d met on a Tuesday or anything like that – the day didn’t really have much significance at all. It just felt like the right day. And at the time, it had been. It had been the perfect day – and if there was a better word for explaining something that was perfect aside from the word “perfect” itself, that was what it was.
They didn’t have the money to go off on some great honeymoon or anything like that, but they’d both taken off from work for the rest of the week, and they fully intended to make the week following the wedding be the best week ever. And that, of course, all started with a wedding night.
The reception had gone into the wee hours of the morning, until there weren’t many people left in the banquet hall aside from their core group of friends and a few relatives who were lagging around for who knew what reason.
“You’re falling asleep on your hand,” Kitty observed from where she sat next to her, adjusting the flower crown on her head (are you surprised that Marley had flower crowns as a staple of her wedding looks because you reallyshouldn’t be – she made them herself and everything!) for the sixth time and keeping her eyes focused on where Ryder was attempting to get a few people to do the worm with him in the middle of the dance floor.
Marley sat up a second later, blinking a few times and shaking her head back at her. “I am not!”
“You totally are,” Sam argued, popping up with his head tucked over her shoulder and leaning in to press a kind to her cheek from behind. “And we totally should’ve gotten outta here, like, hours ago – we’re missing out on crucial honeymoon time right now.”
“He totally means sex,” Brittany piped up for no more than a second, tipping her empty champagne glass to the two of them and nodding a bit tipsily, finger pointed in the air as she proved her fact.
Marley’s cheeks turned pink for a second even though she really wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like they hadn’t had sex before, but having sex on the wedding night just made her think back to that Just Married movie with Brittany Murphy, where she started crying the night of wedding because now everyone was going to know “for sure” that she wasn’t a virgin anymore.
And okay, yeah, maybe she still got bashful about the topic – she’s Marley freaking Rose, pick your jaw up and stop being so surprised by this sort of thing.
Her eyes shifted across the room, taking in all of their friends and noticing that Puck and Rachel must have slipped away a little earlier in the night, probably to spend time to themselves, and realizing that left only Brittany, and a very bored Santana, and an unamused Kitty, and a gleefully dancing Ryder.
“It was a good night, yeah?”’ Marley looked over at Kitty, giving her a small smile and brushing her shoulder against hers for a second.
Kitty downed the last of her champagne, sitting back in her chair a little and allowing a small smile to curve up on her lips as she looked back at her best friend. “Yeah, I guess it could’ve gone worse. I mean, I only made two people cry which is kind of a low for me? But given the day and all, I guess I can let it slide.” She leaned in, one hand on either of her best friend’s cheeks and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “You had a beautiful, boring wedding, Marley Rose. You should be proud.”
“You think you can handle Ryder for the rest of the night?”
“Who do you think you’re talking to right now?”
Sam tucked his arm around Marley’s, pulling her up from her seat and in closer to him. “Let’s face it, that’s as close to a solid answer as you’re gonna get, so let’s go.”
Marley didn’t need to be told twice (okay, she’d kind of been told, like, thirteen times in the past four hours), so she sent a wave in Kitty’s direction and gave Brittany a tight hug. Santana was in the middle of the dance floor yelling at Ryder to “Get the fuck up, nobody needs to see that,” and Marley was fairly certain they hadn’t heard her when she called out her goodbye to them, but it didn’t really matter. Because right now, all that mattered was that she and Sam were going to go home together as a married couple for the first time.
She nearly couldn’t keep off of him the entire drive, scooted all the way over in the front of his truck until she was nestled up against his side with his free arm slung around her shoulder to keep her there. Her eyes kept wandering down to the new, second ring on her finger, and it was enough to make her heart swell up every single time she saw it again, as if it had just gotten there a second ago and she couldn’t believe it.
She couldn’t believe it, honestly.
They made their way up to the front door, but before Marley could actually reach out to open it, Sam was pulling her back in and scooping her up into his arms. “You have to do it right,” he told her, pressing a kiss to her lips and opening up the door the rest of the way. He carried her into their house, and he kissed her until she was seeing stars, and the memory that lingered in her mind still to this day was the way he’d smiled.
God. She would have given anything to make him smile like that every single day for the rest of his life.
And now? Now, that seemed like it would be a possibility. Sam was happy right now. Sam was inexplicably happy, the happiest she’d seen him in years, and she knew that was because everything, finally, was right between them. Everything was finally the way that it was always supposed to be – they were finally the way that they were always supposed to be.
They were going to be a family again, they were going to do everything the way they already should have been. They weren’t going to let stupid things get in the way of their relationship, not anymore – not ever again. Her heart raced in her chest all the way back to his house, all the way back through their neighborhood and into his driveway – their driveway?
Granted, they still needed to figure out some details, naturally, but Marley was pretty sure the house they’d started their lives together wouldn’t be where they spent their lives. It held too many memories as it was, between Marley and her mom, and Marley and Sam, and Marley and Ryder. They needed fresh. They needed somewhere that could just be their place, untouched by everyone and everything else. Just for them.
She let him pull her out of the car and up to the front steps of the house, right through the front door, and Marley had butterflies in her stomach as he spoke – a few seconds later, her cheeks were flushed pink and her heart caught itself somewhere between her lungs and her throat. “That seems like a good compromise,” she said, nodding for a second before she was stepping forward and closing the space between them the way she’d wanted to for so long.
Every time Marley stepped foot into this house, she wanted to kiss Sam everywhere she stood. And now, she could. She backed them up against the wall, interweaving their fingers tightly together and deepening the kiss within seconds, leaning her whole body into his and not pulling away until she felt dizzy.
“I just really needed to do that,” she said with a small laugh and a big smile, and then she was leaning in a second later and doing it all over again just because she could, hands moving up until her fingers were tangled into his hair.
“We have,” she kissed his cheek, “a couple hours,” and his jaw, “before Logan gets out of school,” and his neck. “So we should probably make the most out of that while we can.”
SAM EVANS
“I’m not above drugging you, for the record.”
Sam clutched tighter to the blanket wrapped around his shoulders, not even bothering to lift his head when he heard the sound of Kitty’s voice. His cousin had temporarily moved into his new place only a few days after he finally made the big leap from staying with Marley and Logan. She had noticed how completely off he sounded whenever they spoke and maybe Kitty had a lot of hang-ups when it came to other people but Sam? If Sam needed her, she dropped everything to be there.
But she could only stand to watch him mope so long, especially when she realized that he did this enough to barely sleep at all.
“I’m fine,” he mumbled, closing his eyes like he could convince his body to pass out and therefore give Kitty no reason to be concerned anymore.
“You are not fine,” she countered, sitting on the couch beside him and hesitating a moment before reaching out to tuck a few fallen strands of hair behind his ear. “You can’t just plant yourself on the couch for the next ten years waiting for her to change her mind.”
“That’s not what I’m doing,” he groaned, shaking his head and slumping back against the cushions. “Like, you’re crazy if you think I want to be this tired and look this shitty.”
“Well, it doesn’t seem like you’re doing anything about it.” Kitty shifted to the other end of the couch, more comfortable with giving him space than trying to crowd him with the sort of affection he actually needed. She had her own ways of showing that she cared and she felt confident in the fact he knew that better than anyone else. “I can’t sleep when you’re all over the place making noise. At least cut me a break here.”
“It’s not like I don’t try,” he sighed, shrugging the blanket off his shoulders only to cross his arms over his chest right away “I’ll be in bed and I’ll crash for awhile but then I wake up all sweaty and gross and freaked out.”
Kitty lifted an eyebrow. “So what? You’re having nightmares?”
“OH MY GOSH, KIT, SHE’S GONE!” Sam dug his fingers into his skin, afraid that she’d see his hands shaking if he didn’t try to force himself to be still. “Marley’s gone. I mean, she’s not but she is, you know? I can’t… it’s just done and I wake up freaked out ‘cause I know she won’t be there. She’s never gonna be there and I don’t know how to make that not be my fault.”
“IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT!” Kitty stood up and punched him right smack in the middle of his chest. She ignored him cursing and she ignored him acting like it hurt when they both knew he had taken harder hits from her in the past. “She’s the one who wanted this and, yeah, you’re an idiot for going along with it, but you can’t make someone stay.”
“But I’m the one who left.”
That’s what kept Sam awake at night for years. He had been the one to pack up and leave the house where they’d planned to grow old together. He’d throw all his things into boxes and created a second home for Logan when he’d never wanted to raise his son in a family with two of everything, no matter how appealing that sounded to a kid. Marley brought up the divorce, and she’d put the papers in front of him, but she had never asked him to leave once he came back. He made that choice, and he had to live with regretting it.
In the beginning, Sam never allowed himself to imagine some perfect fairy tale ending where Marley moved into the house he had chosen simply because it happened to be so close to where she lived with their son. That had suddenly become a very real possibility and it felt unbelievably good to stand on the brink of a fresh start for all three of them.
He could remember spending so many sleepless nights pacing, hoping and praying that maybe Marley would come rushing through the door to hug him, to kiss him, to tell him she had never wanted him to go.
Feeling her back him into a wall more than made up for how long he’d waited.
“I think I can work with a couple hours,” he nodded, unable to help the huge grin on his face, wider than it had ever been around Marley without Logan there to help ease the tension between the two of them. “I’d feel a lot better if we had, like, the whole night or something but we’ll definitely make this the best two hours ever.”
Sam leaned in to kiss her neck - one, two, three times - and then gently nipped at the skin, still able to find the most sensitive spot without too much searching. It felt good to have her body pressed into this, to know that she felt the same urgency he did to take advantage of whatever alone time they had right now.
“I guess you already tried out the bed,” he teased, grabbing hold of her hand and lacing their fingers together as he lead her back toward his room. “Totally weren’t supposed to do that without me but I’m still kinda stoked you decided to stay here,” he rambled, not quite sure why he felt so damn nervous when he’d been with Marley more than he’d ever been with anyone else. “Kinda stoked actually doesn’t cover it at all.”
He laughed nervously as he pushed the bedroom door open, stepping backward toward the bed and not stopping until he felt his legs knock into the mattress. “I promise not to use any overly cheesy lines from Nicholas Sparks movies like the first time,” he joked, bending down just enough to nudge his nose against the tip of hers. “Telling you I love you over and over doesn’t count as cheesy, okay?”
Hands a little unsteady, he held onto the hem of his shirt, took a deep breath and pulled it over his head, dropping it onto the floor. “So… your turn, yeah?”
