𝐯. 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐫 ⚭ till annulment do us part
playing · the archer by taylor swift
pairing · dean di laurentis × sunny
fandom · off campus
format · series · part v of vii
word count · 8,178
warnings · 18+ · MDNI · suggestive content · alcohol · jealousy · secret marriage · getting caught · a hurt best friend · crying · fear of abandonment · brief mention of an absent parent · self-sabotage · a break up
My no-more-sex-with-Dean promise lasted a whole four days.
A grand total of 96 hours. I don't know whether to be impressed or disgusted with myself.
I thought I was doing so well. I limited contact. I buried myself in work. I kept my replies short and boring, giving him nothing he could turn into a conversation. Then on the fourth night he sent me a photo of a takeout menu captioned decision paralysis, requires adult help, and I was in a cab to his place before I'd even replied to his message.
That was over a week ago. Safe to say I've relapsed. I haven't gone a day without seeing him since.
He showed up at my office last Thursday with a coffee and told me, with a completely straight face, that he was in the neighbourhood. Midtown. A forty minute drive from the school he works at. I shook my head and laughed, because the man is ridiculous and he knows it. We didn't make it past my front door before my dress was on the floor.
Now it's Tuesday, and I came straight here from work without bothering to go home first. We've somehow ended up in a routine, one of us at the other's place at the end of every day, and I couldn't tell you how this came to be our normal.
I'm stretched out on Dean's couch with my legs across his lap. There's a show playing. I have no idea what's happening in it. He's got one of my hands in both of his, turning it over, running his thumb along each of my fingers, tracing them.
He isn't even doing it on purpose. That's what makes it worse. He's watching the TV and complaining about a plot hole, and his hands are just playing with mine like they're his favourite toy.
I don't stop him. That's becoming a theme.
"You're not even listening to me." He tips his head back against the cushions and rolls it sideways to look at me.
"Are you?" He waits. "Go on then, what was I saying?"
"You were saying something." I wave my free hand at the TV. "About the show. Being dramatic, as usual."
"Wow." He puts a hand over his heart, wounded. "That's it? That's what you got?"
"Something about a plot hole."
"That's not-" He stops. Reconsiders. "Okay, that's close enough that I can't even be mad you're ignoring me." He laces his fingers through mine like he's done it a thousand times, and my chest hurts. "You've got tiny hands. Has anyone ever told you that? It's like holding a very aggressive doll."
"Rude. Give me my hand back."
I pull. He holds on, laughing at me, then lets me win a second later, and the moment I've got it back he takes it again like he can't help himself.
I should put some space between us. Remind myself what this is. Go home to my own apartment, where I should have gone in the first place.
I can't make myself move. Every time I'm around him it gets harder to want to be anywhere else. Stupid Dean and his stupid magical dick and stupid personality. Life was so much easier when I only saw him a few times a year and could spend the rest of it pretending he didn't exist.
The problem, and I'm aware I'm not going to say this out loud to anyone including myself, is that I'm in way over my head. This was meant to be simple. Years of tension, a blackout marriage, a way to get it out of our systems. Sex I could write off as a mistake and walk away from, the same way I've walked away from every uncomplicated thing before it.
He knows how I like my coffee. He knows the name of the coworker who steals my ideas and he calls him a walking participation trophy, unprompted, every time. He turns up with the food I want before I've worked out that I want it. That isn't sex. That isn't getting something out of your system. I know what that is. I'm just not saying it.
"Hey." He's watching me now, not the TV. "Where'd you go?"
It hits me all at once, how comfortable I am, and my body reacts before I can talk myself out of the freak out. My breathing goes shallow. My shoulders raise up. My fingers go rigid where they're laced through his.
He feels it happen. There's no way he couldn't when he's holding my hand.
"You've gone all tense." He doesn't move, doesn't make a thing of it. "You've realised you're enjoying yourself and now you're deciding whether to ruin it."
"Mhm. Sure, you are." He nods sarcastically and tightens his grip so I can't pull away. "For the record. Don't ruin it."
I don't know what to say to that, so I do what I do best, which is change the subject and ignore that my heart is trying to beat out of my chest.
"You keep saying that." He doesn't argue, just states it as a fact. Then he lifts my hand to his mouth and presses a kiss to the back of it and goes back to the show. "Top drawer's got a toothbrush in it with your name on it. Metaphorically. I didn't label it, I'm not a psycho."
I look at the side of his stupid beautiful face and think, not for the first time and definitely not for the last, that I am in serious trouble here.
I don't dare say a word about it. I let him keep my hand in his and tell myself I'll go in a minute.
I leave two hours later. On the way out I find myself smiling alone in the elevator, like a love-sick fool.
My apartment is the first thing in my life that has ever been only mine.
I found it, signed for it and paid for every single thing in it. Four years later I still get a small, stupid kick out of putting my key in the door. It's exactly what I always said I'd have one day, back when I was twenty-three and sharing a bathroom with three people and eating stale cereal for dinner.
A cloud-like couch that took me six months to save for. A marble coffee table with fashion books stacked on it that I do actually read, thank you. The hallway I filled with framed prints one payday at a time. The wall length window I stood in front of for an hour the day I moved in.
Keys in the bowl. Heels off in the hallway. Lamps on, never the overhead lights, looking at myself in bright light after a long day is what I imagine hell to be like. I light the candle on the coffee table, same as I do every night.
Nobody's moved anything. No mug on the counter that isn't mine, no shoes by the door that aren't mine, nothing anywhere I didn't put it. That's been my favourite part of it since the day I got the keys.
I've never been lonely in my apartment.
I shower and do my usual night routine. When I get out I smell like my own body wash for the first time in a week. Vanilla, amber, a bit of sandalwood. Everything smells like me.
I stand in front of the mirror with a towel around me, trying to work out what's bothering me, and when I get there I want to sit down on the floor of my own bathroom. I've spent a week going to sleep after showering at Dean's. A week walking around smelling like him without noticing, because he was there with me. Tonight I washed him off me, and I want it back.
Cool. Great. Very normal.
I get into bed. It's a king, and it's the best money I've ever spent. Up until tonight I've never wanted it any smaller.
Tonight I'm on one side of it. My side, apparently. When did I get a side? I've slept in the middle of this bed since I bought it. I lie there with my eyes open listening for someone breathing next to me, but there's nobody there. Two hours ago I was with him. I got up, put my coat on, got in an elevator like an absolute moron and came home to this.
I want to punch myself in the face.
My phone goes off on the nightstand and I've got it in my hand instantly.
An instant reply, like a woman with no dignity and nothing else going on.
- now go to sleep. you've got that pitch tomorrow you keep telling me you're not nervous about -
- sure, you're not. goodnight, wifey -
Wifey. I hate what that word does to me. Every time he says it my heartbeat turns erratic, and I'm left wondering if it means as much to him as it does to me. I stare at it until the screen dims.
I open the nightstand drawer.
The ring is in there. Not the ring. My ring.
It used to live in a zip pocket, in a bag, on the top shelf of my closet, underneath things I never use, where it belonged. A few nights ago I got the bag down. I told myself I was just checking it was still there. Because that's a real concern. Because burglars famously ignore the television and go straight for the jewellery hidden in a bag in a closet.
For a while I just stood there holding it, and rather than putting it back up on the shelf where I couldn't reach it, I put it in the drawer beside my bed, because that was easier.
Easier for what, some might ask? Yeah, I've got no clue. Another lie I tell myself.
I take it out. It isn't even a nice ring, that's the tragedy of it. A plain gold band from a chapel in Vegas, picked out by a drunk man for an even drunker woman, which I estimate cost him around eleven dollars. I turn it over in my fingers in the dark.
Then, because nobody is here to witness it and I've clearly had a stroke, I put it on.
It fits, same as it always has. It slides on like it's been waiting for me to stop being such a coward, and I lie there in my enormous bed in my beautiful apartment, wearing my wedding ring, thinking about my husband.
I fall asleep wearing it.
I wake up with the ring still on my finger.
I lie there and stare at my own hand like it belongs to somebody else. I have twenty minutes before I need to be in the shower, forty before I need to be in a cab, and ninety before I walk into a boardroom for the biggest moment of my career to date.
I don't take it off. I get up. I put on a navy pants suit that makes me look unshakeable. I go to work wearing my wedding ring.
We've had Maison Sévigné signed for eleven months. A hundred and forty year old French leather house with a waiting list longer than most people's lifespans, and they have never advertised the launch of a new product. Not in a hundred and forty years. Now they're launching the Margaux, and they want a campaign. Every person who works in advertising across the globe would sell a kidney to win this opportunity.
It's mine. I built it. I have lived and breathed this for four months.
- you're going to be brilliant. don't let them see you sweat. eat something please -
- liar. I bet you've had coffee and nothing else -
He's right, obviously, and I hate him. I stop at the coffeeshop on the corner and buy a croissant I don't want and eat it standing up in the lobby. He's going to be absolutely unbearable about this later, when he asks and I have to admit I listened to him.
The room is full by nine. Four of them are in from Paris, all dressed immaculately which is to be expected. Diane, my boss, in the corner where she always sits, the seat with the best view of everyone's face. Then Jacob, sliding into the chair beside mine with a coffee I did not ask for. God, I hate him.
"Big day." He leans back like he owns the chair.
"It is." I keep my eyes on my notes.
"Thought I'd sit in. Support the team." His laptop is already open. There is absolutely no reason for him to be in this room. What the hell is this little worm up to?
I don't fill the silence. I've learned that Jacob fills it with confessions.
"I might jump in on the second half," he adds. "Just so it doesn't feel like a one-woman show."
So that's why he's really here.
I stand up and present my work.
I tell them about my grandmother's coat. She wore it for thirty-one years. It hangs in my hallway now and I'm never getting rid of it. It's something I have kept with me since she gave it to me, my prized possession.
Then I tell them what I found. Months of meeting and talking to women about the things they keep, how it's never the expensive things. It's the things that were with them for the big moments. The bag that went to every job interview. The bag she was carrying when she found out she was pregnant. The bag handed down at a kitchen table, already used, no speech, and it meant everything.
I put the campaign up on the screen. There's a second where I think I might actually throw up. I've given this four months of my life and every good idea I've ever had, and now it's on a wall in front of four French strangers, and there's nothing left to do but keep talking.
No models. No drops, no hype, no waiting list. Real women, photographed in their own homes, holding the object they'd run back into a fire for, telling us why. Then the Margaux at the end, on its own, with one line under it.
The room goes silent. Diane hasn't moved a muscle.
Jacob clears his throat. "And what we wanted to do with that, building on it, was-"
"We?" I keep my eyes on Sévigné's creative director, a woman called Élise who hasn't blinked since the presentation started. "This is my campaign. I wrote it, I researched it, I built it. Jacob has seen it twice. Once being right now."
One of the guests at the far end of the table makes a noise they attempt to turn into a cough.
Jacob goes the colour of raw chicken. Dickhead.
Élise leans forward. She ignores him completely and asks me about my grandmother's coat. She wants to know what happens if the women say something unflattering about the brand. I tell her we keep it in. She smiles for the first time since she walked in, and we talk until Diane has to remind us there's another meeting in the room. I know, in my bones, that we've got it.
They sign in the afternoon.
Diane approaches me at my desk at six, when the office has emptied out and I'm still sitting with my heels off, coming down from the high.
"That's the best pitch I've seen in nine years." She perches on the edge of my desk. "Also, Jacob has requested a meeting about his professional development, which I'm going to take, because I'd like to watch him try."
I laugh so hard I have to put my head down on the desk.
She stands to go. Then she stops, looking at my left hand, and every organ in my body relocates.
"It's not new. It's-" What. It's what. My mouth is open and I can't seem to find the right words, which is a first for me today. "It's complicated."
Diane looks at me for a long moment. She has fired people for less than the face I'm currently sporting.
"Complicated," she repeats. "It looks like a wedding ring."
"It's a Vegas situation."
"Ah." She picks up her bag. "Well. Congratulations, or condolences, or whatever the situation requires."
She leaves. I sit at my desk in the dark office. Heels off, my grandmother's coat over the back of my chair, a signed contract worth more than my apartment.
I turn the ring around my finger, once.
I want to call my husband so badly it frightens me.
Dean has always been in my phone. Commenting on my posts. Replying to my stories at one in the morning. Something stupid in my messages the second I post anything online. Allie calls it his hobby. That was normal. That was Dean being Dean.
What's happening now is different.
Now we talk all day. Every day. From the second I wake up until I put my phone down at night, unless we're together, in which case we're together. I've stopped being surprised when his name comes up. I've started being disappointed when it isn't him.
I text him from the cab on my way home.
- I am telling everyone possible. I'm stopping practice. these boys are about to hear about a handbag account my wife won today!!! -
- OMG DEAN, please don't -
- too late. Marcus says congratulations. Marcus doesn't know what a campaign is but he's very happy for you -
- tell Marcus I said thank you -
- he's gone bright red. you've flustered the poor boy -
I'm laughing in the back of a cab on the FDR like an idiot. The driver keeps looking at me in the rear-view mirror. I don't have it in me to care.
- for the record I never doubted you. not for a second. not ever -
That makes the laughing stop, because I know he means it. He can be an absolute fool and then say something like that, and it gives me butterflies like I'm fifteen years old again.
- come here tonight. I'll cook. we'll celebrate properly -
- careful. you don't want me answering that over text -
- ask me tonight. in person. I'll show you -
I turn my phone face down on the seat and look out at the river going past.
I've got a signed client, a boss who thinks I'm the best in the building, and a ring on my finger I 'forgot' to take off. I'm on my way to my husband's apartment to be cooked for.
There isn't a single thing I want to change.
Give it an hour and I'm sure it will.
Dean opens the door in an apron that says KISS THE CHEF, tea towel slung over his shoulder, looking like an absolute clown. Unfortunately it's working on me, which is humiliating.
"There's my girl." He takes my bag off my shoulder before I've stepped foot through the door. "The woman of the hour. Conqueror of French handbags."
"I have told every single person I've spoken to today that my wife is the most impressive woman in New York. My co-workers, the under-14s even know. One of them suggested I look into becoming a stay at home husband, which, frankly, I'm considering."
I laugh, and he kisses me hello like I'm a person who comes home to him. Which I am now, it seems. It's been two weeks and I can't bring myself to stop coming back to him.
His apartment smells incredible. Frank Ocean playing softly, which tells me he's in a good mood. The pasta is boiling, a pan on the stove, and the kitchen looks like a bomb has hit it. Every surface has something on it. He has used, as far as I can tell, every utensil he owns to make a dish that requires about four.
"Sit," he orders. "Drink. You were amazing today. I want to hear all of it, and don't you dare down play it."
I pour us both a glass of wine, and sit on one of the kitchen stools. The best seat in the house to watch my husband cooking dinner for us.
He is annoyingly good at this. He whisks the eggs and the cheese in a bowl with one hand while he's rendering the guanciale with the other, no recipe, no phone propped up anywhere, just muscle memory and confidence. His sleeves are pushed up. Forearms, veins, the lot. It's hard to be around him. He's testing my restraint and he knows it.
"You're staring." I can hear the smirk in his voice.
"Actually, I'm supervising."
"You're staring. It's fine, I don't mind. I'm very impressive." He tips the pasta into the pan and takes it straight off the heat. "So how did the French take it? Did they weep? Did anyone weep?"
So I tell him all of it. He listens, and when I get to Jacob he puts the tongs down.
"Yeah, but I did it politely. He should be grateful."
"In front of the French?" He points the tongs at me, appalled and thrilled. "You executed him in front of the French."
I'm laughing so hard I have to put my glass down so I don't spill the wine all over myself.
He plates dinner. He does a genuinely obnoxious flourish with the pepper grinder. He puts it in front of me and it's the best carbonara I've ever had, and I tell him so with my mouth full.
"I know." He sits down beside me at the counter, close enough that his knee touches mine. "How was practice, Dean? Oh, thank you for asking, Sunny, it was fine, we lost, Marcus cried."
"How was practice, Dean," I say, flat, and kick his ankle under the counter.
"Devastating. Also, one of the moms cornered me afterwards."
I put my fork down. "Cornered you."
"Mm. Ashley. Wanted to know if Coach was single." He forks up more pasta, entirely relaxed, like he hasn't just detonated something in my chest. "Put her hand right here."
He touches his own forearm, right where I was staring twenty minutes ago.
It hits me in the stomach, fast and ugly. My jaw locks. I put my fork down on the plate very, very carefully.
"And?" My voice comes out level. Too level.
"And what?" He's chewing.
"And what did you say to her." I'm not looking at him.
He's watching me now. He's stopped eating. He is enjoying himself so much I could put his head through the counter.
"I held up my hand," he says, "and I told her I was very happily married."
"Great. That's great. Sounds like a great mom. Very involved."
"Baby." He is beaming at me. He has never looked more pleased in his entire life. "Are you jealous?"
"You've stopped eating." He turns his stool to face me and takes my chin in his hand. I could pull away. I don't. He kisses me, still smiling, which is infuriating. "You're jealous. Of Ashley. Who has a mole on her chin and a husband called Rick."
"Get off me." I put a hand on his chest and don't push.
"My wife is jealous." He kisses me again. Then my cheek. Then my jaw, which is when I feel myself starting to smile and hate myself for it. "This is the best day of my life. First the French, now this."
"Say it. Say you're jealous and I'll leave you alone."
"I told her I'm married." He's stopped teasing. His thumb moves along my jaw and he looks at me properly, so serious and close enough that I can feel him breathing. "I tell everyone I'm married, Sunny. I'd stand on the roof and announce it to the entire block. You just have to say the word."
I don't say anything, because there isn't anything to say that isn't the truth.
He lets me off. He goes back to his food. He puts his hand on my thigh under the counter and leaves it there while he eats, one-handed, and talks about a kid who scored his first goal on Tuesday and burst into tears about it.
I sit there, in his kitchen, in his apartment. I still have my ring on, and I know Dean has seen it. Surprisingly, he hasn't said anything about it. I think about how close I came to saying yes.
That's what scares me. It isn't Ashley. It isn't the mom, or the hand on the arm, or any of it.
I wish I'd been there. I'd have told her exactly who he belongs to.
You know what nobody tells you about getting drunk married? The paperwork follows you home.
I collect the mail on my way into my building already aware that half of it is junk, and I'm going through it in the elevator without looking properly. Bill. Bill. A letter from my building manager about the water being off next Tuesday. At the end of the pile, a stiff white envelope with a Las Vegas postmark and my full legal name on it.
I make it exactly as far as my front door. Bag still on my shoulder, coat still on, keys still in my hand, and I tear it open standing in my own hallway, because there is no world in which I get to the kitchen first.
CLARK COUNTY. CERTIFICATE OF MARRIAGE.
Well, fuck me. I'm standing in my hallway holding the legal document that says my marriage is entirely, boringly, officially legitimate.
The cherry on top is my signature. I signed this. Me. In a chapel, in a dress I don't remember choosing, with Elvis somewhere in the room, I took a pen off a stranger and signed my name like a woman who knew exactly what she was doing.
I drop it like it's burnt me.
It hits the floor and slides under the console table, and I take an actual step back from it, which is unhinged behaviour, because it's a piece of paper.
"Okay," I tell my empty apartment. "That's fine."
It is not fine. I'm on my knees in my coat and my heels fishing it out from under the table. I put it on the counter. I go into the living room. I come straight back. I pick it up again, hold it at arm's length like it might bite me, and read every line, and I don't get any calmer.
Nothing about this is new. I've known for weeks. I've been sleeping with him and eating his food and wearing his ring to bed like an absolute headcase, and somehow none of that counted until Clark County put it in writing.
"Miss me already?" There's a squeak of shoes on a gym floor behind him, a whistle going in the background. He's at practice.
"The marriage certificate. It's here. In my hand. Right now." I'm already moving. "Dean, there's a seal on it. An actual raised seal."
"I signed it. My name. My handwriting."
"Hey." He stops joking instantly. "Slow down. Breathe."
"Don't tell me to breathe."
I breathe. I hate that it works.
"It's just paper." He's completely level. "We already knew it existed. Nothing's different now than it was this morning."
"Everything's different." I've done four laps of the kitchen. "It's a legal document that says I'm your wife, and I can't unknow that, and it's sitting on my counter, and Hannah arrives in four days."
"For two weeks. She's got studio time and Garrett's got some sponsor thing. She'll be at my apartment every day, Dean. She notices everything. She's been suspicious since Vegas and I know she hasn't dropped it-"
"I said good." He's not joking. "I'd like her to know."
"That is not-" My mouth is opening and closing like a fish out of water. "You don't get to say that."
"I've been saying it for weeks. You keep not hearing me."
Somebody in the background yells for Coach. He tells them to give him a minute, away from the phone, then he comes back, and he's so calm I want to reach through the line and shake him. How is he not freaking out?
"Hide it in a drawer if it's upsetting you. Put it somewhere you can't see it. Go and eat something that isn't crackers. I'll call you when I'm done here."
I stand in my kitchen with my coat still on. The certificate hasn't moved off the counter, because paper doesn't move, and I know exactly what a sane woman does here. Bin. Recycling. Anything.
I take it into my bedroom, open the nightstand drawer, and put it in there.
Hannah has been in New York for six days and I have survived four dinners, one photography exhibition in Chelsea that she dragged Garrett and I to, and a full afternoon of her on my couch with a cup of tea, watching me like she's working something out.
Tonight's dinner is at a place in the Village she picked, the kind with no prices on the menu, and it's the six of us. Allie's mid-story about a director who made her cry in a callback. Theo keeps correcting the parts she's exaggerating and she keeps ignoring him. Garrett's got his chair turned toward Hannah's, one arm along the back of it, disgusting.
Then me. Next to Dean, because Allie pointed at the chairs and told everyone where to sit, and put me next to him, and did not once make eye contact with me while she did it.
We're two bottles of red in. I'm relaxed for the first time in a week, which should have been my first warning.
His ring is on. It's been on all night, same as it's been on at every dinner, every drink, every group thing since Vegas. Allie asked about it once. He told her it keeps the moms at his school from hitting on him and she screamed laughing and never brought it up again. That's the thing about Dean, he can hide something in plain sight by being ridiculous about it.
My hand is bare. My ring is at home in the nightstand drawer, sitting on top of our marriage certificate.
"Dessert," Hannah announces, flipping the menu over. "We're getting dessert. Sunny, the chocolate tart."
"She'll say no and then eat half of mine." Dean's still reading the menu. I don't think he even realises what he's said.
It's nothing. It's such a nothing sentence. It's the way you'd talk about someone you've had a hundred dinners with, and the second it's out of his mouth my stomach drops through the floor.
Allie doesn't catch it. Theo doesn't either. Garrett's still reading the menu.
She looks at Dean. Then she looks at me. Her face doesn't move at all. She puts the menu down, very slowly, and folds her hands on the table.
"When has she eaten half of yours?" Hannah's voice hasn't changed at all.
"You said she'll eat half of yours." She's completely pleasant about it. "When have you two ever had dessert together, Dean?"
The table goes quiet, everyone's attention now fixed on us. Allie's mouth is open mid-sentence. Theo has put his glass down.
This is my chance. It's right there. All I have to do is laugh and say everyone knows I do that. I never order it, I always eat half of whoever's sitting next to me. It's not evidence of anything. Hannah would believe it, because she'd want to believe it.
He's already looking at me. He's been looking at me the entire time. He doesn't say a word, doesn't jump in, doesn't do the thing he has done for me a thousand times, which is take the hit and turn it into a joke and let everybody laugh at him instead.
He just looks at me. He waits for me to say something.
Say it, his face says. Or I will.
The silence stretches out until it's unbearable.
"We got married." He doesn't take his eyes off me as he says it.
Allie makes a noise I have never heard a human being make.
"In Vegas." He's completely calm. He reaches over and takes my hand, right there on the table, in front of all of them, and doesn't let go. "Married married. Rings and everything. The marriage certificate turned up in the mail last week."
"THE CERTIFICATE?" Allie is standing up. She's actually standing up in a restaurant, yelling like a banshee.
"Allie, sit down." I'm hissing at her.
"YOU HAVE A MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE?" She has somehow got louder.
Garrett is laughing so hard there are tears coming out of him. Theo is shaking Dean's free hand like he's congratulating him at an actual wedding reception. Allie is demanding details at a volume that has turned three other tables around. The chapel. The dress. Were you married by Elvis. Was there an Elvis. Sunny, WAS THERE AN ELVIS.
Dean is having the best night of his life.
Through all of it, Hannah has not said a single word.
She doesn't laugh. She doesn't shriek. She hasn't moved since she put the menu down. She's got her chin propped on her hand and she is just watching me, steady, through all of it, and every second of it is worse than being shouted at.
I hold her eyes for as long as I can stand it.
She glances down at my left hand, resting on the table, bare.
She glances at Dean's, wrapped around it, with a gold band on it.
Then she picks up her wine, and she takes a sip, and she says, to me, quietly, under all the noise, in a voice that nobody else at that table can hear.
"You've been married for weeks." She sets the glass down. "And I had to find out at dinner."
Hannah is at my door at nine am the next morning holding two large coffees, which means she's not angry. She's hurt. I know the difference and I've been dreading this since I got out of the cab last night.
"Can I come in." It isn't a question.
She strips off her coat, hangs it on the hook by the door and hands me one of the coffees. I trail her like a puppy to the lounge room and stand awkwardly at the opposite end of the couch from where she sits, waiting for the inevitable disappointed comments to start.
"I'm not going to yell at you," she tells me. "I want you to know that up front, because I can see you waiting for it but I'm not going to do it."
"I'd honestly prefer it if you did."
She takes a sip of her coffee. Twenty years I've known this woman. She was nine years old with a plastic butterfly clip in her hair the day she decided we were going to be friends, and I have never been able to lie to her. I just stopped telling her things instead.
"Do you know what I did last night," she says, "after you all left?"
"I sat in the hotel bathroom so Garrett wouldn't see, and I tried to work out what I did." Her voice doesn't waver. It's completely steady, and that's what makes it unbearable. "Because that's where my head went. Not what did she do. What did I do, that she couldn't tell me."
"You didn't do anything."
"I know I didn't." She sets the coffee down. "That's what I want to talk about."
My hands have started shaking, so I put my cup on the table.
"You've never needed me," she says. "Not when your dad left. Not when you moved cities on your own. Not when you got that promotion and I found out because I saw it on LinkedIn." She stops and looks down at her hands. "Twenty years, Sunny. I've never got to be a person you needed. I've made my peace with that, mostly. Then you go and get married, tell nobody, and I find out at dinner because Dean slipped up."
I open my mouth but I can't find the right words.
"So." She looks up. "Why didn't you tell me?"
I say the only thing I can think of, my only excuse.
"Because saying it to you would have made it real."
It's the first time I've said it out loud. To anyone. Ever. It comes out sounding small and nothing like my usual voice. My face crumples, and I cry, properly. Broken sobs that I can't stop. Hannah's next to me instantly. She pulls me in and puts her chin on the top of my head and lets me sob into her shoulder and doesn't say a single word or let go.
"I'm so scared," I whisper.
"He's going to work out I'm not enough and he's going to leave and I will not survive it, Hannah, I won't, I've built my entire life so that nobody can do that to me-"
Then she pulls back and takes my face in both hands and wipes underneath my eyes with her thumbs, and she looks at me like she's about to say something kind.
"Don't be so fucking stupid," she says.
I laugh. It comes out like a horrible wet honk.
"You love him." She lets go of my face. "You've loved him for years, and every single person at that table knew it before you did, and now you're going to run because you're frightened." She stands up and collects her coat. "So don't do it."
"It actually is that simple. You're just committed to making it hard." At the door, she stops. "I'm still angry with you. Just so we're clear."
"Ring me when you've come to your senses. I'll be waiting by the phone, obviously, since you never bloody call me."
Sabrina calls forty minutes later.
Sabrina doesn't call. Sabrina texts in full sentences with correct punctuation, or she doesn't contact you at all. So when her name comes up on my phone I know what it is about before I've even answered.
"Allie told me," she says. "Obviously. Allie has told the entire city, in case you were wondering."
"I've looked into it for you, because I knew you wouldn't ask for help." Papers move on her end. She's at her desk, on a weekend. "Are you sitting down?"
"Okay. An annulment isn't a divorce. An annulment says the marriage was never legally valid, that it never happened. The bar for that is high, and being drunk is not automatically enough. Courts hear that argument constantly."
"We were extremely drunk."
"I'm sure you were." She's completely unmoved. "Here's the problem. It's been weeks. You've been in contact. You've been seen together. You're both wearing the rings and he's been telling people he's married. If you behave like a married couple after the fact, you ratify the marriage. You've told the state you meant it."
I sit down on the kitchen floor.
"So what are you saying."
"I'm saying the annulment window has essentially closed." She lets that sit. "If you want out now, Sunny, it's a divorce."
Not a mistake I can erase. Not a piece of paper I can make disappear. A divorce, with my name on it, filed, on the record, forever. Something that happened.
"Sunny." Sabrina's voice changes. It's about a degree warmer, which from her is a symphony. "Can I say something as a friend rather than a lawyer?"
"You're in love with him."
"I'm going to hang up now."
"That's what I thought." She lets me. "Call me when you want the paperwork."
I sit on the kitchen floor for a long time.
It isn't the divorce that's killing me. It isn't even losing him.
It's that everybody can see it, and by it I mean that I'm in love with him. Hannah saw it. Sabrina saw it down a phone line. Dean knows, there's no way he couldn't.
I've been the only person I've ever needed. That's the deal I made with myself when I was seventeen and my father left and moved to Colorado. It has worked, it has worked flawlessly for thirteen years, and one stupid Vegas weekend has demolished that.
I text him and ask him to come over.
He's here in twenty minutes. I stay standing in the living room and keep my distance, because if I get too close to him I won't get the words out.
"The annulment's not an option. Sabrina called me. It's a divorce or nothing, and I want-" My voice cracks slightly. "I want the divorce. I want out."
He doesn't answer, just takes a deep breath.
"I'm not going to argue with you." He's completely calm and it makes me feel even worse than I already do. "You've decided. I'm not going to stand here and talk you out of your decision, so that tomorrow it's something I did to you instead of something you chose."
"I've got too much respect for you." He puts his keys back in his pocket. "You want out, you're out."
"Right." I'm nodding. I don't know why I'm nodding. "Good. Thank you."
"Sunny." He's at the door. He stops with his hand on it and looks back at me, looking so serious. "I have never wanted out of this. You already know that."
The door clicks shut, and I stand alone in my beautiful apartment that I love, and it has never felt so wrong being in my own home.
I stay strong until two in the morning.
I don't cry. I don't call Hannah. I clean the kitchen. I answer some emails. I sit on my cloud couch with a glass of wine I don't drink, and at half past one I go into my bedroom to put the ring back in the drawer where it belongs, that's the sensible thing to do, the first step, that's what a woman getting divorced does.
The certificate's in there. My ring is in my hand. I stand in my pyjamas in the dark holding both of them and I cannot make my fingers let go.
I've been keeping them. For weeks I've been telling myself I'm dealing with it, and what I have actually been doing is moving my wedding ring closer to my bed and hoarding a marriage certificate in a drawer like a woman who wants to be married.
I put my warmest coat on over my pyjamas. I get a cab.
He opens the door on the second knock. He's not asleep. He hasn't even been to bed. He's in a t-shirt with his hair messy and his face pale.
"I don't want the divorce."
"I don't want it, Dean. I don't want you to sign anything. I want you to throw it out." My voice is desperate. I don't care. "Throw it out. Please. I don't want to be someone you were married to. I want-"
He opens his arms and I throw myself into them. He catches me and pulls me into him, I put my face into his neck and my hands fisted in the back of his t-shirt, and he holds on so tightly that my feet nearly come off the floor. He doesn't say anything. He just holds me in his hallway with the door still open, one hand splayed wide across my back and the other in my hair, and I breathe him in, finally feeling like I'm home.
He gets the door shut eventually. He takes my coat off, undoing the buttons one at a time, and hangs it on the hook like I live here.
"No, they're great. Very sexy. Very New York." He's got both hands on my face now, thumbs moving under my eyes, checking me over. "You came out in the cold in your pyjamas."
He kisses me. It's not a kiss that's going anywhere, just his mouth on mine, soft and slow. Then he kisses my forehead. Then my cheek. Then my jaw, my temple, small kisses, one after the other, over and over, like he's making up for something.
"You're freezing," he murmurs into my hair.
"You're freezing." He picks up my left hand and stops.
He stares down at my hand for a long, long moment, and he closes his eyes when he realises what it means.
"Okay," he says, rough. "Okay."
He puts me in his bed and gets in behind me and pulls me back against his chest. His arm banded around my waist. He pushes his face into the back of my neck.
"It's on my counter," he tells me, half asleep. "The folder you gave me. Never even opened it."
"Dean." I huff a small laugh.
"Never going to, either." He's drawing patterns on my ribs with one finger. "You should sleep. You look terrible."
"Yeah." He pulls me in tighter. "Been a big day."
I fall asleep in his bed, in his arms, wearing my wedding ring.
It's four in the morning and I'm wide awake with my wife asleep on my chest.
She turned up here at two in the morning in her pyjamas. Sunny doesn't leave her apartment without checking her reflection twice. She is immaculately dressed at all times. She rushed over here to tell me what she wants, which is to stay married to me.
I'm not going to sleep tonight. I've accepted that.
Her hand is on my chest and I can't stop staring at the ring. I've been staring for hours now and my mind is still spinning out.
She knows now that I had no intention of ever signing anything, that I didn't even bother reading it. She still doesn't know everything though.
Three weeks ago she gave me the annulment paperwork. It's been sitting on my kitchen counter ever since. I've picked it up twice to wipe the counter underneath and put it straight back down.
I was never going to sign it. I've known that from the start.
The other night, when Hannah asked about the dessert and I felt Sunny go rigid beside me, I could have fixed it. I know I could have. I could have laughed and said something stupid and taken the hit, the way I've done for her a hundred times. Everybody would have moved on. Sunny would have gone home relieved and nothing would have changed.
I didn't do it on purpose. The dessert thing, I mean. That genuinely was an accident.
The rest of it though, yeah definitely not an accident.
I looked at her and made her choose, and when she opened her mouth to lie about it I said it out loud in front of everyone.
I'm not sorry. She can be angry with me about that for the rest of her life. I'd do it again.
People think I don't take anything seriously. I've spent years proving that. It's easier to be the idiot who turns everything into a joke than the man who's wanted the same woman for five years and never said a serious word about it, because saying it gave her the chance to say no, and I don't think I would've survived that.
So I waited. I flirted. I made her laugh. I commented on every single thing she posted like a lunatic and told myself being near her was enough.
It wasn't. It was just what I could get without risking too much.
Then Vegas gave me the thing I'd wanted since the day I met her, she woke up horrified, and I have never worked harder at anything in my life than I worked at looking like I didn't care.
It took me a very long time to understand this about her.
You cannot push her. Her father walked out and because of that she decided at seventeen she would never need anybody for anything again. She built a life for herself on her independence. If I push, if I argue, if I talk her into staying tonight, then tomorrow I'm the bad guy.
I don't want this to be something I had to talk her into.
So this afternoon when she told me she wanted out, I didn't put up a fight, just walked out of her apartment, and ended up standing out on the street feeling lost. Leaving her apartment was one of the hardest things I've ever done, I wanted to turn around and march back in there to change her mind, but it wouldn't have done any good.
I came home and sat on my couch with the tv on silent and waited, because I know her.
Eventually she found her way back to me.
She shifts against me in her sleep, makes a small noise and pushes her face further into my chest. I move my hand to her hair and leave it there until she settles.
She hasn't said anything about love. She's admitted she doesn't want the divorce. Coming from Sunny that's enormous.
She'll say it eventually. I'm in no rush.
She's asleep on my chest with my ring on her finger. She's still my wife.
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sorry this one took so long. life has been hectic and i rewrote this chapter more times than i'd like to admit. it's the longest of the series and the one i fought with the most, and i wanted to get it into your hands. thank you for reading, and for engaging with my work the way you do. every like, every reblog, every comment, i read all of it and it means everything to me. i love you all ♡
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