I Do And I Don't

REINA

Nobody tells you what it actually feels like.

The movies give you nerves and flowers and a father crying at the end of the aisle and a groom who looks at you like you just answered a question he's been asking his whole life. The reality…my reality is a borrowed dress and eleven minutes and a man who signs a document with the same energy he'd bring to a parking permit.

It took Eleven minutes and I was legally, permanently, irrevocably the wife of a man who didn't look at me once during his own vows.

Not once.

I watched Zaden Cole during those eleven minutes the way I watch everything that threatens me.

He is tall. Broader than I expected, though I don't know what I expected. He wore a black suit that fit him the way expensive things fit people who are used to expensive things. Dark hair, cut close on the sides. A jaw that looked like it had never accommodated an uncertain expression.

And his eyes.

His eyes were the coldest thing in the room, which is saying something because the room itself was not warm. They moved over me when I walked in, top to bottom, the way you'd assess a delivery that arrived on time and then they settled somewhere slightly to my left and stayed there for the rest of the ceremony.

Not on me.

Past me.

Like I was standing in front of something he was actually trying to see.

I said my vows in the same flat steady voice I use when I'm running on empty but refuse to show it.

He said his without looking at me.

I signed my name on the document they put in front of me with a pen that was cold from sitting on the table.

My father hugged me before I got in the car. He held on longer than he usually does and I let him because I understood that he needed it and because I was afraid that if I held on too long I would say something honest and honest was not what either of us could afford right now. So I gave him thirty seconds and then I pulled back and I looked at his face and I said nothing at all and he said nothing at all and somehow that was its own kind of goodbye.

The car ride was silent

He sat on his side of the back seat and looked at his phone the entire time reading something, sending messages and making a call. He didn't introduce me to whoever was on the other end. He didn't acknowledge that I was sitting eighteen inches away from him, that I existed, that today had happened at all.

I looked out the window.

I watched the city I've lived in my whole life move past the glass like it was already somewhere I used to be, and I told myself that I was fine, that this was survivable, that I had survived harder things than a cold car ride with a man who didn't know I was alive.

The house was enormous.

I knew it would be, you don't run a pack like a corporation without living somewhere that makes the point, but knowing it and standing in the entrance hall looking up at ceilings that have no business being that high are two different things.

It's all dark wood and clean lines and the particular smell of a space that's been maintained to perfection without ever being lived in. Like a photograph of a home rather than an actual one.

He walked in ahead of me.

Didn't offer to show me around. Didn't tell me where anything was. Didn't turn around. He went down the hall, took a left, and a door closed somewhere in the interior of the house with a sound that was final.

And I stood alone in the entrance hall of my new home and breathed.

In. Out.

In. Out.

A woman appeared from somewhere, housekeeper, I assumed, middle-aged, the kind of professionally neutral expression that comes from years of seeing things and saying nothing about them.

She showed me to my room without making eye contact, pointed out the bathroom and the wardrobe and the window that looked out over a garden that was too dark to properly see, and left before I could find a reason to ask her to stay.

My room.

Not our room. My room. At the end of a long hallway, door on the left, a bed that was made with the kind of precision that suggested nobody had ever actually slept in it.

I sat on the edge of it, pressed my thumb to my wrist and looked at the room; the room looked back at me.

Somewhere down the hall, on the other side of a house that could have swallowed my entire apartment, Zaden Cole was doing whatever Zaden Cole did at nine pm on a Wednesday night that was apparently more important than acknowledging that today ever happened.