Page 120 of Dirty Ink

“Shut up and go find me an Elvis wig,” she said.

With Aurnia’s…careful persuasion…Conor even agreed to dress up like the Midwest tourist from Rachel’s made-up wedding. We gave him a big Mai Tai glass, a fanny pack, high-waisted cargo pants, and an I Heart Vegas t-shirt we ordered online that ended up being a child’s size large, and therefore a midriff shirt after we cut out a bigger hole for the neck and sleeves. He was pissed and it was perfect.

We invited everyone. Even Rachel’s friend JoJo made the trip over. Dress code was Vegas trashy. The invitation said, “If you look even remotely elegant, you’re getting a pint of the black stuff spilled on you. You’ve been fucking warned.” I tried to tell Aurnia the “fucking” was too much. She told me it was “fucking perfect”.

When Rachel and I left for city hall the madness began at Dublin Ink. All the flashing neon lights our friends could round up were brought in. The place was packed with Marilyn wigs and polyester pink boas and lots and lots of black vests with no shirts, just inked-up pale Irish abs. I’d paid the cabbie ahead of time to get us a little lost in the direction of city hall, stall for time, and then double back to Dublin Ink. Rachel and I had been fooling around so much in the back seat, not so discreetly slipping hands where hands shouldn’t be, that she didn’t even notice when I opened the door and held out my hand at the curb outside the shop.

“Wait, why are we—” Rachel stopped when I unbuttoned my black slacks there on the sidewalk.

She watched with a mix of concern and intrigue as I kicked off my shiny shoes, tugged off my socks, and pulled down my pants to reveal shamrock underwear.

“Oh…my…God…” Rachel murmured, smile growing on her perfect lips as I loosened by bow tie just enough to slip my collar from underneath it.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” Rachel said.

She was chewing at her lips and watching as I tossed my suit jacket and then my white shirt to the sidewalk. I held out my hands in my wedding “suit” and she screamed, loud as hell, “Oh my God!”

She ran to me and leaped into my arms. I held her as she kissed me, smearing lipstick all over my face. Wild curls curtaining our locked eyes, Rachel looked down at me and whispered, “But I’m in this stupid dress.”

I jerked my head to the side and she wrangled her hair out of her face just in time to see Aurnia, dressed head-to-toe as Elvis, peeking her head outside the door of Dublin Ink. She lifted a hanger with a white feather costume and wiggled it back and forth, grinning stupidly. But we were grinning stupidly, too.

Rachel changed and we all got locked on Jamie’ and gingers downstairs. I thought she might need to catch up, but judging by the way she and Candace, Aubrey, JoJo and Aurnia stumbled down the stairs, giggling stupidly, and by the way their lips were all stained a bright blue, they’d been doing plenty of catching up already.

Doing her best Elvis impression—which between the bad American accent, the booze, and the massive wig that kept sliding around her head was absolutely, wonderfully terrible—Aurnia began the ceremony. Between the shouting and the drinking and the constant interruptions for cheering it was quite a shite show. Judging from Rachel’s beaming smile and the way she kept squeezing my hands and pulling me in for pre-emptive kisses, it was exactly how she would have wanted it, there beneath the spray-painted Eiffel Tower.

When Aurnia asked us for our vows, Rachel was ready.

“This isn’t at all what I was going to say at city hall,” she warned me. “What I was going to say at city hall was beautiful and thoughtful and sober.”

I grinned.

“Fuck city hall.”

Then Rachel repeated the words she’d said in our bed. The words that I wrongly saw as lies. They were never lies. They were always the truth. They were true then, in Vegas. True there, with our naked bodies against one another. And they were true now, professing our love for one another in front of all our family and friends.

“I ran all this way to you,” Rachel concluded, laughing as she started to cry, making a complete hames of her already messy makeup. “And you knew I wouldn’t know how to stop, so you just ran with me. And you’ll always run with me.”

Rachel accepted a tissue from Conor’s fanny pack.

It was my turn and I knew the words to say: “I love you, Rachel.”

Rachel nodded. Nodded and whispered, “That’s enough.”

I repeated, squeezing her hands in mine, “And that’s enough.”

We kissed. We spilled shots of whiskey on each other as we took them with arms snaked through the others. We lifted our arms up in the air and smiled as a packed Dublin Ink cheered.

We partied like it was fucking Vegas.

At some point in the night (or was it already morning?) Rachel and I were kissing up against some hard surface. Who can really pay attention to whether it’s a bed or brick wall or kitchen table when you’ve got a handful of a perfect tit, nothing between you and buttery-soft skin but a sparkly pasty and some feathers, and pillowy lips between your teeth?

Turns out it was a door. A door I was grinding my hips against hers against.

We were already pretty fucking locked so it took us a second to realise why the hard surface we were getting hot and heavy against was bucking back against us. The music was loud, the neon lights were flashing everywhere, and there was my fairly sizeable boner all to distract me.

“Door!” Rachel was shouting as she laughed.

“What?” I shouted back at her.

---