Page 151 of Chaos

“And would you have gone to jail in the old world for trading guns for your …” I study his face. I didn’t get to see it earlier when Ottilie asked if I was his wife and I said yes. I watch him closely now. “Wife.”

His gaze jerks toward mine, his throat shifting in a deep swallow, the candle flame dancing in his irises.

He’s got a good poker face, but I’ve been topping-off my heart and soul by learning his every tiny tell for a year now.

He’s feeling something.

“Did it bother you that I said that?” I ask quietly.

He clears his throat. “No. It’s okay if you don’t … if you can’t … I know Jimmy was—”

“Don’t say what he was as if it negates something that you are.” I set the comb down on the barren side table, no pots of fancy creams, no picture frame.

My back is still cut up so I’m careful as I slither-crawl across the bed and into his orbit.

“What doyouwant, Yorke?”

Still nothing.

“You don’t have to call me your wife unless you want to.”

He does his quintessential Yorke pause, and I stomp on the impulse to interrupt him. “I didn’t really ever have a family. I don’t want that for the blueberry … Or, if I’m honest, for myself. But I don’t if you don’t.”

There’s only one position that works when Yorke and I need to talk.

And we need to talk now.

I slip my thigh over his, climb on top of his lap, get my face right in his so he can’t avoid me, cup his cheeks with my palms, my fingers sliding through his hair.

He’s hard to see in the light of nothing but that one fake, dying candle.

“Do you listen when I talk?”

He nods very, very somberly, his eyes blinking owlishly. “I think I listen very,verycarefully.”

“I told you in the pool house, it’s you, Yorke. In all the universes. In every single one. If there’s a heaven or hell. If there’s a Cowboy-verse or a Darcy-verse or a Desert-verse, or one where we go back and the plague never happens, or somehow it does but Jimmy lives, it’s still you. It would havehappened somehow. We’d have found a way. If we’re atoms floating in an acid chain in a tomato, you’re stuck with me. Do you understand what I’m saying? If there are two grave plots, one for him and one for you and I pick who I live beside until the earth explodes and stars implode and we finally learn the point of all this chaos, it’s you. I already think of you as my everything, so call me your wife, and I’ll call you my husband, but know this, what you are to me is bigger than any word or any name or title on this earth. It isn’t healthy. It’s a trauma bond that surpasses death. And if you die, I will pull a fricking Orpheus. I will come for you. You’re stuck with me, fucker. You get it?”

His hands tighten around my thighs. “So many words.”

“And so few back,” I whisper.

His hands slide up, warm and gentle along my hips, up my waist, my ribs, my shoulders, to cup my face so we’re sitting there holding one another’s faces like a mirror image, with a mess of elbows like spider legs.

His fingers brush my hair behind my ear. And in that moment of sunburst sweetness he says, “You shouldn’t have called me fucker.”

When I laugh quietly, he traces my lower lip with his thumb. “I told you we’d get sunshine Frankie back.”

I shrug, letting go of his face and snuggling into the covers, my face in his neck, my chest to his. “The world without Ben and Duane is brighter.”

“Will you marry me?”

“Didn’t you listen? We’re already married.”

“No. I want a real wedding.” When he talks his abs tighten, and his quiet voice rumbles in his chest under my ear. “I want you in a white dress, Auden and Beast as ring bearers. Shane and Wendell and me standing in the mountains in the sunshine while you walk toward me surrounded by flowers in those shoes with the bows. I want music. I want the whole thing.”

“We’ll do it, but you need to promise me something. No prevarications, no last-minute mind changing, because I’m pretty sure we’re about to go to DC and join a war against the general, and I need to know every step of the way while we’re there that you are not holding some secret backup clause where you have to run away and leave me to save me. That can’t happen.”

“I won’t if you won’t,” he murmurs.

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