Page 71 of First Comes Marriage

“I need to say some shit and I need you to listen and let me get it out, okay?”

Jamie nodded, leaning back in the chair and waiting for Baz to continue.

“Sabrina and I didn’t mean to get married. It wasn’t planned. We had too much to drink and things got out of hand and the next morning…” Baz held up his left hand and Jamie nodded in understanding. “Did you know there’s no such thing as an annulment in Rhode Island?”

“No shit?”

“So fine, whatever, we’ll get a divorce. Only something’s wrong with Sabrina. She’s sick—I mean, not sick exactly, but she gets this pain.” He gestured vaguely to his stomach. “Not all the time. But too damn often. And—get this—she didn’t have health insurance. Couldn’t afford to get any until the studio’s up and running. Fine, I think, we’re already married, she’ll go on my policy. No big deal. And once she’s on her feet, then we’llget divorced.”

“Makes sense,” Jamie said. “You always take care of the people in your life.”

Baz made a face and pushed away the compliment. “Only now our families think we’re married for real. And you remember how the Pages are.” Jamie nods. “I couldn’t let her go to that party Labor Day weekend alone. They would have torn her apart. And I think, fine, I’ll get to rub it in Holly’s face. I’ll get to show her she didn’t break me when she left.”

“And did you?”

“I don’t give a shit about Holly,” Baz scoffed.Then why did her words the other night send you into a tailspin?He shrugged off the thought and barreled ahead. “Except there’s thisthingwith me and Sabrina. This sexual chemistry or whatever. And I can’t remember ever feeling that way with Holly. Like I had to kiss her or I was going to explode. You know?”

“Yeah, I do know,” Jamie said with a chuckle.

“I don’t remember it being like that with Sabrina either. Before. She was a kid, and I liked her well enough. Wanted her to be happy. Liked making her laugh. But she was a kid. She wasn’t this… It doesn’t matter. Point is, it was supposed to be paperwork. Roommates. Married in name only.”

“How’s that working out for you?” Jamie said with one of his goddamn eyebrow arches.

“Let’s enjoy the time we have, she said. Like it’d be that easy. And I’m the fucking idiot who agreed. Because of the exploding thing.” Jamie nodded, but Baz was pretty sure he was making less and less sense as he went on. Baz dropped onto the couch at the edge of the office and braced his elbows on his knees, hands clasped like he could keep himself together if he could hold on long enough. “How did you know? With Tessa. How did you know it wasn’t just sex?”

Jamie blew out a long breath as he considered his answer. “There were a hundred little ways, but I think it was whenbeing with her started to feel inevitable. Like she was the shore and I was the wave. There was never a world in which we didn’t end up crashing into each other. I think it was when not being with her started to feel harder than being with her.”

Baz hung his head and scraped his hands through his hair. “When we knew each other before, I used to call her ‘wildflower.’ Her shampoo or something had some kind of floral smell and she seemed…chaotic, but in a good way. I was the only one who called her that.” He turned helpless eyes towards his friend and pressed his hand to the side of his ribs. “She has a tattoo. Right here. Wildflowers.” He struggled to string together his next thoughts. “She’s my wife. I don’t think I ever want her to be anything less than that.”

For once, Jamie didn’t smile and Baz had never been so grateful. This didn’t feel like a smiling matter. It felt big and messy and out of control. It felt like careening down a highway in a rainstorm and that second when the water got under your tires and for a moment you were weightless and wild and terrified, but you also felt a little bit like a god, like you could do this impossible thing and survive. Only this time Baz wasn’t sure how long it would be until his tires touched the pavement again.

“Does she know how you feel?”

“She doesn’t want to be married. Not to me. Not to anyone. Her last marriage… She doesn’t want to do it again. If I tell her… Fuck, I don’t even have the words to tell her.”

“Don’t you?” Jamie leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees and looking directly into Baz’s eyes. “You tell her you love her.”

The words stole Baz’s breath and simultaneously settled something inside him, like for the first time since that bar in Vegas, the buzzy restlessness in his chest calmed to a dull hum. He loved her.He loved her.He silently repeated it to himself a few times, as though he were trying it on for size, and was awe-struck by how well it fit. He loved her. As the words weresettling into his bones, becoming a part of him he hadn’t even known was missing, something new wrapped itself around his heart, an echo of a long-ago pain.

“And what if I tell her that, and she doesn’t want it? What if she’s not all that different from her sister after all?”

“Then at least you know.”

Chapter Twenty-six

Baz was working on his laptop at the kitchen island when Sabrina got home. For the last two weeks, he’d taken to working the end of the day from home, timing his arrival to coincide with her typical return from the pottery studio. It would be another few days before she held her first break-up party there for Kyla’s friend Jo, but since opening last week she’d welcomed a group from the senior center, led by Mrs. White and Aunt Lucy, to make bowls for the food pantry’s latest fundraiser, and a local mommy-and-me class. It was a slow start to be sure, but Baz was certain that once word got out about the break-up parties, business would be booming.

Even if she never booked another event, he was so damn proud of her. She’d built a whole new studio, started from scratch and had it up and running in record time, and she’d done it all on her own. And he was the lucky bastard who got to stand by her side while she did.

He couldn’t imagine not standing there for the rest of his life. He certainly couldn’t fathom giving her up simply because they’d met an arbitrary deadline on the calendar. But he wasn’t sure if she felt the same way.

Most days he came home early to hear about what was happening in the studio. So far, he’d learned all about thedifference between slab building and throwing on the wheel—well, notallabout it, but enough to understand what she was talking about when she enthusiastically recounted her day.

But today was different.

Today, she’d had her first appointment with a new doctor—someone Tessa had recommended in Providence—and Baz had been on edge all day waiting to hear how it had gone, if she’d gotten whatever she needed to keep her from being in pain again. Sabrina had tried to explain that it wasn’t that simple, that even with medication there still might be bad days, but it had to be better than what he’d seen on that first day back from Vegas, right? And if that was a mild flare up…

He hoped this doctor was good.

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