She looked at Seven. “Your vows?”
Seven nodded, took a deep breath. Let it out. “Autumn, I…I wrote these elaborate vows, using all the best words I know. I memorized them. They were damn near poetry. But damn if I didn’t forget every word of them the moment I saw you, just now. So I guess I’ll try my best to recapture what I was going to say, but I’ll just…freestyle it.” He sighed again, nervous, emotional. “You changed me, babe. There was nothing for me in this life except getting through day to day. And then I met you. You’re the softness these hard hands crave. You’re the sweetness this rough heart requires.” He let go of her hand with one of his and pounded his chest with his fist, then rejoined her hands. “You’re the wonder that makes each day better, the light that shines out of the sun itself every morning. You’re the love that tells my heart it’s okay to feel again. You’re the trust that tells my mind it’s okay to be vulnerable…I’d say again, but it’d be more accurate to say for the first time ever. Autumn, you’re the future that makes this life worth living. I never thought I’d be a husband, and more than that, I never thought I’d want to be a husband.” He squeezed her hands, let out a soft breath. “But I am your husband. So my vow is that I’ll fight with every ounce of myself to be the best husband I can be, as hard as I fought every time I stepped into the ring. I’ll fight for you, and I’ll fight for us. I’ll love you till the sun goes cold, not just till death do us part, but past that, in whatever it is that’s on the other side of living. Rich, poor, sick, healthy, hard times and good times, I’m yours through it all. That’s my vow.”
Autumn sniffed, smiled. “You’re a hard act to follow, Seven, but here goes.” She gazed up at him for a moment, then let out a shuddery breath. “You said I changed you—you stole the words out of my mouth. You absolutely altered the very fabric of who I am. I wasn’t sure I believed in love until you. I know I didn’t. I’d never seen it, after all.” She broke off and gazed at Lizzy, with Braun beside her. “Until you two, at least.” Back to Seven. “They made it seem possible. You proved that it’s possible for me. And that’s what I never believed I’d ever have. But here you are, marrying me, loving me—choosing me. So that’s what I promise, Seven: to love you. To choose you, again and again, even when you piss me off as only you can. I promise to love you so hard that you’ll never want to spend a single night apart from me.”
“Already did that part, babe,” Seven interjected, laughing.
“Hey now, I didn’t interrupt you,” she joked. “I promise to prove to you that love is real and that our love is forever, no matter what.” She squeezed his hands, and stepped even closer to him, eyes shimmering. “I promise to wife you so hard, you don’t even know.”
He laughed, we all did at that.
She wasn’t done, though. “I have one other promise to make.” She inhaled shakily, and when she spoke, her voice was tremulous. “I promise, Seven St. John, to be the best mother I can be to the life that’s growing inside me.”
Silence, then, as we all took in what she was saying.
“Wait, you…” He stared down at her. “For real?”
She nodded, took his hands and placed them over her womb. “I found out this morning.”
He dropped to one knee and pressed his forehead to her belly, and his shoulders shook. “Best day ever just got better. It’s like a two-for-one special.” He pressed a soft kiss to her belly. “Thank you, Autumn. Thank you for this. For you.” Another kiss to her belly. “And for you.”
She pulled him to his feet, and glanced at the minister. “Are we married yet?”
The minister laughed. “Yeah, I think we best get on with it, shouldn’t we?” She plucked something from the pages of her folder—a length of pale blue silk. “It came to my attention that no one had brought anything borrowed or blue to this wedding, so I brought this. This piece of silk is older than the state of California. It was first used to bind the hands of my many-times great-grandparents almost two hundred years ago. They fled slavery in South Carolina together, and built a new life out here, by pluck and by courage and by love.” She wrapped the pale, frayed length of silk around Seven and Autumn’s joined hands. “It has been wrapped around the hands of my forebears in every marriage in every generation since. There’s so much love in the fabric of this silk, I think you can just about feel it coming off of it in waves. In all the generations of marriage for which this silk has been used to bind hands, there has not been one divorce. Not one. Marriages in my family last, on average, a minimum of forty years. This very silk was wrapped around my hands and my husband’s as we were married thirty years ago, just yesterday in fact. Before I wed you, I place upon you the blessing of long life and lifelong love, pressed into your hands as they are joined by the symbol of this handfasting.”
There was murmuring among us in the crowd—that was something truly special, and we all knew it.
“As this piece of silk binds your hands together, so it also binds your lives, and your hearts. With that in mind, do you, Seven, take with a willing heart and mind this woman, Autumn Scott, to be your wife, for all time and through all things?”
“I do.” His voice broke, and he tried again. “I do.”
“And you, Autumn, do you take with a willing heart and mind this man, Seven St. John, to be your husband for all time and through all things?”
“I do.”
“Then by the power vested in me by God and by the State of California, I pronounce you husband and wife, wife and husband, now and forever.” She withdrew the silk, held it in her hands. “Amen, and let it be. You are now wed, before God and these good people. Kiss each other and seal the deal!”
Seven kissed the ever-loving shit out of her. Gathered her in his arms and bent her backward, kissing her with gusto and with passion, until we all began to whistle and clap and laugh.
It went on until it was nearly uncomfortable, and then he lifted her to her feet and then they turned and faced us.
“Who’s ready to get their party on?” Seven said. “We’re married, ya’ll!”
Titus traded his acoustic guitar for an electric one, a keyboard, and a microphone, all fed through a loop pedal. With the keyboard, he lay down a complicated series of synthesized beats, which he layered and looped into something like a dance club beat, and then swung his electric guitar around and picked a haunting, delicate melody which he put on loop. Returning to the keyboard, he then layered an ascending riff on the piano, repeated and looped. Back to the guitar, then, angling to the microphone and strumming a slow, chugging rock riff.
Played that for a moment, and then sidled up the mic and began a low, wordless note, a gravelly hum that smoothed as his voice went louder and higher, sliding up the register of his remarkable range until he was singing an aria, and I was amazed again, as I’d been when I saw him with Bright Bones, that he could so seamlessly go from growly and deep to almost smooth and melodic and operatic.
The lyrics, when he began actually singing, spoke of moonlight love and sunrise kisses, a chorus repeated with variations on that theme.