Anastasia looks over at me, and I can barely see her with all the damn tears pouring out of my eyes and down my face. But luckily, I’m not the only emotional one. I watch my daughter smile at me and swipe her own tears off her face as she nods at PJ, and he slides the ring on the ring finger of her right hand.
“You’re such a nerd,” she says, rolling her eyes even as she sniffles and wipes more tears off her cheeks.
She stands up, leaning down to kiss PJ on the cheek before walking over to me and wrapping her arms around my waist. I kiss the top of her head.
“You have my permission. I guess you can marry this guy. But if you make me wear a pink bridesmaid dress I will murder both of you in your sleep.”
With that, she pulls out of my arms and walks out of the room.
PJ gets up from the floor and walks over to me, scooping me up in his arms.
“I love you so much, Princeton James Charming,” I tell him, wrapping my arms around his shoulders and holding on to him tightly.
“I love you more, Cindy Ella. What do you think about getting married on New Year’s Eve, at the stroke of midnight?” he asks, setting me back down on my feet.
“I think that sounds exactly like the perfect ending to a fairy tale.”
Belle
Six months later . . .
“When did you and your spouse move in together?” the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services officer asks us.
We’ve been here for over two hours already, answering so many questions I feel like I might forget my own name soon. We’ve answered everything from what each other’s dates of birth are, to when we saw our spouse for the third time, to what kind of cars we each drive and where we do our banking. But this is a big day. An important day. More important than even our wedding was, which was a pretty spectacular day a few months ago, if I do say so myself.
This is the day Vincent hopefully gets his permanent citizenship, and we won’t have to worry about him possibly being sent back to Canada. I mean, I’d go with him if it came to that, but I’m hoping it doesn’t. My business is here, my library is here, my friends are here, and my dad is here.
“Well, that’s kind of a funny story,” I tell the man, who doesn’t smile and clearly doesn’t find anything funny. “He sort of kidnapped me from the library where I work and forced me to move in with him a few months after we met at the strip club where he works.”
“Christ,” Vincent mutters from the chair next to me, both of us sitting facing the officer on the other side of the desk. “I didn’t kidnap her. I gently coaxed her into coming home with me, since she was living at the library and had no place else to go.”
“Potatoes, po-tah-toes,” I mutter, waving my hand at my husband. “I totally thought you were a serial killer until we got to your house out in the woods. Even then it was touch and go, since I was worried if I screamed, no one would hear me.”
I reach over and grab Vincent’s hand, turning to the officer and smiling.
“It’s a really pretty cottage out in the middle of nowhere with the most gorgeous library you’ve ever seen. Did you know less than twenty percent of the population has a library in their home? Such a travesty.”
The man doesn’t even blink. He just looks down at the paperwork in front of him and quickly scribbles something before moving on to the next question.
“Did you and your spouse go on a honeymoon? If yes, where did you go?” he asks us.
“Florida,” Vincent replies in a clipped voice, and I roll my eyes.
“We went to Key West. Vincent took me to visit Ernest Hemingway’s house. It was built in 1851 and Ernest moved there in 1931. The house still contains the furniture he and his family used. It was fascinating,” I tell the man with a dreamy smile, remembering walking through that house and touching the things that Hemingway would have touched.
And all the touching we did back at our hotel. And on the beach. And in a restaurant bathroom.
“Is that all you did on this honeymoon?” the officer asks in a bored voice.
“Yes,” I reply, at the same time Vincent says “No!”
“It was our honeymoon. We had a lot of sex. Even tried some new things,” I inform the officer with a smile.
“Christ,” Vincent mutters again as I continue.
“Did you know that more than twenty percent of women between the ages of twenty and thirty-nine reported having anal sex in the last year?” I ask.