To Hold and To Hold

He proposes with her grandmother’s ring on a pink-flushed night in May, and she can hardly hear herself say yes over the butterflies in her stomach and champagne heartbeat in her throat.

“I’ll take your name,” she whispers, up against his perfect ear. “I’ll take everything you give me. I’ll take everything.”

He kisses her, long and slow, this Botticelli angel she’s allowed to touch; this golden muse, this man who’s brought her back to life. She wishes she could taste him.

Domesticity follows. She finds comfort in the consistency and reminds herself that she hardly went out on the weekends anyway. “You’re so beautiful,” he says, over scrambled eggs at breakfast when her face is peeled paint and splotched red on the sides.

“You’re so funny,” he says, when she sings loudly and badly along to the car radio in the fragile warmth of early June. “You’re so smart. I love you.”

She’s never been loved before. She’s never loved herself. It buoys her, and she tells everyone she knows. They whisper and wag their fingers that she’s too young. But they must never have been delicately kissed on their foreheads in the middle of a grocery store. They must never have seen a smile so bright or eyes as kind and blue. They must not know love, and she feels very sorry for them.

She bites his ear one night. She rolls her teeth against the boneless cartilage and digs harder at the noise he makes, low and warm and inviting. He holds her close. She hears his heartbeat and prays, for a moment, that she might hold it in her hand.

The summer is wine stained in splendid color, pink peonies on Tuesdays, red dahlias on Fridays, and kisses every “Good morning, beautiful.” Her best friend doesn’t call on her birthday, but his parents bought champagne, and they drink together as the sun sets cat-eyed gold.

The summer is his gorgeous, easy laugh and invitations on heavy cardstock and sampling meringues and buttercream from a chef who said she’d sounded older over the phone. She smiles politely and makes sure to show him how big and lovely her ring is and tips fourteen-and-a-half percent.

That night, once the fireflies have settled into their black corners, she kisses his perfect lips. Her teeth find the soft folds of skin and bite. He’s as warm as she imagined, against her tongue and down her throat.

He mixes pancake batter from scratch the next morning and gives her extra blueberries. The syrup-soaked tower leans over to one side, and he runs hot water to soak the pan before sliding up beside her. Butterflies are inadequate. There are wild doves in her stomach, and to not hold him wholly is utter agony.

Every minute without his hand on hers is devastating. Every second without his smile makes her scream into her unheld hands, nails bitten to raw shreds, even as he consoles—“I love you, I’ll stay with you, I’ll never leave you.”

Summer evenings become summer midnights. She crawls on top of him. She carefully reaches her left hand inside his mouth, spit slickening her fingers as they dig, finally finding the smooth-capped prize in the saturated, shadowy darkness.

She pulls.

He whimpers, but she twists her thumb and pointer finger against bone until the fleshy gum gives, pink like sparkling rosé. Warmth pills into her nailbeds as she pulls, running down the cracks and callouses he would massage in the mornings with soft-scented cream.

She loves his hands. But she loves his smile even more.

Her thumb presses deeper into enamel, reaching underneath the flap of skin hiding the precious root. It nearly slips from her fingers, and she grabs harder. She imagines dipping it in molten gold or making a casting in iron so when she rubs the ridges down and softens those sharp edges, she’ll have something else to hold onto.

It pops, faintly, and pools red like summer sangria. She continues to pull, fighting through the fibrous sinew to dislodge the rest, and it’s warm on her tongue and sweet down her throat.

Then, the root is visible, a white whale in red water. She twists and tugs until finally it’s freed, and tears fill her eyes as she touches it. A piece of his smile sits in her hand. And suddenly, she can’t stand to sully it, even for its beauty to last longer.

She’ll wear it around her neck. She’ll sleep with it under her pillow. She’ll treasure it in her cheeks. She’ll treat it like the diamond ring on her finger, her grandmother’s ring, now wet like she’s washed her hands.

She stands to stretch her legs and searches for a towel. She pats the dampness around his mouth dry and gently turns him over, so he doesn’t choke. She cradles him, just as he cradled her in the pink haze of his proposal. Him and her, against the world.

“You and me,” she whispers, and her teeth drag against his ear again. He doesn’t move. “No one else.”

***

Calder Cassetti (she/her/hers) is an attorney from the Southeastern United States. She has an upcoming short fiction piece in Reverie Magazine.