wasn’t used to, and I wasn’t sure I ever would be.
Then again, Dante enjoyed the spotlight enough for both of us. I enjoyed the rest of it, though. Getting to spend each day making music with my best friends, who had become the family I’d always wanted. We were just closer now, and instead of the constant fighting, even the tour bus felt like the happy home the three of us had tried to knit together for ourselves as kids. The difference was that now, we had all the ingredients. It was like Cash was always meant to be part of it, and in the last six months, even Drake and Rafael had grudgingly learned to get along.
For the most part.
They’d made enough peace that he had agreed to stand by me at the aisle that night. Getting married in Vegas wasn’t something we’d planned before last week, but since the tour had us in the area and neither Rafael nor I wanted to wait any longer, it seemed like the perfect occasion.
No Elvis, though. Raf’s mom was already irritated enough we were getting married at some place called the Chapel of Love, but we’d pacified her by promising a church wedding when the tour was over. I wasn’t sure what her priest was going to think of that, but since Dante was apparently ordained, we had a backup.
The room was full, small as it was, with all the people we could have wanted to be there to celebrate. I still couldn’t focus on anything other than the fact that Rafael was standing up there with me, looking like a god in his black tux.
I was wrong about which god, though. He wasn’t Apollo. Too cookie cutter. He was Hades, hot as hell and far too tempting, and I guess that made me Persephone, because I was more than happy to follow him into the underworld, or anywhere else.
I doubted I looked half as suave in my ivory white tux. Was that as ironic as wearing a white dress? I doubted there was a soul in the room naive enough to think I was a virgin, but the fire burning in Rafael’s eyes as he looked at me while we stood hand-in-hand at the altar kind of made me feel like one. His gaze kept traveling down to the matching white collar he’d given me the night before. Diamonds weren’t really my thing, but I’d make an exception for the ones adorning the scripted letter R engraved in the leather.
Dante cleared his throat and started reading the rites he had almost certainly printed offline half an hour earlier. I had a hard time paying attention to the words, anyway. I just said “I do” as soon as I heard my name followed by the intonations of a question.
Dante sighed, confirming my fear that I’d answered a bit too soon, but I had waited for this moment nearly a decade, and it literally felt like two more seconds would kill me.
“And do you, Rafael Martin, take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband, to love, protect and--”
“I do,” Raf interrupted, his gaze smoldering as it held mine. “Get on with it.”
Dante tossed the printouts into the air in defeat. “Fine. Then by the power vested in me by the state of Las Vegas and the esteemed Online Institute of Divinity Education, I now pronounce you man and pup...I mean husband.”
Raf shot him a glare, but it was short-lived since he had already pulled me into his arms, and our lips met like two stars colliding. The explosion of bliss and love and a whole bunch of shit I didn’t even have a word for beat any high I’d ever experienced. It felt so surreal to be in his arms, his tongue tangled with mine, not as friends, not as the late-night booty call he could always count on, but as his husband.
I was someone’s actual husband, and it wasn’t even an accidental mistake-during-a-weekend-long-bender kind of thing.
We finally managed to separate, mostly for the sake of Raf’s mom, and Andrew and his wife, because everyone else knew what they were in for when they RSVP’d--and I was pretty sure the chapel had seen worse.
It was still hard to keep our hands off each other during the reception, and everything was honestly kind of a blur of congratulations and pretending like I was capable of thinking about anything other than the impending desecration of the Belmonte Hotel’s honeymoon suite later that night.
I