“Is anyone else coming?” my mom asks when she pulls away.

“You’re our exclusive guest of honor,” I say proudly.

“Yeah,” Camryn adds, “it’s just you and the reverend here.”

My mom moves around us to give Reverend Reed a hug, too. She has been attending his church for nine years—tried to get me to go a hundred times, but I’m just not the church type. But I thought who better to ask to marry us?

And while Reverend Reed is standing in front of us on the beach, holding his worn Bible in his hands and saying a few words, all I can see or hear is Camryn standing in front of me with her hands in mine. The breeze combs through her loose strands of hair, free from that golden braid over her shoulder that I love so much. I love her smile, her blue eyes, and her soft skin. I want to kiss her now and get it over with. I press my fingers gently against the tops of her hands and pull her a little closer. The wind whips through the long fabric of her dress, pushing it against her hourglass form. I hold in my smile when I notice a piece of hair fly into her mouth. She tries to covertly work it out with her tongue without drawing attention to herself.

Knowing she doesn’t want to create any kind of interruption, even for something as simple as this, I reach up and move the hair away for her.

I feel like we’re the only two people in the world.

When it’s time to say our vows, I know that neither one of us wrote anything down or had much time to think about what we wanted to say. And so pretty much the same way we tend to do everything, we just do it.

I grip her hands tighter between us and say, “Camryn, you are the other half of my soul, and I will love you today and every day for the rest of our lives. I promise that if you ever forget me, I’ll read to you like Noah read to Allie. I promise that when we get old and our bones hurt, that we’ll never sleep in separate rooms, and that if you die before me, I’ll make sure you’re buried in that dress. I promise to haunt you like Sam haunted Molly.” Her eyes are beginning to water. I caress the insides of her palms with my thumbs. “I promise that we’ll never wake up one day years from now wondering why we wasted our lives away by doing nothing, and that no matter what hardships befall us, I’ll always, always, be right here with you. I promise to be spontaneous, to always turn down the music when you’re asleep, and to sing about raisins when you’re sad. I promise to always love you no matter where we are in the world, or in our lives. Because you’re the other half of me that I know I can never live without.”

Tears pour from her eyes. It takes her a second to gather her composure.

And then she says, “Andrew, I promise never to leave you on life support and let you suffer when I know in my heart that your life is spent. I promise that if you’re ever lost or missing that I will… never stop looking for you. Ever.” This just makes me smile. “I promise that when you die, I’ll make sure that “Dust in the Wind” is played at your funeral and to never bury you where it’s cold. I promise to always tell you everything no matter how ashamed or guilty I feel, and to trust you when you ask me to do something because I know that everything you do has a purpose. I promise to be by your side always and to never let you face anything alone. I promise to love you forever in this life and wherever we go in the afterlife, because I know I can’t go on in any life unless you’re in it too.”

Pastor Reed says to me, “Do you, Andrew Parrish, take Camryn Bennett to be your wedded wife, to have and to hold, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, to love and to cherish, from this day forward?”

“I do,” I say and place the wedding ring I bought in Chicago on her finger. She gasps quietly.

Then he turns to Camryn and says, “Do you, Camryn Bennett, take Andrew Parrish to be your wedded husband, to have and to hold, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, to love and to cherish, from this day forward?”

“I do.”

Finally, I hand her my ring, because I’ve been hiding them both from her until this very moment, and she slides it on my finger. Pastor Reed finishes up, including those anticipated seven words—“I now pronounce you husband and wife”—and then he gives me permission to kiss my bride. It’s all we’ve wanted to do since the ceremony started, and now that we can, we find ourselves just staring at one another, lost in each other’s eyes, seeing each other in a different light, one so much brighter than we’ve seen it since the day we met in Kansas on that bus. I feel my eyes beginning to sting, and I scoop her up into my arms and crush my mouth over hers. She sobs into our kiss and I squeeze her around her back, lifting her bare feet completely from the sand and I spin her around. My mom is bawling like a baby. I feel like I might never stop smiling.

Camryn is my wife.

34

Raleigh, North Carolina—June

“Surprise!” several voices shout when I walk into my and Andrew’s new house.

Actually surprised, I gasp and my hand flies to my chest. Natalie is front and center, with Blake beside her. My friends from my favorite Starbucks and Blake’s sister, Sarah, who I met two weeks ago when Andrew and I arrived back in town, are all here.

“Wow, what’s the occasion?” I ask, still trying to catch my breath a little because they scared the crap out of me. I turn my head to look at Andrew. He’s grinning, so it’s obvious he had something to do with it.

Natalie, now with auburn highlights in her hair, pulls me into a hug. “It’s your official welcome-home party.” She smirks at me and glances at Andrew. “Why do you think I’ve been acting so who-the-hell-cares-she’s-back the past few days?”

“You haven’t been acting like that,” I say.

“OK, maybe not that noticeably,” she says, “but come on, Cam, couldn’t you tell I was holding something in?”

I guess she does have a point, now that I think about it. She has seemed happy that I’m home, but she hasn’t been overjoyed like she would normally be. I guess I’ve been assuming that maybe Blake had finally tamed her some.

I turn to Andrew again. “But we don’t even have any furniture.”

“Oh yes you do!” Natalie says, grabbing my wrist.

She drags me into the living room, where eight beanbag chairs are placed randomly on the floor. In the center of the room are four red milk crates pressed together with a flat piece of lumber on top, which I’m assuming is the coffee table. The electricity isn’t even on yet, but the “coffee table” holds three unlit candles sitting inside the lids from cookie tins, ready and waiting for when night falls several hours from now.

I just laugh. “I love this!” I say to Andrew. “I say we forget about the furniture altogether and stick with the retro beanbag theme!” I’m totally kidding, and Andrew knows it.

He plops down on the nearest beanbag and splays his legs out onto the floor, leaning back into the cushioning vinyl. “I can manage with these, but we’ll definitely need our bed.” I sit down in the one next to him and get comfortable. Everybody else follows suit as Natalie and Blake head into the kitchen area.

Andrew and I found this small house five days after we got here. Wanting out of my mom’s house as soon as humanly possible, he spent hours on the Internet and looked at real estate magazines even while I was slacking off and just relaxing after the long drive from Galveston. I pretty much just let Andrew take the house-hunting thing and run with it. He’d show me pictures, and I’d give my opinion. But this house was perfect. It was the third one we looked at physically (and I really don’t think his love for it had anything to do with accidently seeing my mom half-naked when she thought we’d left for the day). It was priced great because the sellers, who already moved out four months ago, wanted to sell it and get it over with. We ended up buying it for twenty thousand less than what it’s worth, and we agreed that the sellers didn’t need to make any repairs before closing. Since we were cash buyers, everything happened really fast.

Today is officially our first day as its new owners.

We brought a lot of things with us from Galveston, rented a small U-Haul trailer to tow behind us, which we stuffed full of whatever we could fit. But we’ll have to go back soon for the furniture. Unfortunately, Andrew is still adamant about keeping his dad’s old, smelly chair, but he promised to get it cleaned. And he’d better!

Natalie and Blake walk back into the room, each holding three beer bottles, which they start to pass out.

“Thanks, but none for me,” I say.

Natalie looks heartbroken, sticking out her bottom lip as she stares down at me. She’s wearing a tight white shirt that makes her boobs stand out.

“I’m played out on beer for at least a week, Nat,” I say.

She wrinkles her nose but then shrugs and says, “More for me!”

After Blake hands Andrew his beer, he goes to sit down on the only beanbag left, but Natalie races and beats him to it. So, he sits on top of her. While they’re playing around, Natalie lets out this weird peal of laughter, and I glance over to see the look on Andrew’s face.

“Shenzi,” he whispers and shakes his head with the beer bottle at his lips.

I laugh under my breath, knowing now what Andrew meant the first time he called her that. I googled the name shortly after and found out it refers to the mouthy hyena in The Lion King.

“Now, you promised to tell me about your road trip,” Natalie says, now sitting between Blake’s legs on the beanbag.

Everybody looks over at me and Andrew.

“I’ve told you stuff already, Nat.”

“Yeah, but you haven’t told us anything,” says Lea, my friend who works at Starbucks.

Alicia, who works with her, adds, “I went on a road trip with my mom and my brother once, but I’m sure it wasn’t anything like yours.”

“And you still haven’t filled me in on what happened in Florida,” Natalie says. She takes a drink of her beer and then sets it down beside her on the floor, afterward resting her arms over Blake’s legs. Blake kisses the side of her neck.

I cringe inside, just thinking about Florida, but I realize it’s because Andrew would really be the one of us who might be embarrassed about what happened. For a second, I can’t even make eye contact with him because I feel guilty for bringing it up to Natalie at all. I didn’t give her any details, just mentioned that something really messed up happened while we were there.

When I do meet Andrew’s eyes, I can tell he’s not mad at me. He winks and sets his beer on the floor beside him, too.

“Florida,” he says, to my surprise. “That was probably the worst part of our trip, if not also the strangest—and yet, somehow parts of it I didn’t mind so much.”

I have no idea where he’s going with this.

Everyone is looking right at Andrew now, especially Natalie, whose eyes are bugged out with anticipation.

“We met this group of people who offered us to drive out and party with them on a hard-to-find area of the beach. So we did. And we had a good time. But then shit got weird.”

“Weird how?” Natalie interrupts.

“Like LSD or who-the-hell-knows weird,” he says.

Natalie’s eyes get bigger and grow fierce as she looks back at me. “You did LSD? What the fuck is wrong with you, Cam?”

I shake my head. “No, no way did I do it willingly. They drugged us!”

Everyone’s eyes match Natalie’s now.

“Yeah,” Andrew goes on. “We’re not even sure what they gave us, but we were both trippin’ out of our minds.”

“I was roofied once,” Blake’s sister, Sarah, says.

She looks about eighteen.

Blake’s body jerks forward to sit straight up, causing Natalie to hit her front teeth on her beer bottle. “What?” he asks with fire shooting from his eyes.

“Oh, you didn’t know about that?” Sarah says sweetly, acting like she had simply forgotten to tell him at some point.

Obviously, it was better that he hadn’t known.

“Owww!” Natalie whines, holding her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” Blake says. He kisses her cheek and turns back to his sister. “Who the fuck roofied you, Sarah? Don’t shit me, either. You better tell me… Did anything happen?” There’s dread in his face.

Sarah rolls her eyes. “No. Nothing happened because Kayla was there and she drove me home. And no, I don’t know who did it, Blake, so please just chill out.” Then she turns back us. “You were saying?”