When he left all those years ago, I'd been afraid to leave home, leave everything I knew. But what I'd learned since was that he was everything that home meant to me. Without him, I'd been lost, wandering through my life without moving an inch, searching for something to make me whole.
Now that I had him, I could do anything. I was unstoppable.
He squeezed my hand and began to walk away, and I followed, neither of us speaking until we'd left the cemetery.
"I don't want to leave you," he said once we were in the cab headed for the airport and I was tucked into his side, my head on his shoulder.
"I don't want you to go, but I'll be right behind you."
He sighed. "Two weeks is too long."
I chuckled. "Seven years is too long. Two weeks is a heartbeat."
"I've spent every day for the last two months trying to memorize your face, trying to get my fill, but I can't. No amount of time will ever be enough with you to satisfy my heart."
I lifted my hand, touching his face as I kissed him. "Well, do you think forever would be long enough?"
He smiled down at me. "Guess we'll see."
My heart fluttered, and I rested my head on his shoulder again. "Do you think Lou is getting settled in?"
"Ben says everything's great. I just can't believe they ran off like that and got married without telling anyone."
"Oh, I dunno. It doesn't sound so crazy to me. And anyway, I'll be glad to have someone familiar in Germany."
"So I'm already not enough for you? I see how it is," he joked.
"You're a given. You're more familiar to me than my own reflection."
He kissed the top of my head. "I love you, you know."
"Almost as much as I love you."
He sighed again. "Two weeks is too long."
I laughed and wrapped my arms around his chest as we rode the final minutes in the cab in silence, the ticking of the infernal clock never stopping. And too soon, we were standing at the passenger drop at LaGuardia, his duffle bag at his combat boots, cap on his head, shielding his eyes from me.
"For so long I didn't want to come back, and now I don't want to leave."
"Yet let me not be too hasty,
Long indeed have we lived, slept, filter'd, become really blended
into one;
Then if we die we die together, (yes, we'll remain one,)
If we go anywhere we'll go together to meet what happens."
He smiled, a crooked thing, surprised and teasing and full of love. "Quoting a Whitman poem about death is supposed to make me feel better?"
"It's easier than saying goodbye, isn't it?"
He pulled me close, still smiling. "It's only two weeks."
"Two weeks is too long," I echoed, and he kissed me sweetly before whispering in my ear.
"Two weeks, and then forever."
And at that, I cupped his cheeks, kissing him once more as the sunlight danced across his grandmother's engagement ring resting on my finger, the same finger that was closest to my heart.
Epilogue
Elliot
He laid his hands gently on my jaw, my heart singing his name and tears stinging my eyes, and he kissed me, sealing the vow of our forever.
The people who loved us cheered and clapped from behind us, but I barely heard a thing. There was nothing outside of his hands, his lips, in that moment when our lives began. And when he pulled away, his hands still warm on my face and the ghost of his kiss still on my lips, he smiled at me with more joy than I knew one man could possess.
He took my hand, and we walked up the aisle, past Sadie and Sophie, crying and smiling from the front row, past Ben and Lou with her hand on her round belly, Charlie and the kids, as confetti rained down, spinning to the ground like dervishes. Hanging candles in jars and paper flowers spun above us in the light breeze, whirling the tiny scraps of paper around us.
The Black Forest was magical, a fairy tale forest of trees stretching up to the heavens, lush and green and older than time. The big trees were so tall, so dense we could barely see the sky, the leaves and moss so green they almost glowed. When Wade and I had come here to view the venue, we'd both known it was the perfect place to start our fairy tale.
A year of planning after years of loneliness had brought us to that moment. We'd flown back for Sadie's graduation and brought her and Sophie back with us, and every day since then had been busy with the whirl of preparations, time mostly spent constructing decorations for today, this day.
All the paper cuts were worth it.
I'd typed up all of our letters on an old typewriter, and though it wasn't the first time I'd read them all, every one hurt in its own way, sated only by the peace of forgiveness. But I remembered writing every line, and I felt every line of his.
We'd photocopied the originals and used them to make a myriad of decorations, mostly paper flowers, some big, some small, some in bouquets, some to make garlands of, which hung all over. Some were made into strips and used as streamers. A thousand more copies were shredded into confetti, confetti that floated around us like snow.
A thousand letters that brought us to that moment.
My heart skipped in my ribs as we walked together to the back of the venue with my hand in the crook of his elbow, the long chiffon spilling down from the empire waist of my dress, floating around me like mist. And as we reached a curtain made of tulle strips strung with flowers, he pulled me through it and stopped.
He was so beautiful, his uniform crisp and medals shining as he smiled down at me.
"Mrs. Winters," he started as he brushed a scrap of confetti from my nose.
"Yes, Mr. Winters?" I asked with a smile.
"I have dreamed of this day for eight years." His fingers trailed across the lace capping my shoulder in a triangle.