“And I’ll promise to love you until death does us part…”
And when she looked up from under her fluttering veil, she saw that dazzling grin of his, splitting his lips into that sweet red curve that always melted her heart, but in his eyes, she found that she did not see herself floating in the midst of tangled adoration that she had always wanted to set foot in, no, it was not her, it was the woman sitting in the fourth row back, with the plum colored dress that set ablaze the twinkling ash of her eyes, the woman with the molten gold for hair that draped around her shoulders like drippings of the sun, the woman with the patented black heels that she kept unconsciously twisting around her ankles, the woman that had leaned against the marble pillar of the ball room clutching a glass of red wine in her perfectly manicured fingertips while this man that stood before her now, had grasped at her trembling elbow and said softly, with a quiet and determined pulse in his voice that she had never heard before echo out to her, slowly and deliberately, almost as if he were measuring out the strength of his words in terms of an irresolute undying devotion, “I still love you,” and the woman that she knew, even now, with him standing at arm’s length beside her next to the ornate altar that now looked so silly, would always hold his heart, always…
“You may now kiss the bride.”
She inadvertently flinched when he lifted the veil from her powdered face, and there must have been tears in her eyes, because he leaned in and brushed the wetness from her cheeks and whispered, “I love you,” and even then she knew, when his lips pressed to hers deftly and tenderly and the applause of the audience erupted thunderously, that he did not, it would always be her, always.