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“You’re gonna marry me, right?” Bellamy asks, without raising his head from her lap. “When we get down to the ground.”
Echo laughs, surprised, and the look he gives her is sleepy-eyed and fond. They’re in their bed, which not too many months ago she would’ve thought of as being his bed. He’s been dozing with his head in her lap for a while now as she reads, flipping through the dog-eared, aged book of poetry someone found tucked away in one of the unused rooms long ago. They’ve all passed it around in times of boredom. Someone’s family heirloom, left behind and possibly forgotten by the original owners, if they’re still among the living, but at least it’s been put to good use since.
“What?” Bellamy laughs. “I’m husband material.”
“Oh, definitely.”
He rolls his eyes. “I’d like to think I’m a decent boyfriend.”
“I’d even say above average,” Echo says, widening her eyes innocently.
Bellamy huffs, amused. Echo lets her fingers slip through his curls as he lifts his head from her lap and sits up. He rearranges himself on the bed, leaning back against the headboard and sliding an arm around her waist to pull her so that their bodies halfway overlap, her back and his chest brushing. Echo allows this, amused enough to entertain whatever wild hair has taken him over at this hour, when they should be turning off the lights and going to sleep. “I’m serious,” he says, resting his chin on her shoulder. “Unless you don’t want to.”
“I’ve never thought about it, really,” Echo says, closing the book. She rubs the pad of a finger over a worn spot on the cloth cover.
“Is marriage not a big deal to your people?” he asks.
Is it? Or was it, she wonders, but that’s a path well-trod. She can’t know what parts of her culture, if any, survived the death wave, and they’re as yet only four years into their five-year stay here. That makes no mention of the fact that Azgeda would not claim her now, even if she tried to claim it. “I don’t know,” Echo says. “People called themselves married, sometimes. Occasionally there were wedding celebrations.”
“Did you ever go to one?” Bellamy asks. She can feel him studying her profile, but without turning her head she can’t read his expression.
“Once, actually,” she says. “Queen Nia’s youngest sister had a feast in honor of her marriage. I was there as part of the queen’s guard. I must’ve been—fifteen or so.” A memory rises to the surface, surprising her; she hasn’t reflected upon this in at least ten years. “A boy asked me to dance.”
Well, perhaps not a boy; she can’t remember much about him, including his age, but he was young enough. He had close-shorn hair and was tall, and had smiled at her cheekily when he approached her, though she stood near Queen Nia’s table.
She can hear the smile in Bellamy’s voice. “You danced?”
Echo huffs. “I said he asked.”
“Poor bastard,” Bellamy says, very seriously, and Echo laughs. “Tell me about the feast. You must’ve had some fun, at least.”
Echo searches her memory; she’s honestly not sure that she did, but she does not voice this, lest he tease her for it. “Everyone was very drunk,” she says. “The children made a mess of things during the feast, but nobody got angry with them. There was fish, I think. Stew. And a cake. I think I was sent away early; I was leaving before dawn the next morning, headed for Boudalan lands.”
She can remember the mission better than Princess Lita’s wedding, of course. All the intel she’d gathered had proven useful, and she’d been able to come and go without bloodshed.
“That’s a shame,” Bellamy says. “That you weren’t allowed to—just be a guest.”
“Wasn’t allowed to enjoy myself, you mean,” Echo says, turning her head slightly to look at him. They’ve brushed against this topic before, many times. Years ago she would have assumed he was judging her and her upbringing, and she would’ve felt protective of Azgeda, or worse she would have felt pitied; now she knows that he speaks this way because he cares about her, and wishes he could shield her from things that happened long ago. “I was doing my duty. It wasn’t the hardest thing that was asked of me, certainly.”
This close, she can see pensiveness stealing over Bellamy’s expression, and while she appreciates his concern, she doesn’t want either of them to dwell on it. “What about Skaikru?” she asks. “Weddings must have been special, then.”
“Yeah, they were,” Bellamy says, thoughtful. “Their wedding day was one of the few days most people could get out of work. You’d go up to the admin office, here on the Go-Sci Ring, and fill out the paperwork. Recite a few vows. Sometimes people brought their friends and family along for that bit. Then, that night—when most people were done for the day—there’d always be a party in that person’s section. Kids running around, people drinking, same deal.”
“You must’ve been to several, then.”
“The parties, yeah,” Bellamy says. “I got so drunk I threw up after one.”
Echo snorts. “You’re joking.”
“Serious as a heart attack,” Bellamy says, grinning. “I was sixteen. I’d never had moonshine before. A bunch of guys in my year had gotten ahold of some and I wanted to fit in. I thought my mother was going to lose it when I came back to our quarters like that. Octavia thought I was just sick, though.”
Echo hums sympathetically, almost without thinking about it. Bellamy’s childhood was much different than hers, of course, but she often feels what he seems to feel about hers, the twinges of sorrow and protectiveness that can’t be acted upon.
“Not everybody got married, of course,” Bellamy continues. “My mom didn’t. But it probably made the one-child policy easier to keep track of, and it was tradition. Special, I guess.”
“Right,” Echo says, nodding.
Bellamy’s thumb rubs a light circle against her ribcage, almost enough to tickle but not quite. “Since you don’t have a family name,” he says, “you could take mine if we got married. If you wanted. You’d be Echo Blake. Did people switch clans when they got married?”
“I don’t know,” Echo says, possibly a bit distantly, as she turns the idea of Echo Blake over in her mind. “No one married or had family outside of Azgeda. At least no one I ever met. It might’ve been different elsewhere.”
Bellamy rests his chin on her shoulder again, and Echo tilts her neck, letting their heads rest against each other. “You know,” Bellamy says, “if this was a movie, I’d have had to have this conversation down on one knee. Do Grounders do that?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Right. Well, it’d be traditional, mostly, in terms of our genders,” Bellamy says. “But otherwise, to express my devotion.”
Echo’s cheeks are hot. “You’re teasing me,” she says.
“Hey,” Bellamy says, softly, lifting his head again so that he can look at her. “Of course not. I mean, I am, but I’m serious about this, too.”
“Where did this come from?” Echo asks, aware that Bellamy is watching her closely. She looks at the book again, at the faded print on the cover. Notable Love Poems of the Nineteenth Century. Bellamy had called it cheesy, once, but he’s read it cover-to-cover, too.
“Nowhere, I guess,” he says. “I was just watching you read. And I thought I’d like to call you my wife someday. If you’re okay with that.”
Echo bites her bottom lip, surprised by how close she is to smiling. “You could do that regardless.”
“Sure, I could,” Bellamy says, grinning, “but the traditional route does have some perks, you know.”
Now Echo does smile, and Bellamy gives her a little squeeze, fond. “How about this,” he says. “You take some time to think over the idea. And I’ll save all the kneeling stuff for when we get to the ground. Sound good?”
“Alright,” Echo says, though she’s made up her mind, quite suddenly and yet—not at all. “I can do that.”
Bellamy kisses her cheek, then her shoulder, then her neck. “I meant what I said,” he says. “About being devoted, and whatnot.”
Echo bites her lip again to hold a straight face. “You should write poetry."
“Would it help my case if I did?” Bellamy asks, half-earnestly, and Echo laughs.