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The first time he saw her, it was like looking into the sun. She was so bright that she made his eyes sting and yet he couldn’t look away. Her hair was swept away from her face in a trio of buns, a funny affectation that he adored immediately, and she was dressed in neutral tans and browns. He noticed the sprinkle of freckles across her face and recalled that his mother used to say that freckles were where the sun kissed the skin and had a wild thought that he wished he was the sun that kissed those marks into her skin.
Then she smiled and he could have sworn his heart stopped. She was smiling, laughing with two men who were seated next to each other and just as he wondered if one of them might be her boyfriend, the one with the black curls leaned into and place a kiss to the forehead of the darker man and he saw he radiant joy at the expression of affection mixed with just a tint of longing. So, he walked over to them and introduced himself, offered to buy them a round. She smiled and extended her hand.
“I’m Rey,” she’d said. Of course it was; she was the sunlight, after all.
Their first date was a week later, she wore a red dress that looked incredible on her and he found out what it felt like to be the one to make her laugh. They had dinner and talked about themselves at length. She was a recent college graduate, working a steady, but boring desk job that she didn’t really care for. She wanted to travel and had a passport without a single stamp in it. When he told her about his travels abroad, her eyes lit up and she plied him with questions. At the end of the dinner, they had coffee and dessert and when she had a dollop of cream on her lip, he resisted the urge to lick it off her.
They held hands and walked through the city streets after they finished dinner. He asked about her family, was deeply saddened by her answer. She asked about his and he launched into story after story about the trouble his parents, godfather, and uncle got into. She laughed until she couldn’t breathe and he felt distinctly satisfied by his family for the first time in a while.
They saw each other several times a week for two months before things got more heated. He took her out on a drive one night, choosing to get away from the city for an hour or so. They’d ended up kissing in his car in moonlight until he had to force himself to stop, not wanting their first time together to be a hurried coupling in the backseat of a car. She spent the night at his place and when she slept curled against him like a cat, he felt content. That night he slept better than he had in years.
The next morning when he woke up, she wasn’t in the bed beside him. It shouldn’t have surprised him that his Rey was the type to wake up with the sun and when he stumbled out of his bedroom, bleary eyed, he followed his nose to the scent of fresh coffee and found her seated in his overly large bay window, looking out into the city in nothing but a t-shirt of his she’d found in a drawer. Her hair was a riotous mess around her and she’d pulled the neatly folded blanket from his couched and wrapped herself in it. When she heard his footsteps, she turned around and his breath caught in his chest.
“Don’t you just love the snow?”
He spent that Saturday with her, wrapped up in each other alternating between watching the snow and making love. The very next day, he went out and bought a ludicrous amount of clothes in the size he’d sneakily seen on the label of her jeans and enough pretty smelling body wash, shampoo and conditioner that she could stay with him in relative comfort for as long as she wanted. The next time she spent the night, she laughed when he told her of his excursion, but the following morning, she was comfortably dressed in a pair of jeans and a cashmere sweater and they went out for a wonderful breakfast and picked out a Christmas tree.
They never discussed living together, but Rey was at his place more often than she was at his and when she mentioned offhandedly, six months into their relationship, that her lease was up in another month and they were raising the rent above what she could afford, he simply asked her to stay with him. She tried to offer to help pay the rent, but he’d refused. She’d argued with him, but he’d gently stood his ground, finally convincing her that the money would be better used put towards her student loans, minimal though they were.
Their routine was comfortable. They had her friends over at least once a week and he found that he enjoyed their company as much as she did. They had an easy way of making everyone feel comfortable and the love they had for each other was deep and abiding. They expressed it in many small ways and one evening, after they’d left, he’d turned to Rey, kissed her temple tenderly and whispered that he loved her.
“I know,” she’d replied and he’d swept her off her feet and they’d sunk into their bed and into happiness.
She’d met his parents and they’d approved of her so thoroughly that it wasn’t uncommon for them to drop by his and Rey’s place unannounced for the joy of seeing Rey’s happiness. His mother knew she’d had no real parents growing up and clung to her like the daughter she’d always hoped she’d have one day, but had never been able to produce. It wasn’t uncommon for her to come by and take Rey out for ‘girl time’ while his father was constantly trying to steal her away to talk about their mutual love of cars and planes.
For Rey’s birthday, his father had gotten her piloting classes and Rey’s overwhelming happiness had expressed itself in a tight hug that made his tough old father tear up. He’d gone in a similar, but different direction and had booked them flights and hotels and took her around to some of the most beautiful destinations in the world. She enjoyed every second of their trip together and when they came back, he’d often find her flipping through her passport and running her fingertips across the pages that were no longer empty.
On the anniversary of their first meeting, he took her back to the bar where he’d first spotted her. It was empty, save her friends and his family and hundreds of flowers. He’d gotten down on one knee and before he could finish his well-planned speech, she was throwing herself into his arms.
“Yes!”
His mother had waited only a few minutes before she swept Rey away from him and eagerly hugged her. Rey returned his mother’s joy and when she mentioned the idea of calling her ‘mom’ the older woman dissolved into happy tears and hugged her closer. His father came up beside him and wrapped an arm around him, joking that he’d never imagined that a girl like Rey would love him. He added, very seriously, that he thought the same about his own wife loving him and made a joke about the luck of the men in his family before joining the raucous joy.
He watched his fiancé laugh and cry and when she held her hand out to him, he saw the sparkle of the ring he’d put on her finger and thought that there was nothing that would ever measure to how beautiful she looked then.
He’d been wrong to think that, he realized, when he saw her walking down the aisle to him, his own father giving her away. She’d put her hair up in the same trio of buns it had been in when he’d seen her the first time, only now fragrant white flowers had been threaded through them and even under the veil he could see the joy that had first pulled his eye to her that night. She was radiant and he thought that she could put even the sun to shame that day.
He’d written his vows to her and when he recited them, she openly cried, not a care in the world for anything but their love. He promised to love her forever and be the man and husband she deserved. When it came time for them to repeat after the priest, his voice trembled a little, but hers was strong and even despite the happy tears.
“I do.”
He hadn’t given much thought to anything but keeping his wife happy as much as he could. When they fought, a rare thing given how little the idea of hurting her in any way appealed to him, he always held her afterwards, soothed her temper and told her all the things he loved about her.
He could have been perfectly content for them to go on the way they were going forever. Until one day he came home from work to his wife’s radiant face and a home pregnancy test clutched in her hand. He hadn’t realized how much he wanted a family until Rey’s exultant grin and overjoyed announcement.
“I’m pregnant!”
He was going to be a father. As the months passed, the love for his wife that he thought was already at capacity grew further. Her body changed, become softer and fuller and everyday there was something new to see. The first time he felt his daughter’s gently fluttering kick against his hand, he realized that the love he thought was all consuming wasn’t even the beginning of the love he could feel for another person. His wife grew more beautiful in his eyes with every passing week even as she jokingly complained that she looked like she’d swallowed a watermelon whole. Any craving she had, he was eager to satiate, no matter the time. He took great joy in helping her decorate the nursery, in surprising her with more baby clothes, more toys, and always a little present for her, a thank you for doing all the work it took to make their family complete.
When her time came, he was with her every second he could be. He reassured her over and over again that it was okay to scream and that she could do whatever she wanted to make herself feel better. He wasn’t surprised when she faced this new challenge with a determination and when she held their daughter for the first time, he was blown away by the way it transformed her from tired and pained to a woman who glowed in her happiness and contentment. It seemed like the universe was willing to recreate perfection because their daughter looked exactly like Rey.
“I want to name her after your mother.”
For the first several weeks, he stubbornly insisted that he should be the one to wake up with Leia whenever she screamed. Rey had protested, but he kissed her forehead and reminded her that she’d done all the hard work up to this point and that she needed to rest whenever possible so she could recuperate. He watched his wife avidly, afraid that she would somehow succumb the way his grandmother had, but she was resilient and soon it was as if she’d never gone through what he’d privately determined a massive medical trauma.
His daughter seemed to have the same radiance his wife did and he found himself waking up in the middle of the night just to hang over her crib and watch her sleep. Several times, Rey caught him doing just that. By the time their daughter was a year old, Rey found him studying their child and wound her arms around his middle.
“I think she needs a sibling.”
She got two. Rey had twins the next time around and they moved out of the city into a large, beautiful home. Sometimes, he missed the lights and action of the city, but whenever he did, he surrounded himself with his incredible family and their light was all he needed.
It was all he could have ever wanted.