[78] Know? Do? Hope?

We marry in Budapest on our slow return to the Dream City. It will silence the people we don’t want to have to listen to so that we can get back to things that matter. Budapest, because Charlotte is there that month and can summon witnesses that her parents wouldn’t dare to challenge. We need those, with Emma still … well … I’d been asking myself lately. (On her next birthday, she will sit down in front of the birthday cake she’s baked all by herself and tell me what she just turned. Then she’ll wait to see if I count back. Then I’ll get her to do it for me.) So we get married at the Council House there, and Charlotte offers us her villa in the hills for a week. We sleep through a couple of days – getting married makes you tired, no matter how easy you try to make it for yourself. We don’t even touch each other the first two nights, from remembering what we’ve just done and how we came to do it. She has a hundred ways to let me know she wants it all the time. I’ve hardly thought about sex since we met – she does that for us both and then makes sure we’re always having it. So, where did it go? Then I wake up the third morning and see her brushing her teeth in the marble bathroom, her silk cami flowing down her champagne breasts and her plum peaking out through her ivory towers, and she must sense I’m there because her nipples start to blossom in the mirror before she looks at me, and suddenly we remember to stop thinking about what we’ve always just done.