Chapter 18

Jo is ticklish on the bottoms of her feet. A lot of people are, I know, but finding that a fingertip dragged gently down the sole of her foot leaves her uncontrollably giggly and therefor perfect for scooping into one's arms for loving. Monday was the previously discussed informal practice session. Tuesday was the real thing at the music department. Still, Jo is a responsible sort and we missed nothing of her schedule. So am I.

She's an accomplished musician, and that translates to practice. Every evening. And that means that I practice with her a bit. That's part of the creation of the 'us' in our brand new marriage. Also, I have the rare privilege of attending to domestic chores to the strains of a concert-grade flute in my ears.

And beware when the music stops. Barefoot in the house, Jo is stealthy and I am an easy capture.

So it's Friday and I'm off work and Jo's parents are in town. I wish my own mom and dad were still around to see Jo. In my mind I can hear their voices of approval. I stand by myself here. Only child. Not that close to cousins in the first place and hundreds of miles away if they did know and cared to attend. It's me and Jo and her parents.

And a few friends. We snagged the community hall at the apartment where I lived. Jo called on a friend who knew a friend who knew a minister who'd do a wedding like ours, just one non-denominational step from a civil ceremony. Okay, so I invited Brad, for sure, and since she sort of needed to witness it, Jennie, and a couple of other denizens of the engineering warren. Jo's contribution included Key, of course, accompanied by Hutch. "I'm hoping he'll take the hint," she opined. There were promises from a couple of others.

Friday I got out a bit early, trading off a previous late night of mad engineering for a little time to go home and get ready to meet Jo's parents in the final twenty-four hours before I became their registered son in law. So I went home to my wife. Walked in the door. She was sitting sideways on the sofa with a textbook.

"Honeymoon's over, I guess."

"Not even. This is the last economics course I need, and we'll have a mid-semester test next week. And if I jump up and get too excited, we'll just be miserable. I have another day or two on my period."

"Understood," I said. "But if I don't move fast and keep my hands to myself, can I get at least a chaste little kiss?"

Her eyes twinkled as she smiled. "Oh, of course. I'm sorry. I find this course a horrible drudge. What is it you said about bean-counters being a scourge upon the universe?"

"Right there with lawyers and government regulators," I said. "And my baby's a business major."

"Double major, sir, thank you very much," she said. "And don't you forget it or I will bop you with my flute!" Giggle.

I walked over to the sofa, bent down and kissed the crown of that red head, then gently massaged her shoulders and neck.

"Heard from my in-laws?" I asked.

"Oh, yes. They have landed, en route to the hotel, we are expected at the restaurant at 1900 hours. Mom assured me that due to TSA, Dad has made the trip totally bereft of instruments of mayhem."

"Which means that he intends to dismember me with a steak knife."

"What!?!"she giggled, "And turn his beloved daughter into a widow? Hardly. I shall be suitably indulged." With a loud thump, the econ book hit the floor. "Press on me and kiss me and possess me, Stonewall Jackson!"

"Oh well, there goes the self-restraint," I said as I complied. Her hands cradled the back of my head, lining me up for kisses. One of us had to keep track of the time. I wanted a shower before going out to eat. I mentioned it.

Giggle. "Okay." A few more kisses. "Let's go shower."

"Okay!" I said, thinking I sounded like an excited little boy sometimes since I've been around Jo. I stood up., caught her when she stood, kissed her.

"I didn't know what I was missing, not having you, Stoney," she said.

"You are so darned perfect, Jo," I said.

"Because I worship you?" she asked.

"That would be one of the signs," I said.

"And you worship me," she retorted.

"Absolutely."

"Then we absolutely must be married," she said. She pushed me back towards the hall and the shower. "Wash me, guy."

The hot water was running by the time we got undressed and I stopped to gaze at the neat example of femininity before me. She saw me looking. "Diana, the Huntress," I said. "Or some Celtic-Norse version"

"Freya," she said. "But I always pictured Norse goddesses as being a bit more on the hefty, big-breasted side."

"Okay, then you're a Celtic forest nymph."

"Whatever I am, I'm yours."

"Good!" I said. "I've aways wanted to be married to a supernatural creature."

Soapy and wet is a pleasant way to play, but Jo pushed my hands away from her pussy. "Period. Yuck! Soon enough, baby," she said.

"Yeah, but you get to play with mine," I said.

"Nope. You gave it to me. It's mine." She was still in the curiosity mode about how I worked, lovingly stroking and squeezing me to hardness. But no further.

We finished the shower and got out and took care of the rest of the ritual. She shoved some cologne in my direction. "I like this on you," she said. "And not just your face." She gave me a wicked grin. I know what she wanted. I put a dab on my own pubic swell. She handed me the hairbrush. "Here! Do the back!"

Like giving a kid candy. I loved the color, the shine, the clean smell right after a shower, the 'bunny rabbit' smell at the end of the day. I brushed, finally got overcome by the whole idea, nuzzled my nose through her hair to the back of her neck.

"Stoppit! You KNOW what that does."

"Yeah," I laughed. "I do. Like you don't know a dozen things that do the same to me."

"And if we take off down that path we'll be late for dinner. Besides, I want ... I can't."

"Okay, princess. Let's get dressed." That precipitated a flurry of activity ending with Jo in a blouse and a flared skirt and me in slacks and a business shirt. The restaurant where we would meet her folks was in the upper tier of informal destinations. We'd fit in nicely as were were.

She touched my face. "Baby," I said, "Are you sure we should be wearing rings? Isn't that sort of rubbing their noses in this?"

"Nope. I want them to know I'm ... we're serious," she said. "We'll take them off before the ceremony tomorrow, then it's never coming off again. Never."

"Then kiss me and let's go," I said. "I like my ring. And my Jo."

We walked into the restaurant just like the first time I'd met her mom and dad, Jo hanging onto my arm, smiling. Anders rose from his seat. I shook his hand. "Anders. Bridgette. How are you this evening?"

"We're fine," Bridgette said. "Both of us. And my daughter looks happy. So how is my son?"

"Sit, son," Anders said.

"Yessir," I replied.

"Stoney, it's not an order. And relax. We're happy. A bit surprised at the timing, but happy." He smiled.

"Really, Dad?" Jo asked. "That's soooo important to me," she said, her voice sounding almost like a six-year-old with a home-made greeting card.

"Johanna Elise," Bridgette said, "had we other opinions, do you not think we would have told you? Have I not? In the past?"

"No, Mom," she said. "But Stoney just popped up on my screen and knocked me over. I don't want to do without him."

"I was the same way with your father, dear," Bridgette said. "Your grandmother fretted over all the imagined stereotypes of dashing American military officers leading tender girls astray. On her deathbed she admitted that she was wrong and that she'd wasted a large portion of the joy in her life worrying about me. I am not going to make that mistake."

"Thank you," I said. "I am a long way past the 'dashing' part anyway."

Anders has a wry smile. He used it on us. "I question that, Stoney. The first time you went out in public with my daughter you went to her aid in what I consider to be a quite dashing manner." He paused. "Measured. But dashing, nonetheless. Bridgette and I discussed it quite extensively."

"How so?" I asked. "I don't see much to discuss."

"The facts, son, that after that incident you recoiled back to an apparently stable and genteel demeanor. Johanna tells us of your lives twining together. Who you speak with, the manner of conversations, how you two spend idle time, music, life. You do not appear to be given to reckless adventure."

"Hardly," I said. "I've got some friends who are into, as they call it, 'extreme sports'. I don't..."

"One day in Iraq was extreme enough." His steel-blue eyes read me like a book, a skill transmitted to his daughter.

"Yessir," I said. I know that Jo caught the little shudder as that group of memories played through my head. He caught it. "Jo explained to us what she saw from that day. Stoney, you're not the only man to have those effects, and..."

"I have held my own husband, Stoney," Bridgette said. "He can recite the name and rank and hometown and family of ever man in his command who fell. It's a heavy thing, to be sure. But that same character that makes those faces come back is that character that has kept him by my side through all the moves and the trials and exertions of life." She smiled at Jo. "A mother can never be sure, but with the announcement that she has chosen you, I relaxed because I seem to have passed on to my daughter that which my mother passed on to me."

Jo started to speak. "Wait, Jo," Anders said. "Stoney, what the two of us are saying is that despite the startling manner in which our daughter reported your marriage as being a fait accompli, we are more than happy with the outcome. Since she started university, Jo had found her own way, something that caused more than a small amount of fretting and worrying from Bridgette and I. As her college career nears an end, we have become increasingly comfortable with her choices. Then you came along, the first reports causing us renewed concern. We are no longer concerned."

"I'm glad. Since I met Jo and got to know her, I cannot imagine returning to life without her."

At one o'clock the next afternoon we were all gathered in the apartment's community room, I in one of my 'respectable engineer' suits, Johanna breathtakingly beautiful in a shimmering dark green dress with flowing lines that harkened to cool climes of two different homelands. The emerald green set her fiery hair aglow.

Anders and Brad saw my face as she stood beside her dad. Brad had to make a comment: "Damn, Stoney! You know the reason Northern European women are so beautiful, huh?"

Anders and I both looked at him, awaiting the answer. Anders didn't know Brad. I did. I knew that he was getting ready to drop one on us. "Why is that, Brad?" I asked.

"Because the Vikings didn't bring the ugly ones home with them..."

Anders clinched his jaw. At first I thought he was offended, but no, he was trying NOT to laugh. Finally he trusted himself to open his mouth slightly. "True," he said. "Absolutely true."

The rest was a blur. I remember looking at a radiant face, green-clad, a simple strand of twisted little blossoms circling a perfect head, eyes, lips, the constellation of freckles.

Her mom helped with the make-up. "Don't touch the freckles," Jo told her. "My husband adores them."

"So does mine," she said. "We have such oddly perfect mates, do we not?"

Perfection was my Johanna as I slipped the ring back onto her finger.

"You may kiss the bride," the minister said.

I did. Just a chaste brush. If I'd have given in fully to my emotions, I would have fallen down at the feet and worshipped this goddess. And I was wedded to her. "Two become one flesh," the minister had read from the old text. Under my breath I repeated the real vows from the weekend before: 'and one soul and one spirit'.

Behind the partition of the community room the caterers had a spread laid out.

Music? Johanna. Life WAS music. "We're doing this different," Jo announced. "Stoney and I will do our own. Won't be long. But Stoney makes my heart sing."

We played a duet. I played and we both sang a couple of happy songs. The sound system took over for a waltz. I danced with my bride. I danced with the bride's mother, saw my beautiful apparition of a wife dancing with her blonde bear of a father.

In keeping with the low-key theme, we escaped amid cheers, hit my waiting SUV and were off on the official 'honeymoon', a night at an upscale hotel an hour's drive away.

"I promise you, princess, that we will revisit this honeymoon thing," I told her.

"And I told you that last weekend on the boat was more magic than any contrived production we could imagine. Stoney, this is me. Johanna. You know me. It's not about the artificial and contrived. It's about the real things. You and I, we are real. Love. It's real. Music. It's real."

So we caught a movie. Giggled. Hand in hand. Arm in arm. Walked along the coastal levy, feeling the wind coming in off the Gulf, the humidity like a moist blanket, watching the moonrise. I only wish she hadn't changed into her 'Jo uniform': jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, instead of that diaphanous green dress. In my mind's eye I saw her standing with the moon disc at her back, a vision enough to make a man believe in the Old Gods and the spirits of the forest and glen.

Everywhere I looked, I put Jo there. The rocks of the jetty thrusting out into the waves? Jo, cross-legged, flute at her lips calling forth the creatures of the sea, who would marvel and dance at the song. That little alcove where the jetty abutted the seawall? Jo there. Sitting, feet drawn up beneath her, arms wrapped around her knees waiting for me with a smile on her lips, eyes sparkling to put the stars to shame.