After I Do Read Online Free PDF Page A

behind me, his arms wrapped around my shoulders, and he whispered into my ear, “Let’s spring for the big one. Let’s make all of our sex hotel sex.” My heart fluttered, and I blushed, and I told the man we’d take the king.

SIX YEARS AGO
    W e had a July wedding. It was outdoors on the wide lawn of a hotel just outside of Los Angeles. I wore a white dress. I threw my bouquet. We danced all night, Ryan spinning me around, holding me close, and showing me off. The morning after the festivities were over, we got into the car and headed out for our honeymoon. We had considered places like Costa Rica or Paris, maybe a cruise through the Italian Riviera. But the truth was, we didn’t have that kind of money. We decided to take it easy. We’d drive up to Big Sur and stay in a cabin in the woods, where no one could find us for a week. A fireplace and a beautiful view seemed like all the luxury we needed in the world.
    We got on the road early in the morning, hoping to make good time by beating midday traffic. We stopped for breakfast and again later for lunch. We played Twenty Questions, and I fiddled with the radio, tuning in to local stations as we passed through towns. We were in love, high on the novelty of marriage. The words husband and wife felt as if they had a shine to them. They were simply more fun to say than all the other words we knew.
    We were two hours outside of Big Sur when the tire blew. The loud bang scared us both out of our newlywed daze. Ryan quickly pulled over to the side of the road. I hopped out first; Ryan was a second behind me.
    “Fuck!” he said.
    “Calm down,” I told him. “It’s going to be OK. We just have to call Triple A. They will come out here and solve the whole thing.”
    “We can’t call Triple A,” he said.
    “Sure we can,” I told him. “I have the card in my wallet. Let me get it.”
    “No,” he said, shaking his head and pulling his hands up onto the back of his neck in a resigned position. “I forgot to pay the renewal fee.”
    “Oh,” I said. The disappointment was clear in my voice.
    “It came last month, and it said on it that we had to pay it by the fifteenth, and . . . with the wedding and everything going on at work, I just . . .” He shrugged, and his voice got defensive. “I forgot, OK? I’m sorry. I forgot.”
    I wasn’t mad at him. He made a mistake. But I was very concerned with what we were going to do about it. I was frustrated that I was in this position. If you do not have the ability to call Triple A, how do you fix a tire? We were not the sort of people who knew how to do that on our own. We were the sort of people who needed Triple A. I didn’t like that about us at that very moment. In fact, I was starting to think we were two useless idiots on the side of the road.
    “You don’t know how to fix a tire, right?” I asked him. I knew he didn’t. I shouldn’t have asked.
    “No,” he said. “I don’t. Thank you for highlighting that.”
    “Well, shit,” I said, the polite cushion around my voice fading and exposing my irritation. “What should we do?”
    “I don’t know!” he said. “I mean, it was an accident.”
    “Yeah, OK, so what do we do? We’re on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. How are we going to get to the cabin?”
    “I don’t know, OK? I don’t know what we’re gonna do. I think there is a spare tire in the trunk,” he said, walking back there to confirm it. “Yeah,” he said as he lifted the bottom out. “But there’s no jack, so I don’t know what we would even do.”
    “Well, we have to think of something.”
    “You could think of something, too, you know,” he said to me. “This isn’t only up to me.”
    “I never said it was, all right? Geez.”
    “Well? What’s your bright idea, then?”
    “You know what?” I said. “I . . . Why are we even fighting right now? We’re on our honeymoon.”
    “I know!” he said. “I know that! Do you have any idea how upset I