Just look over your shoulder

Chapter 14
On an early July morning, five months after Gerard’s 19th Birthday, on day 2,760 on this island and one year & nearly seven months after I broke my foot after our big fight, Gerard asks me if I want to become his husband.
I was standing in the kitchen area of our house, preparing some fish he had brought back the day before, when he came up behind me, curled his arms around me from behind, smelling so wonderfully soft and warm, kissed my neck and whispered, “Will you marry me,” into my ear.
You’d think that you’d have a thousand things running through your head when someone asks you the probably most important question of your life, you’d maybe be stunned or confused if someone asked you this when you never even thought of it before, hell, you might even be scared and uncertain. But not me, no. There was only one thing running through my head, and I took one of his hands, lifted it up and kissed his knuckles, breathing a “Yes,” onto them and Gerard told me soon after that my Yes was what he wished for his last birthday, and my heart did the biggest jump of joy and happiness when he told me this, keeping his promise of telling me.
I know that it’s meant to be. And I also know that he knows it, too.
We’ve always loved each other, in one way or another. My love for my brother has grown so much over the years, developed itself into something I didn’t even knew existed for so long and whenever I think that I can’t possibly love him any more than I do in that particular moment, I’m always proven wrong.
Literally, he is my whole life. And I want to spend the rest of my days with him.
With him as my brother, with him as my best friend and soulmate and now, as my lover and husband. All these terms describe what Gerard is to me. There’s not just one word to describe it. I know he feels the same about me, and I guess I will never truly understand how I got so lucky that my still so short life turned out the way it did so far.
Time can do so much. Nearly 8 years ago, I was just a kid going to third grade, sitting in my room and playing with my plushie donkey. Now, so many years later, me turning 16 at the end of Summer and Gerard reaching his 20s soon after, I’m a married Teenager, living on a desert island in the middle of the ocean with a pet parrot and Autumn and Ermintrude as our adopted daughters.
When we first got here, I never thought I’d ever be happy again. But then someone came along and taught me that everyone and everything can always turn out to be good again, made me smile on a daily base, protected me night and day, taught me things I didn’t know yet, wiped away my tears when I was having a bad moment, accepted when I wanted to be alone, gave me my first kiss, my first sexual experience, eventually took my virginity and told me he loved me over and over again. Sometimes with words, sometimes without.
That someone was Gerard. He’s always been there, all through my sometimes scary and sad, amazing, wonderful and perfectly complete life, and he will be there for every second in the future.
I know he’ll keep protecting me until I’m an old man with grey hair and wrinkly skin, I know he’ll keep making me smile and wipe away my tears if they should ever fall again, and I know they will. That’s just how life goes. You have good and bad moments, but the bad ones are so little compared to the good ones when I look at it in the big picture, and that is all thanks to Gerard.
Sitting on the beach now in my favourite yellow dress and braided hair, with the warm July sun on my back, listening to Autumn and Ermintrude play under the stairs where it’s cooler than on the hot sand, I stroke carefully over the small mark on my wrist that Gerard has matching with me on the same part of his body.
It’s a branding that we got instead of wedding rings. It might sound a bit extreme, but we talked about it and agreed that we wanted it. It’s a maybe one inch long, plain line. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s meant to be a symbol referred to the notches we carve into the bark of the palm tree day after day, year for year. We chose that exact symbol, if that’s even what you can call it, because it means so much to us. It means home, it means emotions, but most importantly it means time. Time we spent here together and will spend here in the future. Everything we went through so far and everything we want to go through together as the days here on this island go by, with our new life and new family, and if a ship should ever come by, we won’t get on it. We belong here now.
I stroke over the marked skin with the pad of my thumb and smile to myself, more happy than I ever was, and turn my head to look over my shoulder to catch a glimpse of Gerard, who’s wearing my white dress and once again works on our house to make it bigger and more beautiful than it already is and has been from day one. He catches me smiling and stops hammering for a moment to smile satisfied back at me, before going back to work with the smile still brightly on his beautiful face.
It’ll always be like that. I just have to look over my shoulder, and he will be there. Forever.
I’m so, so lucky.
The End.

Notes