Off Limit: Claimed by My Ex-Fiancé's Stepdad novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: The Real Ferry

We got married on the 6:30 boat out of Whitehall on the Sunday after Labor Day.

You can't rent the Staten Island Ferry.

We just got on it, like everybody else.

The crew got on with us.

The flyman wore his pressed shirt, and the deck crew wore ties they'd borrowed from each other.

The wig master had done everyone's hair in the green room after the matinee, for free, and cried twice.

The girl from Baltimore came in a yellow dress, holding the swing's hand.

They'd stopped pretending they weren't together sometime in August.

Jude's old understudy came too, from the show across 46th Street, with his kid from Ohio on his shoulders.

Joanie came in a black suit and a clerical collar she'd bought online.

"Is that real?" I'd asked her at the terminal.

"The license is real. I got ordained on a website in twenty minutes. The collar's from a costume shop on Eighth."

Her wife had fixed her tie for her, twice.

I walked myself onto the boat.

Nobody gave me away. The man who would have was already off the back of this boat.

My dress was ivory and plain, with thin straps and a skirt that moved in the wind.

It had one zipper down the back.

I'd told the seamstress I was never doing buttons again, and she'd laughed until she stuck herself.

My mother's bracelet was on my left wrist. The little gold mask swung when I walked.

My father's work gloves were in my bag.

I didn't need to wear them. I just wanted them on the boat.

Ward was waiting on the open back deck in a navy suit, with the wind in his hair.

When he saw me come through the cabin door, he forgot to stand up straight.

The boat was half full of ordinary people going home on a Sunday.

There were families with strollers, a man with a bicycle and two nurses in scrubs.

They worked out what was happening and came out onto the back deck to watch.

The horn blew.

The boat pulled out of the slip, and Manhattan started getting smaller behind us, gold in the evening light.

"It looks better going away," the flyman said behind me, and somebody passed him a tissue.

Joanie stood at the rail with a folded index card.

"Okay," she said. "Dearly beloved and random commuters."

The commuters laughed.

"We are gathered on this boat," Joanie said, "because the last time these two tried to do this on a fake one, it went really, really badly. For one of them."

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