The first thing Ren noticed when he woke was the absence of ceremony.
Not absence in the sense of loss, but in the gentler, stranger sense that the house had finally stopped arranging itself around the expectations of a public event. No one was waiting for a cue. No one was checking the position of flowers or the alignment of chairs or whether the music had begun on time. The wedding had already happened. The reception had already happened. The speeches, the laughter, the endless stream of congratulations, the tearful smiles and the decorative grandeur of it all had passed through the night and into memory. What remained now was the quieter truth beneath it, the fact that he was lying in bed beside Fang as his husband, and that the world had accepted this with all the calm inevitability of a sunrise.
Ren kept his eyes closed for a moment longer, listening.
