What If It's Us- The Rest of the Story

Part 4: "We're Home"

**Disclaimer** There is a wedding in this section and thusly there is a lot more sexual content in this chapter. I would generously call a good portion of this chapter NSFW. It's similarly danced around as the sex scene in the original book is danced around. It's not always explicit, but it's there and they're young guys, so they can't keep their hands or anything else to themselves seeing as they are so in love they can't see straight. If you're a young teen, please be sure you're mature enough to read this content. **

Arthur: Thursday, May 22nd, 2025

Ben and I are now only two days out from the wedding, and we'll be returning home from our honeymoon on our second anniversary. Things could not possibly have lined up more perfectly, but I'm feeling a pretty heavy weight knowing how all of this came together so well.

First, the driver who hit Ben was determined to be at fault, as she admitted to having been texting when she took her foot off the break and hit him. She wrote him a long and heartfelt note of apology and her insurance company settled with Ben for the entire cost of his medical care, something close to 60k and an additional 50k in personal damages. We went to court with all of Ben's medical expenses and a letter from his boss stating that his performance at work had been significantly reduced and personal statements from myself and Dylan about the overall hardship Ben faced. That was a hard day, but when the verdict came in awarding Ben the money, we held each other and cried because somehow it felt like all of the struggle and the hours of PT and the shitty reaction to the anesthesia and the newfound fear of crosswalks he's developed (consequently making him feel like a bad New Yorker again) would be able to bring something good to our life.

The medical costs were paid directly to the hospital and the other 50k comes in monthly installments over 5 years. When we started getting monthly settlement checks of over $800, Ben was insistent that we use the money for honeymoon, so we set up a separate account and directly deposited them there.

The rest of our wedding fund was a blessing I could never have expected. I came out to my parents during my junior year of high school and they were very cool about it, but never in my life would I have expected my mom to change how she prepared for my future because I was gay. In November, the lawyer called my dad and my dad called me because they found that my mom had set up a fund. See, in traditional weddings, a wife's family might take the brunt of the cost of the wedding, but that's obviously not true of a wedding with two grooms. My mom, unbeknownst to my father, in addition to my college fund, began to squirrel away a couple hundred dollars a month in what she listed in a small, easily missed section of her will as Arthur's Wedding Fund. As I sat on the couch facetiming my dad, Ben held me as tears poured down my face. I was both so grateful for who she was and so sad she wasn't here in that moment, that I actually asked my dad if it was okay if we used it.

"Of course you're using it Arthur. It's yours. It's in your name and your mom wanted you to have it. With interest, there's about 15 thousand dollars in the account. Use it for the wedding, the honeymoon, whatever you need it for, Art. It's there for you. I'm sending you everything you need to access it by certified mail today. I love you, bud. I know Mom would have wanted this to be as amazing as you and she could make it." He smiled and wiped tears from his face with his thumb as we said our "I love you"s and hung up. Then Ben and I had a pretty cathartic cry together as we realized what this meant for our day and the added security we had because we had this money.

Once we got the paperwork, just before Thanksgiving, we used a bit of it to book a gorgeous outdoor wedding venue about an hour north of Manhattan. When we took a train up on the Saturday before Thanksgiving to tour The Powelton Club, we stood in front of the massive hundred-year-old oak, laden with the fall colors and heaviness of the late season, where they hold most of their ceremonies. Ben put his arms around me from behind and asked what I thought. "It's perfect," I breathed, tears in my eyes as the picture laid out before me in my mind. Ben and I under the oak tree surrounded by family and friends as the tree bloomed bright green in the springtime, so in love and so happy. He agreed and we put in our down payment that day.