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She did now.
And that didn’t count the groom’s cake. Or the petits fours with their initials in gold on the top.
Add the flowers, the music, seating charts, colors, themes, and despite the efficient and incredibly patient wedding planner, it all boiled down to nightmare.
She couldn’t wait until it was over and done.
And that probably made her an aberration.
Weren’t brides supposed to want the fuss and bother? Didn’t a bride want her wedding day to be special, unique, a fairy tale?
She did want it to be special, unique, and she very much wanted the happy ever after.
But.
And those buts had been coming fast over the last few weeks.Butit didn’t feel like her day, her special, unique, gloriously exciting day. At all. Somehow, it had slipped right out of her control. When she reminded herself it was Brandon’s wedding day, too, and he should have some say, it struck her he hadallthe say.
None of it reflected her vision or her wishes. It clearly reflected all of his.
And if their vision and wishes were so dramatically different, didn’t that mean they just weren’t suited?
If she dwelled on that, she worried. Like she worried when they spent three Saturdays house hunting and he pushed for the sleek, contemporary McMansion and she wanted the rambling old house with character.
But.
If she didn’t dwell on it, if she remembered the last eighteenmonths of being a couple, she couldn’t find anything to worry about.
A wedding day was just one day, and why shouldn’t Brandon have the fuss he wanted? A house? It’s what you put inside it that counted. They’d find a compromise, and make it a home.
Wedding jitters, she told herself. The Big Reality was setting in. And she had proof—literally—in the wedding invitation proof in her bag.
Accepting jitters, she canceled an appointment with the florist—couldn’t face it—and headed home.
She’d have a couple of quiet hours. Brandon had some groom thing to deal with, so she’d have the place to herself until he got home.
She decreed when he did, they’d open a bottle of wine, go over the wedding invitation proof, finalize that, then finalize the ever-growing guest list. Order the invitations, and be done with it—since he’d hired a calligrapher to address them.
Something she could’ve done, but hey, she wouldn’t complain aboutnotaddressing a couple hundred invitations.
She pushed through Boston’s Saturday traffic with the windows down and the music up. In eight weeks, she thought, the color would have exploded with fall—her favorite season. And all this would be behind her.
She was twenty-eight, closing in fast on twenty-nine and the end of another decade. She was ready to settle down, start a family. And in eight weeks, she’d marry the man she loved.
Brandon Wise—smart, talented, romantic. A man who’d taken it slow and easy when she’d been cautious about starting a relationship with a coworker.
He’d won her over—and she’d enjoyed being won over.
They rarely fought. He was incredibly sweet to her mother, and that mattered. He enjoyed the company of her friends, and she enjoyed the company of his.
Sure, she could think of a lot of ways they diverged. He’d go to a cocktail party, dinner party, art opening—name the social event—every night. And she needed to spread those things out, hold on to the quiet-at-home times.
He had more shoes than she did—and she liked shoes.
When he talked about buying a house, he talked about grounds crews, and she imagined mowing the grass and planting a garden.
But who wanted to marry and live with a clone?
Differences added variety.
