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Wow. I sound like a true idiot.
That could have been a good excuse, though, that Dave wouldn’t like me going on a work trip with my very handsome boss. But I don’t like the idea of my fake boyfriend sounding like one of those ridiculous jealous types, or Grayson thinking I’d go for that type of guy. Anyway, Fake Dave deserves better than that. He’s been working hard to save me from myself, after all.
“So, we’re good to go, then?” Grayson asks, his eyebrows moving up his forehead.
“I … guess we are,” I say, sickly butterflies swimming around in my stomach. I’m not sure if they’re there because if I don’t quickly come up with an ironclad reason not to go, I’ll not only be going on a trip with my crush-worthy boss, but it will also make it possible to attend Nadia’s wedding. Or is the sick feeling because if I don’t come up with a good excuse, I’m going to have to get up the nerve to throw myself down some stairs?
It’s all a lose-lose.
SIX YEARS AGO
THE SECOND WEDDING I WAS asked to be in was for my cousin, Amelia, who was marrying her neighbor and high school sweetheart, Ethan. And Ethan was a bit of a douchebag. I can say this now because their marriage only lasted four years. He cheated on her, which wasn’t a surprise. The surprise was that someone else was willing to have sex with Ethan. We’re all still a little shocked by that.
Amelia was my best cousin friend—my BCF, as we called each other growing up. Our moms are sisters and Amelia’s parents were divorced. Every summer my mom would pack Everett and me up and we’d go visit her and my aunt Tammy and cousin Cade (who was Everett’s age) in Nebraska. Those summers were some of my fondest memories from my childhood. When we were younger, Amelia and I spent the summer making up skits and games to keep us occupied. We played in the field behind her house, spotting animals (mostly birds), flying kites, stargazing at night, and during one particular picnic, finding out we were both allergic to carpenter ants.
When we got older, we spent most of our time trying to get the attention of dumb boys. Like the summer before our freshman year when we spent it spying on Ethan (he lived two doors down), “accidentally” throwing balls in his yard, and, one night, heart attacking his door with notes from his “secret admirer.”
It should be noted I thought Ethan was a butthead from the beginning. Especially when he came over to Amelia’s house the day after we taped hearts all over his front door and was bragging that he was sure the most popular girl in school, Kate, was the person behind it. Ethan, as already established, was no catch. And was obviously full of himself. But love is blind, and Amelia was heartbroken. She got over it, because by the next summer they were dating, and I got to spend my vacation being a third wheel. Summer visits were never the same after that.
The day of Amelia’s wedding, things started out pretty well. Just a couple of normal hiccups—the DJ was late due to traffic, even though everyone else who attended the wedding got there in time. And for a bit, we couldn’t find the veil, and Amelia had a small panic attack until it was found hanging just behind the maid of honor’s dress, where no one thought to look. As far as weddings go, it all seemed minimal to me.
Amelia’s dress was gorgeous. It was A-line and sleeveless, with a lace overlay on the bodice, and the skirt was layers and layers of tulle. She looked like a princess. Remember the tulle, though—it’s important to the story.
Like I said, everything was great, but then her maid of honor happened. It’s a well-known fact that the maid of honor’s job is to mediate conflict among the bridal party, but unfortunately for Amelia, her maid of honorwasthe conflict.
For privacy’s sake, we’ll call her Stephanie. Okay, fine. That was her real name, and you had to say all three syllables because Steph-a-nie “would rather die” (her actual words) than be referred to asSteph. Anyway, Stephanie got very tipsy on wine as we were getting ready for the ceremony, and tipsy Stephanie can be quite belligerent. Amelia knew this, since they were BFFs, and yet allowed her to keep topping off her wineglass.
The first thing she did was hide the veil. That’s right—it was Stephanie’s doing, and she’d even pretended to help us look for it. She said it was all for a bit of fun, but when no one found it funny, she told us we were a bunch of babies and refilled her glass of wine.
The next thing she did was berate the makeup artist, saying she looked like trash, wiping off all her makeup and redoing it herself. Mind you, it looked worse in my opinion. Then she went after the hairstylist, telling Amelia she’d wasted her money on novices.
She didn’t stop there. She also chewed out the wedding coordinator and spilled wine on the floor of the bridal suite after tripping over something (she blamed it on another bridesmaid, but my money is on her own drunk feet) and refused to clean it up.
My cousin has a kind heart, with the fact that she somehow agreed to marry douchewaffle Ethan as strong evidence. She made excuses for Stephanie, but when I saw her wipe away a couple of tears, I decided right then that I’d do whatever it took to make sure her day went perfectly.
Little did I know I’d make it even worse.
Before I get to that part—Stephanie had a couple more moves in her reign of terror. First, she decided as we were lining up that she couldn’t walk down the aisle with the best man, for reasons unbeknownst to everyone else (and perhaps even herself), so I quickly switched partners with her.
Thankfully Stephanie decided not to ruin the actual wedding part, because after that, she behaved herself. The ceremony went on without any problems, and everything seemed to be looking up from there.
Except that between the ceremony and the reception, there was a little cocktail hour for the guests while the bridal party was supposed to be taking pictures. But no one could find Stephanie or the best man, whom Stephanie had recently decided she hated. It didn’t take a detective to figure out where they were and what they were probably doing, and not wanting Amelia to know, I decided to take matters into my own hands.
I gathered the photographer, Amelia, and Ethan and dragged them over to a beautiful tree I spied in the distance—away from the rest of the bridal party as they tried to find Stephanie.
We’d been there for about fifteen minutes, snapping pictures of Amelia and Ethan together, and bridal shots of Amelia on her own. It truly was the prettiest spot, and the photographer kept complimenting me for finding it. I felt like patting myself on the back because it was a completely lucky move on my part. That was until Amelia started squirming and jumping and making little screeching noises.
“Something’s biting me,” she yelled, and then, grabbing up her skirts, she hightailed it away from the tree.
They were on an anthill. A carpenter anthill, to be precise.
To avoid her crazy maid of honor, I’d sent my cousin to an anthill, where hundreds of ants had crawled into the layers of tulle on her dress, and a bunch of others were crawling up her legs and biting her. And … she’s allergic.
Big red hives started to form on her legs. We tried to get rid of all the pesky bugs that were basically everywhere in the skirt of her dress. I had to be careful because I’m also allergic, but at this point, she was screaming, and we were working so hard to remove the hundreds of little red ants from the tulle that I had to just deal. I walked away with only a few bites, which felt sort of unfair since this was my doing.
In the end, we had to race her back to the bridal suite and take off the dress while someone found some Benadryl. It took a bunch of us—Stephanie not included—about thirty minutes of working together to remove as many of the bugs as we could. During the reception, she kept finding and removing ants from her dress.
Amelia called me not too long ago to tell me that when she got that dress out of storage after her divorce, to give it away or possibly burn it, she found—even after having the dress steam cleaned—two ant corpses still in the tulle.
