Almost a Bride

by Jo Watson

  This was not the reaction I had been expecting, at all. But Damien’s sudden laughter caused the corners of my mouth to curve into the tiniest smile. “It was such a terrible accent.”

  Damien laughed a little more. “In fact, I wish we’d come earlier to see this whole thing play out.”

  “Are you serious?” Jane’s voice cut through the building laughter; Lilly had also joined in.

  “Did he say ‘g’day’ and ‘mate’ and…?” Damian asked, barely able to control another round of choking laughter.

  “He called me his sheila once!” I added as my smiles had turned to soft chuckles. This even caused Jane to start laughing. I face-palmed and shook my head in my hands. “And this one time, he told Trevv that he liked to play his didgeridoo while on walkabout.”

  Well that was it. Chaos broke out as we all started laughing. Damien almost fell out of the hammock and Lilly reached for him as she desperately tried to say something through the laughing.

  “Oooh, oohh…what was that Australian guy called, the one that wrestled crocodiles and wore their teeth as a necklace?” Lilly was snapping her fingers in between the laughs.

  “Crocodile Dundee!” Jane quickly jumped up. Typical, she basically knew everything. Every tiny, seemingly insignificant fact was firmly planted inside that supersmart brain of hers.

  When the laughter finally stopped, I was feeling so much better. “Fuck, you guys are the best. Seriously, I needed that. These last few days have been so crazy, I’m glad you’re all here.”

  “So am I,” Damien said rather seriously, “because I’m not going to let you tell Trevv the truth.” He climbed out of the hammock and stood opposite me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can’t tell him. Do you know how much he’s going to love it? It will basically make his life, Annie.”

  “What other options do I have? I can’t go through with our fake wedding tomorrow.”

  “Why not?” Damien said. “It’s perfect. We’re all here. And do you know how much it would ruin Trevv’s day not to be in the spotlight? Totally upstaged by his ex Annie and her hulking man from the outback.”

  “Wait! Especially if your wedding is nicer than his!” Lilly jumped up as if a firecracker had propelled her. “He always had to have the best and latest of everything, imagine how he’d feel if your wedding was nicer. If you looked more gorgeous than Tess and everyone’s eyes were on you, not her.”

  She started walking up and down as if she was imagining the thing playing out in front of her. “Everyone is watching Boyden and Annie and no one gives a shit about Trevv and Tess’s lame little seaside excuse for a wedding! Yes!” Lilly was jumping up and down with excitement now. “It’s brilliant. It’s amazing, it’s—”

  “The most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!” Jane pulled Lilly back down to the seat. “Annie, a fake wedding? Really?”

  “Oh, stop being such a party pooper, Jane,” Damien teased. “You hated Trevv just as much as we all did.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “They’ve already put in all the legwork, they’ve been pretending to be a couple for days already. They almost got bloody arrested during their big public proposal.” Damien threw me a look. “In our Annie’s case, she almost got arrested again.”

  “Ha-ha,” I said sarcastically. Damien loved to tease me about my arrest. He always thought I should wear it like a badge of honor; it gave me street cred, he said.

  “It would be such a waste not to follow through with the whole thing now.”

  Logical Jane rolled her eyes. “Those drinks were too strong, because you’re not making any sense.”

  “What’s the harm?” Damian asked. “It’s not like you two are falling in love or anything. You’re just two buddies helping each other out. One friend helping the other through a difficult patch, like the time you gave me extra laughing gas when I came in for that filling.”

  Jane burst out laughing. “Stupidest analogy I have heard all day. Especially for a supposedly intelligent astrophysicist. Are you going to start quoting Depeche Mode next to support your argument?”

  “Sure, it’s only ‘A Question of Time.’”

  “Stop!” Jane held her hands in the air. “Honestly, I don’t know how I’m friends with any of you. I’m the only sane one in the group, the rest of you are all mad.”

  “Oh, Jane, you’re madder than all of us combined, you just haven’t been pushed to the breaking point yet,” Lilly said. We all looked at Jane.

  “Hey, why is everyone looking at me like that?”

  Lilly shrugged. “You know it’s your turn next to lose your marbles. I did, Annie did, Stormy-Rain lost hers the day she was born…you are so next.”

  “Unlikely.” Jane dismissed us all with a flick of the wrist. “Val will be doing that way before me.”

  There was a pause as everyone considered that.

  “True!” Lilly said.

  “I agree,” I concurred.

  “But we’re veering off course here, guys,” Jane said loudly. “This is about Annie losing her marbles.”

  “Sssshhh.’” Damien actually waved his hand at Jane to quiet her down. “Annie, just take a moment to imagine how good it would be to see the look on that dickhead’s face. Plus you cannot give him the satisfaction of thinking he was right about you this whole time.”

  Jane opened her mouth to object once more, and Damien raced over and stood in front of her, blocking her from view. “Ignore the sensible one here. Ignore her and all her perfectly sound logic. Because there is nothing logical or rational about this. So just do it. Come on, it’ll be fun.”

  Jane cleared her throat loudly and pushed her head around Damien. “Even if this was a good idea in some parallel universe somewhere, there is no time to pull it off.”

  “Sure there is. Places like this have weddings all the time; they probably have wedding planners on staff who can do these things with their eyes closed. Besides, Lilly’s really good at planning weddings that don’t actually result in marriage,” Damien said with a playful wink in Lilly’s direction.

  Lilly gasped and slapped him in the arm playfully. “Bastard.”

  “Should I?” I suddenly became excited by the thought. Maybe I should just go through with it. Maybe Damien was right. Mind you, I wasn’t sure how supportive they would be of the idea if they knew how I was really feeling about Chris. I had planned on telling them as the story had unfolded, but something stopped me. I think I was just embarrassed.

  “Do it!” Lilly reached over and grabbed my hands.

  “No, fuck!” I stopped dead. “What am I thinking? Even a fake wedding costs money.”

  “Some rose petals on the sand? Some candles and pretty hanging light things? Tons of champagne for the massive five-hundred-strong wedding party?” Damien said sarcastically. “You can charge it to my room.”

  I looked at him and knew he was being deadly serious. He was like that when he wanted to do something. Or when he wanted to help a friend out. There were no lengths that Damien wouldn’t go to to make sure all the people that were important to him were happy. And in the last year or so, we’d all become very important to him, as he had to us.

  “Jane?” I looked over at her and she shrugged.

  “Annie, if you want to do it, fine, then go for it. It’s still the silliest thing I’ve ever heard and clearly only something a movie writer could come up with. But if it’s going to make you happy?”

  “Okay!” I said. “Okay. I’ll go back to Chris and tell him the whole thing is back on. Let’s do it.”

  Lilly hugged me. “This is going to be the best fake wedding ever!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I walked through the garden toward Chris’s room, the room I’d shared with him for the past few days. All I could hear was Lilly blathering on next to me. “A band…orchids…fairy lights between the palm trees…a gazebo…floating candles on the sea…Don’t worry, Damien won’t mind…a champagne fountain…Asian finger food
s…”

  Maybe since I’d left Chris he’d had some time to think and had actually decided he didn’t want to go through with this farce. What would I do then?

  We arrived outside the palatial villa and it felt odd to do it, but I knocked. I stood outside and heard some shuffling, some walking, and after what felt like an eternity, the door opened.

  “Annie.” He smiled at me like he hadn’t seen me in years. He had his strange reading glasses on, and suddenly he looked like a nerdy hipster librarian who crocheted his own scarves and read books with really long titles about ironic hamsters and their philosophies.

  I smiled, trying to hold back a laugh. “Chris, you look…”

  “Oh.” He reached for his glasses and pulled them off, looking embarrassed. “They make me look way smarter than I actually am.”

  “Oh, he looks nothing like Crocodile Dundee,” Lilly said in my ear. “Nothing.”

  “Yeah, I would hope not, mate,” Chris said in his broadest Australian accent to date and we all burst out laughing.

  “God, you weren’t kidding,” Jane said, “it’s terrible.”

  “Oh, this is Jane, by the way, and this is Lilly,” I quickly said as Chris held the door open for us and we all walked in.

  “Oh wow!” Lilly looked around briefly. “It’s stunning; anyway, no time for all that.” She marched over to the couch and sat down. “We need to start planning this right away if we’re going to pull it off and make it look real.”

  “Pull what off?” Chris looked from Lilly to me, and back again.

  “Surprise, the wedding’s back on,” I said making light of it.

  “Really?” Chris looked confused. “But I thought you didn’t want to…that you were going to tell—”

  “Over our dead bodies,” Lilly piped up from the couch. “Right, so let’s get to it, there’s no time and so much to do.”

  “If you still want to?” I quickly asked Chris.

  “Sure. If you?” He threw the question right back at me.

  “She does! Trust me.” How was Lilly capable of doing so many things at once?

  “Are you sure, Annie Anne?” Chris came closer and said in a lowered voice. His soft whispering brought memories and feelings rushing back in. Mmmm, did I want to pretend to get married to the man I was falling in love with, knowing that he would never love me back? Let me think…

  I shrugged. “Why not, right?” I tried to sound upbeat and blasé, but I was failing.

  “Because if you don’t, the offer still stands. I’ll come with you to tell Trevv—”

  “No one is saying a word to Trevv and Tess,” Lilly butted in again. “The only words Trevv and Tess are going to hear are the sound of I dos as we drown out their wedding with one of our very own.”

  I smiled faintly at Chris. “You heard the woman. We’re getting married.”

  Chris walked over to the desk and shut his laptop; the collection of coffee mugs and junk food wrappers had grown since I’d left. I followed him with my eyes and was transported back to the wall. To the way he’d made me feel and the way he’d felt in my hand. As if he knew what I was thinking, he turned and looked at me. Like two pieces of Velcro coming together and clinging to each other, our eyes met and we didn’t let go.

  “Guys…we have to do this.” Lilly’s voice did little to break the hold we had over each other in this moment.

  “Guys!” she said, louder this time, and I looked toward her. But as I did, I caught sight of Jane. Staring at us.

  “You heard the woman,” Chris said, moving to the living room where Lilly was anxiously pacing.

  “What?” I mouthed at Jane.

  She walked up to me and looped an arm though mine. “You clearly left out the important bits of your story, didn’t you?”

  “Like what?” I whispered as we walked to the living room.

  “Like that fact that you two are having…” She leaned to my ear. “Sex,” she whispered.

  “We are not.”

  Jane stopped and eyed me. “Well you’re having something, Annie. That’s for sure.”

  * * *

  The rest of the afternoon went by in some sort of strange, surreal blur. Lilly was having the time of her life, and there was no stopping her. Every few seconds she had added something else to our wedding. Another detail that was going to make it better than Trevv and Tess’s. She’d drawn up several to-do lists and was handing them out.

  “So we all agree then?” After what felt like hours, she finally sat back in her chair and closed her little notebook just as her phone beeped.

  “It’s Damien. What room number is this?” she asked Chris.

  “It’s Bougainvillea Villa three.”

  “Yes!” Lilly opened her pad again. “I knew I was forgetting something.” She took her pen out and read as she wrote, “Bou-gain-villea.”

  She messaged Damien back and within seconds he was at the door. We all watched as they did their obligatory “hello kiss session” like they hadn’t seen each other in years. Like he had been away in Afghanistan and she had been sitting at home waiting for years for him to return.

  Damien introduced himself to Chris. “So, I believe congratulations are in order.” Damien gave Chris one of those manly pats, which to be honest I hadn’t ever seen him do before. “You got a good sheila here,” he said in an Australian accent.

  “She’s a wee keeper,” Chris replied.

  “Wrong country,” Jane corrected. “They say things like ‘wee this’ and ‘wee that’ in Britain, not Australia.”

  “Seriously?” Chris’s eyes widened and met mine. “Ooops. I’ve said ‘wee’ more in the last two days than I have in my entire life.”

  We all laughed again. This Australian thing had legs, real comic mileage. Like the time Lilly boarded a plane to Thailand in her pajamas. We’d managed to get a year out of that, at least.

  “So, I kind of did something.” Damien’s tone got serious.

  “What?” Lilly swiveled.

  “I ran into Trevv and Tess at the pool.”

  “And?” Lilly asked.

  “I sort of said something, a few things really…God, I fucking couldn’t help it. They were going on and on about their wedding and then I kept telling them about your wedding and how I got specially ordained online so I could do it.”

  Jane laughed so loudly at this that we all looked at her. “Sorry, carry on.”

  “And then Tess was talking about these stupid white doves they were going to be releasing when they kissed for the first time, and I sort of told them that you’d be having peacocks.”

  “What?”

  Lilly and Jane burst out laughing simultaneously. I, however, did not. This was why I’d wanted to back out of the thing in the first place; this one-upmanship was causing everyone to go crazy.

  “Where are we going to get peacocks?” I asked.

  “They are all over this resort. I’ve seen about five this morning already,” Damien said.

  “So, we’re going to what? Wrangle peacocks and make them walk down the aisle like the good-behaving birds they are?” I said sarcastically.

  Everyone laughed harder now. Even Jane had gotten into the spirit of things.

  “Look, if I can wrangle the crocs back home in the bayous—” Chris started saying.

  “Bayous are in America, not Australia,” Jane quickly corrected.

  He didn’t miss a beat. “The ol’ crocs in the swamps—”

  “Wetlands,” Jane quickly corrected.

  “The crocs in the water, where it is wet and muddy.” Chris looked at Jane and raised a questioning brow.

  “That will be adequate,” she replied.

  “I think this ol’ Ozzie can catch himself a few peacocks.”

  More laughter rose up. Okay, maybe this Australian thing should not have legs. Maybe it needed to die, now!

  “Oooh, you know what else we should have.” Lilly jumped up. “Lipizzaner horses. White, majestic horses that deliver the ring down the aisle.�
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  “Or dinosaurs,” Jane added. “We’ll just bring them back to life and have you ride off into the sunset on the long neck of a brontosaurus.”

  Even I finally laughed at that. It was funny. What wasn’t funny, though, were the feelings I was having inside. I was vacillating between genuine excitement for my fake wedding, excitement to see the looks on Trevv and Tess’s faces, and especially to see Chris standing at the top of the aisle. But the other part kept reminding me what a bad idea this was. Playing pretend-relationship with real feelings was a game that was only going to end up hurting me.

  “Are you okay?” I felt a soft hand on my back. It was Chris. He leaned in and put his head so close to my ear that I could feel his warm breath. I closed my eyes for a second and let myself enjoy the feeling of it caressing my skin. “You can still back out of this if you don’t want to do it.”

  “Why, do you not want to do it?” I opened my eyes.

  “No. I want nothing more than to fake marry you, Annie Anne.”

  Fake.

  “Hey.” Lilly came over to us. “You guys better not be getting cold feet. We’ve rounded up the peacocks and a yacht. You two will be sailing off into the sunset in style!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  We all stayed at Chris’s for the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening. I couldn’t believe how he’d just slotted in with my friends. It was as if he’d always been there. Strangely enough, he and Jane were hitting it off, which was rare to see. She was usually so reserved with strangers, to the point of total social awkwardness at times. But she seemed so easy and relaxed with Chris.

  Perhaps they could sense their similarities, the two kids that had been cruelly teased on the playground and hadn’t had the easiest time growing up. It warmed my heart to see it, but also broke it a bit at the same time. This was probably the last time we would ever all spend together. In a few days, I would probably never see Chris again.