As Kate continued to take shuddering breaths, she blindly lifted her arms and allowed her friends to put her outfit back together. After a few moments had passed and Kate’s breathing had returned to something close to normal, Emilie gave her a solemn look. “Turn around so I can fasten your dress, sweetie.”
Kate obediently turned, watching silently as Lana bent down to retrieve the veil, which had finally slipped free of its loose hold on Kate’s head and fallen to the floor. Working efficiently, Emilie soon had the numerous buttons running down the back of the dress refastened.
Once the last button was secure Lana stepped forward and grasped Kate’s hand, forcing her into a folding chair against the wall. Emilie and Lana took a seat on either side of Kate and patiently waited for her to say something.
When she finally seemed to come out of her daze, Kate met Emilie’s eyes. “I’m sorry I threw my mother’s bra at you,” she said gravely.
A small smile tugged at Emilie’s lips. “That’s all right, Kate.” She put her arm around her friend’s slumped shoulders. “What do you want to do now?”
Kate looked at her in confusion. “What can I do?”
“Girl, if you don’t want to do this we’ll leave!” Lana gently rubbed Kate’s knee. “It’s not like anyone can stop you.”
“We’ve told you before, Kate,” Emilie softly reminded her. “We’re here for you. If you want to walk down that aisle and marry Will, we’ll support you. But we can totally make a break for it right now if that’s what you want.”
Kate lowered her head to her lap and curled in on herself as best she could while wearing yards of satin. Emilie and Lana exchanged a meaningful glance, but they remained silent as Kate weighed her options. It was, after all, a decision only Kate could make.
Eventually, Kate raised her head. “I have to go through with it.”
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” Lana insisted.
“You know that’s not true, Lana,” Kate said wistfully. “All those people are waiting for me to walk down that aisle and say I Do. All that money and time we spent planning… I can’t just blow it off because I’m having a bad day.”
“Better to have a bad day and be rude,” Emilie pointed out. “Than to marry someone you don’t even like and have a bad life.”
Kate appeared to be flummoxed for a moment, but she eventually gritted her teeth and resolutely stood. “I had a plan and I’m going to stick by it.” She gulped and looked somewhat nauseous, but again she seemed determined to press on. “It’s almost time for the ceremony; could you please help me with my veil so that I can go get this over with?”
The girls stayed seated for a several moments but, after another shared look of misgiving, they stood to help Kate. Lana attached the veil to the top of her head without a murmur of protest while Emilie held her tongue and silently smoothed her dress and train. Kate remained stoic, lost in her thoughts.
Emilie and Lana both found themselves having an internal monologue about the distance from the altar to the church doors and speculating how each of their mother’s would react should they decide to bolt. Neither believed for a moment that Kate was really going to make it through the entire ceremony. They were, however, deeply concerned about how much an annulment was going to cost if she didn’t bail before the vows were spoken.
Once the gown was as wrinkle-free as it was going to get, Emilie stepped around her to survey the complete picture. Kate looked beautiful in her crisp white gown and simple veil, but her normally bright eyes and animated features had gone jarringly blank. Emilie repressed a shiver of foreboding and moved to join Lana by the table laden with flowers. She noticed distantly that something was missing and she turned to Lana with a questioning glance.
Lana tilted her head in trepidation. “What?”
“What happened to my purse? I could have sworn I left it right here.”
Relieved there wasn’t yet another crisis to overcome, Lana’s frown disappeared. “Your mom came to the door while you were gone to borrow some lipstick. I handed her your purse, and she said she’d keep it with her during the ceremony.”
“When did she have time to do that?” Emilie asked. “I was with her practically the entire time I was out of this room.”
Lana gave her a good-natured shove. “I presume she slipped past you when you were allowing Ethan to slip you the tongue, you shameless floozy.”
Emilie blushed at the reminder.
Kate came out of her trance long enough to wander over to her friends and touch her hand lightly to Emilie’s arm. “You were making out with Ethan? In church?”
Emilie nodded warily, unsure of where Kate’s volatile emotions were about to take her now. But instead of throwing a fit at Emilie’s blatant disregard for the fact that today was meant to be all about her, Kate simply smiled and squeezed her hand. “I’m so glad you’re happy, Em.”
Emilie blinked in surprise and returned the squeeze. “Thanks.” She stared at her for a long moment before asking hesitantly, “Are you going to be? Happy, I mean?”
Kate sighed deeply. “I’ll let you know when I figure that out.” She turned and headed towards the door before either of her friends could reply.
Though she had several reservations about the state of the bride’s decision-making abilities and definite doubts about the wisdom of allowing Kate to go through with what was sure to become an epic disaster, Emilie picked up the wedding bouquets and forced herself to hand them out. Lana frowned, but she grudgingly took her roses.
When Emilie held out the largest bouquet to Kate, the pale bride accepted the flowers without a word. Then, after taking a deep, shaky breath, Kate clutched her bouquet in a death grip, pasted a plastic smile on her face, and reached for the door handle.
“Ready to go?”
Rather than wait for their response, Kate threw open the door and hurried out of the room. Emilie and Lana exchanged another apprehensive glance before following their friend down the long hallway towards the sanctuary.
Chapter 25
Once they reached the hall, Emilie wordlessly straightened Kate’s veil and train before moving to get in line behind Lana. Kate’s dad stood beside her with a look of abject confusion on his face, not understanding why his daughter insisted on staring blankly ahead at the doors leading out of the church and into the May sunshine.
Robert Drake was usually blissfully oblivious to the feelings of those around him, but even he could not miss his daughter’s pallor and uncharacteristic reserve. Alarmed, he found himself shaking her arm to bring Kate out of her very disturbing trance and whispering, “What’s wrong with you?”
Kate met his stare without a hint of recognition and, instead of replying, listlessly shrugged her shoulders before returning her gaze to the church’s exit doors.
Scratching his head at her non-responsive behavior, he told himself she must simply be feeling jitters. Walking down the aisle was bound to frazzle any girl’s nerves. That seemed like a perfectly rational explanation, so he grabbed hold of it with both hands.
Now if only her little friends would stop staring weepily at Kate, as if she was moments away from walking the plank without a life jacket. Their gloomy faces looked as serious as he had ever seen them in the twenty odd years Kate had known them. It was making Robert rather nervous.
Anxiously straightened his tie while Kate continued her concentrated inspection of the exit, he wished with all his might that he was anywhere but here, blithely unaware of how closely his daughter’s wishes mirrored his own.
After spying that sad father-daughter display out of the corner of her eye, Lana shook her head in disgust and glanced back at Emilie, who was biting her lip again and looking excessively worried.
“Hey,” Lana tugged on the hem of her dress to get her attention.
Reluctantly turning her gaze from Kate to Lana, Emilie seemed surprised to see the glimmer of mischief in her friend’s eyes. Curious, she raised her eyebrow.
Lana grinn
ed at Emilie’s imperious expression. “How much you wanna bet she makes a break for it halfway down the aisle?” Rolling her eyes at Emilie’s look of shock, Lana gave her a playful tap on the head with her bouquet.
With a sigh, Emilie checked to make sure no one else was around to hear them — luckily, the girls were alone near the doorway and Kate was still standing a few paces behind them in a daze — before speaking. “Kate’s going to make it down the aisle, Lana,” she said with a sad smile.
Sighing, Lana turned back to face the doors with a shrug, concluding that it was obviously pointless trying to lighten the mood; everyone’s nerves were strung too tight.
Moments later, she felt Emilie’s breath on her neck. “My money’s on her ditching him in the middle of the vows,” she whispered conspiratorially in Lana’s ear. “Kate’s a procrastinator.”
Lana let out a startled snort, stealing a quick glance over her shoulder at Emilie’s smirk before quickly turning back to face the sanctuary doors.
Moments later, the string quartet began the first strains of Pachabel’s Canon in D as the doors to the sanctuary opened. With one last worried look over her shoulder to Emilie, Lana slowly stepped onto the aisle runner. She winced when the photographer snapped a few shots of her sure-to-be glum face, so she forced herself to smile at the people crowded into the small church.
Before moving further down the aisle, Lana stole another fleeting look at Kate. Her face had taken on a faintly green tinge, her eyes were kind of glazed over, and her lips were so bloodless that they nearly matched her pale skin. Kate’s father still looked perplexed by his child’s strange behavior, and he shrugged helplessly when he caught Emilie and Lana watching them, as if to say, “What gives?”
What gives, indeed? Emilie thought despairingly. There was no denying that this wedding seemed to have all the makings of a Shakespearean tragedy.
Or farce, depending on your point of view.
Kate still had an eerie, unseeing stare, and she was patently refusing to meet anyone’s gaze. Emilie had no choice but to turn around and follow Lana down the aisle as the music wafted through the air. She smiled weakly into the camera that flashed before her, but she felt unsteady and vaguely responsible for the drama that was almost certainly about to unfold. Kate was her best friend — there must have been something she could have said or done to prevent things from reaching this critical stage. But now it was too late.
Wincing at the concern in Ethan’s eyes, Emilie ascended the altar steps, silently meeting his stare in the hope that he would receive her telepathic warning that things were very likely about to get sticky. His mouth pursed at her obvious distress as the organist began to play Wagner’s Bridal Chorus.
Everyone in the church stood to watch the bride make her grand entrance, and Emilie felt the back of her neck prickle with mounting apprehension. She heard Lana mutter behind her, “This is really going to suck.”
They tensely watched as Kate slowly made her way down the aisle with all the enthusiasm of a Romanov about to face the firing squad. She was shaking so hard that the veil was jiggling around her face and behind the veil there was not even the shadow of a smile to ease the starkness in her expression.
Unable to look any longer, Emilie glanced at Will and saw that he was almost as pale as Kate. Her eyes narrowed at his shaky hands and palpable anxiety, and she was overtaken with the burgeoning suspicion that Will, too, was having second-thoughts about this wedding.
Emilie fought back the urge to roll her eyes at the bride and groom — nitwits both of them. They had been either too scared or too lazy to sit down and have an adult discussion about the wisdom of holy matrimony to each other before their big day and only now, when the ball was irrevocably rolling down the hill, were they taking the time to reevaluate.
Awesome strategy, that.
She was brought back to the moment at hand when Kate finally began climbing the altar steps under the tight-lipped frown of the minister. Kate’s father beat a hasty retreat to the front row the moment Kate placed her hand on Will’s trembling palm.
Lana nudged Emilie’s leg and Emilie leaned back to hear her whisper, “She is so going to throw up.”
After shrewdly observing Kate, who was turning an undeniably darker shade of green, Emilie hissed through her teeth, “What do we do?”
There was a long pause before Lana replied. “I thought you’d know.”
Cringing helplessly, Emilie worried her bottom lip as the minister droned on about finding the one person in the entire world that God had made just for you and then making a lifelong commitment to them. It was impossible to miss the look of abject terror in Kate’s eyes and, with each additional admonition about faithfulness and honesty, Kate and Will both seemed to grow more wobbly. Ethan actually reached out to steady a swaying Will at one point.
Wonderful. Not even five minutes into the ceremony, and already the bride and groom were on the brink of succumbing to a fainting spell. Emilie glanced briefly at Ethan and saw that he, too, was grimly watching Kate — though when he caught Emilie’s eye, he winked reassuringly and made a big show of throwing her a kiss. Biting back a smile, Emilie forced herself to focus.
A few minutes into the ceremony, one of Will’s step-nephews stepped onto the stage and began to nasally read from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. As his voice droned on about the infinite patience and kindness of love, Kate began to look as if she had just ridden the Vortex roller coaster, with its many dips, spins, and stomach-lurching drops, five times in a row. Once the asthmatic nephew had finally gone back to his seat, Kate turned to hand Emilie her bouquet before she and Will began their vows. The second Kate’s hand touched her own Emilie firmly pinched her fingers, forcing her to look up.
Kate’s eyes rose reluctantly and clashed with her friend’s empathetic gaze. The sympathy in that look made tears spring to her eyes. Barely stifling a whimper, Kate tore her eyes away from Emilie’s far too perceptive stare and turned back to the minister, who seemed quite put out by her inattentiveness. Only after she pasted a smile onto her face did he begin reciting the vows.
“Will you, Katherine Ann Drake, take William Herbert Sturgis to be your lawfully wedded husband? Will you love, honor and respect him in sickness and health, in good times and in bad, forsaking all others as long as you both shall live?”
All eyes were on Kate as she stood mute in the face of these questions. She had practiced answering them in the mirror every day for the last week, trying to make the simple response flow easily off of her tongue as she vowed to become Mrs. Kate Sturgis. Mrs. Kate Sturgis — a name which Kate dismally realized did sound an awful lot like the name of an especially smelly fish. But that didn’t matter now. It couldn’t matter now. I can do this, Kate assured herself. I want to do this. All she had to do was open her mouth and say “I do.”
As she opened her mouth to reply, she saw Emilie and Lana holding their breath as they waited for her answer. Lana’s eyes were wide and Emilie was gripping the flowers in her hand so hard that they were starting to bend under the pressure.
Kate felt a deep kinship to those poor flowers.
Closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, Kate forced herself to face the cold, hard truth. This felt wrong. Not just a little wrong, either — monumentally, gigantically wrong. Getting married wasn’t supposed to make you feel sick with panic at the idea of spending your life with the person beside you. It wasn’t supposed to make you dread a future that would include the person next to you in it. It wasn’t supposed to be so hard.
Kate finally got a good look at Will’s confused face and wondered for the first time if maybe he had some doubts of his own about all of this. They hadn’t actually talked about anything of substance for months. She had been too busy sneaking around with Jase and pretending everything was fine and dandy to even notice Will on the rare occasions they had crossed paths lately.
And when they had spoken, it was usually about a wedding glitch or family emergency that allowed them t
o continue skimming the surface of the underlying truth: if it weren’t for this wedding hullabaloo, they would have had nothing to talk about at all. They were more like strangers with every passing day, and Kate was suddenly keenly aware of how lonely that was for both of them.
And here she was trying to tie them together for life because of some stupid notion of duty and her own pride.
The minister loudly cleared his throat, jarring Kate out of her unfortunately-timed epiphany. Her startled gaze met the minister’s annoyed one, and her face broke out in an unexpected smile. She opened her mouth to answer his all-important question, secure that she was making the right decision for everyone concerned, when she was interrupted by the choking, gargling sounds emitting from Will’s throat. She was just about to slap in on the back when he managed to get a coherent word out of his mouth.
“No.”
She blinked several times, unsure whether she’d imagined his muffled, but definitely audible no. All eyes near the altar turned from Kate’s shocked expression to Will’s anxious face in two second intervals. Will still looked ill, his pastiness now made starker by his flushed cheeks and stunned expression. He seemed to have surprised even himself.
As Kate and the minister stared him down, Will took a deep breath and held it for so long his face began to turn blue. But he continued to shake his head and, over the odd gurgling noises in his throat, he finally managed to say it again.
“No.”
The minister’s jaw unhinged at that highly unconventional response. “I beg your pardon?”
A wet sheen of sweat now covered Will’s face, making his shirt stick to his torso in odd places. His mud brown hair, never his most attractive feature to begin with, was dripping with sweat and grease, and the two substances were mixing together to form a kind of gooey sludge that ran down the back of his neck. It was not a pretty picture by any means, and it was certainly not helped by the cheesy aroma wafting up from the damp confines of his tux.
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