Marriage of Unconvenience

“Yeah, that would be great,” I said, trying not to think about the way her letting go of my hand made me feel hollow inside.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Not sure. Probably loose. And I kind of ordered something online. One for each of us.” She blushed a little.

“What is it?” I asked, and she got up and pulled out a box that was hidden behind a stack of other boxes. It was as if the boxes had mated and kept multiplying.

“It’s probably silly, but I couldn’t resist. And they won’t die, so we can keep them forever.” She pulled out two identical bouquets, each with pink and cream flowers. They sincerely looked real. I couldn’t stop myself from smelling them. Plastic.

“They’re so pretty,” I said, taking mine.

“I thought so. And they were on sale, so there’s that.” Pretty and cheap? Hell yes.

“How are we going to do this, exactly? Like, do we walk down the aisle together? Is there an aisle?” Cara blushed again.

“What?”

“So I might have looked up the courthouse and what it looks like. There is an aisle. So what do you want to do with that?” I thought about it for a few moments.

“What if we walked toward each other at the back, and then both walked down together? Then it’s not like one of us is waiting for the other. We’re already together when we get there.” Cara beamed.

“I hoped you would say that. That’s what I want. Should we practice?” I looked around, but there wasn’t a whole lot of room until Cara started shoving boxes out of the way to make a small path from the living room to the kitchen.

“We need music,” she said, picking up her bouquet.

“Are they going to play music?” I asked. I was sure that was on the site.

“We can. We just have to bring it with us. They can hook it up to the speakers if we have it on one of our phones. Let me know what song you might want. I can’t pick. But for now, I’ll just play something traditional.” She fiddled with her phone and put on the traditional wedding song.

“Come here,” she said, taking my arm. “Now we walk.” I started forward, but she yanked me back.

“No, you have to step slow. Like this.” She took one step and put her feet together and then did it again.

“Is that how we have to do it?” This was getting more complicated than I wanted it to be.

“Yes, now walk with me.” I didn’t feel like it, but I wanted to humor her, so I let her drag me down and then go back and then do it about ten more times.

“You know that there will be no pictures of this. And no one is going to see it but whoever is marrying us, Mom, Dad, and Ansel? And that this isn’t a real wedding?” The lines kept getting blurrier and blurrier. We shouldn’t have gotten dresses, probably. Or let my parents plan us a pretend reception. We should have just gotten it done and not told anyone. The rings had been the first step into making this feel more like a legit wedding and I was regretting how impulsive I’d been when I’d made us get them.

“I don’t care. I want it to be right,” she said, and her grip on my arm tightened. She wanted this. Walking down the aisle the way she wanted would make her happy, so I was going to fucking suck it up and do cartwheels down the aisle if that was what she wanted. I’d do anything for her. We had already sort of crossed the line of real and fake wedding, so we might as well let it ride until we got through it. Afterward, we could go back to remembering this was not a real wedding, not a real marriage, and swim in our pool full of money.

At last I walked “correctly” and Cara was happy.

“Do you want to choose a song?” I asked. Now that was something that I particularly wanted to be right. I didn’t want it to just be another song like other people had. We couldn’t be generic when it came to the music. I wouldn’t let it happen.

“I pulled up lists, but they all seemed too traditional. This isn’t traditional, so why should our song be?” she said. I scanned through a few lists, but nothing jumped out at me, so I went through my giant database of music. Nothing really said ‘wedding’ but did that matter? We only had to have a song that was us, and that was slow enough to walk to.