That night played in my fantasies non-stop, but with the wedding so close and Amanda losing her mind about something or other every five minutes, I hadn’t been able to sneak off and see Lacey.
Damn, I missed her.
Not just the physical, but her sweet presence.
Her voice.
The look in her eye.
Those sweet gasps.
Her smile.
Fuck, I was so fucked.
But then Amanda’s voice broke into my rhapsody, a shrill screech.
“My veil is too short! I need it be longer!”
The blonde barreled down the hallway wearing her wedding dress, a tight thing that belonged on a girl half her age. She had a filmy veil in her hand but was ripping at the cloth like it had personally pissed in her cereal. “I can’t wear this!” she screamed, unduly agitated.
Her sister, Jillian, jogged along at her side looking ready to kill. “We can get you another one, Amanda. Calm down,” she soothed.
And I grit my teeth, turning away. Nearly everything I’d heard from my fiancée’s mouth in the last couple of days had been at the loudest possible volume. Her flowers were the wrong shade of pink. The cake wasn’t tall enough. Why didn’t her ex-husbands all RSVP yes to be wedding? Unbelievably, really fucking unbelievable.
I just hoped she’d hold it together long enough to get married. And long enough for me to get those connections afterwards. Because this was driving me nuts. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life shackled to a chick who turned into a raving lunatic just because her veil came down to her ass instead of her feet.
Where the hell was Lacey?
Down in the church, everybody was settling into their separate sides of the aisle. Amanda had more people on her side than I did, but most of my friends knew this wasn’t important and had decided to skip.
No worries.
I didn’t mind.
So long as this farce ended sooner rather than later, things would be fine.
But then Amanda ran by again, prattling about another nonsensical shit.
“This is ridiculous!” she screamed to no one in particular. “Who went ahead and invited that bitch again anyway?” She viciously scratched through something written on a yellow notepad. “Tell her to fuck off and go someplace else. I told her she was uninvited weeks ago.”
Her sister tried to calm her down.
“Amanda, she’s your stockbroker, you can’t un-invite her just because of that one investment. Everything else is doing well.”
“No! Fuck her. She can’t come in here and she better not try or I’ll have the bouncers throw her out on her ass.”
Bouncers? At our wedding?
Lacey would never act this way, wedding or no wedding. Shit, she’d never act this way at all. I shook my head again. In the church below, everyone was ready and waiting, looking on expectantly.
Except the woman I was supposed to be marrying was a raving lunatic. My fists tightened around the banister.
Where the fuck was Lacey? At least if I saw her today, it would help me calm down and face her bridezilla mother with a smile. Maybe I could even drag the teen into a back room and do something naughty. Yeah, can you believe it? At my own wedding, I wanted to stroke my stepdaughter’s anus and make her scream.
Fuck.
I was so fucked.
Maybe after all this wedding shit, Lacey and I could take a drive to the beach and enjoy ourselves as Amanda slept off her post-celebration stupor.
Yeah, right.
Because Lacey would never do any of that. Our illicit liaison had already made her so unhappy. And once the vows between me and Amanda were said, she’d be out. There would be no relationship once this was all said and done. Lacey would be gone, out of reach forever.
My heart dropped.
God, choices suck.
I looked down into the church at the guests again.
Lacey wasn’t coming, and disappointment tightened my chest, sad reality hitting me in the head again.
Once this was done, she’d never let me touch her again. She was off-limits. I’d lose her. She’d probably avoid being in the same room with me again, much less naked and begging for cock. My heart pounded, feet dragging on the floor.
Did I mention that choices suck?
I’m not one for drama, but resigned, I burst into the bride’s room.
“Jake!” my fiancée giggled when she saw me. The blonde stood in front of a mirror, preening and admiring herself. It was a completely different scene from the woman running up and down the halls threatening people with bouncers, screaming “Fuck this” and “Fuck that.” The devil truly has two sides.
But Amanda had no idea that I’d seen.
“You’re not supposed to be here, silly. It’s bad luck,” the woman cooed.
I took a deep breath. There was only one way to say what I came to say, and even for a viper like Amanda, it wasn’t gonna be easy.
“I can’t marry you,” was my curt reply.