Crazy Little Thing Called Love

Chapter Two

I nearly tripped over the hideous yellow bridesmaid dress as I walked up the aisle. It was seriously awful. Did my sister listen to me when I told her the dresses looked like the sun barfed all over a bed sheet? No. She loved them. Actually, she loved that we had to look like total morons and she got to be the beautiful Barbie.

I didn’t look at Dane as I stood at the opposite side of him. It wasn’t as if he was looking at me anyway. I officially did not exist to him. The room swayed in front of me and I found it harder to stand than it had been to walk. Who knew my first time getting completely plastered would be before a wedding? Seventeen and a half years old and already poisoning my body.

"To hell with that," I muttered. I hadn’t realized I had spoken out loud, though, until my mother cast me a scolding look. She was too elated for my sister to see my drunken stupor, but I was pretty sure my dad, who noticed when I cut a half an inch off my hair, would notice right away.

The awful and dramatic piano and violin music started, cueing that my dad was walking my evil sister down the aisle. I instead became strangely fascinated with the small stain on Pastor Reynolds’s suit sleeve. I couldn’t bear to watch that little exchange between the bride and groom. I would hurl the moment I saw Dane giving my sister "the look"; you know, the look the groom gives his intended as she’s walking toward him. Just the thought alone had me gagging.

Marisa stepped up in front of me, all smiles. I wished she’d choke on her own spit while exchanging her vows. She turned to me and for a whole minute, I was terrified I’d spoken out loud again. But then I looked down at her outstretched hand with her uber expensive bouquet held to me. I knew there was something I was supposed to…..

I snatched the bouquet hurriedly, although missing it a few times. When did she decide to get two whole bouquets? Jeeze! I stared down at my own bouquet, not knowing what to do with it. Was I seriously meant to hold two and a half bouquets? So, after glancing around to make sure no one was watching, I tossed it under a curtain. There. Much better.

He was holding her hand gently between his, the tenderest look in those intense green eyes as he spoke softly his vows to her. Did she know that I was the one who used to get lost in those eyes long before she came around? Did she know I was the one he held hands with first? Or worse yet, did she even care?

Sometimes I swore my sister was marrying him just to prove she could have everything her eyes landed on. But my sister wasn’t that smart and reality would slap me in the face at that realization. Dane really did love her. It made me sick the way he did and I wished, I so wished, I had just sucked it up and told him how I felt about him before it was too late.

What Dane didn’t realize is that I would never have made him change. I would have hoped he’d want to change on his own because of what we meant to eachother, but I never would have forced him to, not like how I knew my sister had done. She loved Dane for who she had turned him into. So many times she told me "oh, he has great potential". Potential? Really? By the time she got her claws around him, I had already seen what was really inside of him and still loved him for it, before she pussed him out.

I was snapped out of my thoughts at the first sound of "I do".

No, I whispered in my mind. I don’t know why, but I guess I had been clinging to an idea that Dane would come out of my sister’s hex, take me by the waist and run like hell out of the church. It’s not too late. I begged him with my eyes to look at me, to see me for once.

But then he was smiling, so bright the stars in the night sky could not compare, and he said, "I do."

And then Pastor Reynolds was saying, "I pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss your bride."