Love Of My Life

Chapter 1 - Catching Up

"You're ENGAGED?" Gio yelled through the restaurant. I was holding my hand up to my face, showing him the beautiful ring that donned my finger. Wiggling all of them back and forth as I showed him and smiling ear to ear. We were in a restaurant getting lunch the day after the premiere. We wanted to tell Gio as soon as possible and we thought this would be a nice way to do it.

Joe was sitting on my side of the booth. His arm wrapped around my waist, squeezing me tighter as I revealed the ring to Gio. It was hard to hide it until right now. Greeting him at the front of the restaurant with my hands behind my back until I went in to hug him. So, now, I was a giggling mess when he realized what I was telling him.

"Yes," I laughed out. "All thanks to you, I might add." Gio mouth hung open as he looked back and forth between me and Joe. Still not believing what he was seeing. Then, he got a smug look on his face as he sat back in his seat, crossing his arms.

"I knew this would work out. Knew it all along," he said. Trying to act calm.

"Is that so?" Joe teased. Resting his head in his hand and his elbow on the table, staring right at Gio. His arm never left my waist.

"Yup, always saw you two spending the rest of your lives together." He was smiling with his smug face even more than before.

"And what if we break up? Will you take the blame for it then?" I asked, trying to egg him on in this façade he was putting out. Joe looked at me with worry on his face. Wondering if I had doubts about our relationship. This was the first time I had ever brought up breaking up with him.

"I'll only take credit for the good stuff," Gio replied.

"Uh-huh," I nodded, falling further back in my seat. Joe still had the same worried look on his face. I patted his hand that was around my waist. "Don't worry. I'm not going anywhere," I laughed. He relaxed as well, letting out a puff of air.

We told him about how Joe proposed. How he used the theater to play Somebody to Love through the speakers and then crept up behind me when I was watching the music video. And how they had technical difficulties.

"Wait, so what happened? They had technical difficulties?" Gio asked, trying to clarify everything that Joe was telling him. Joe let out a sharp laugh.

"Yeah, I had called ahead to the theater like a week before to make sure everything was set up. And they told me they were all ready to go and that there would be someone there to help me out. But, then when I got to the booth where they were going to project the music video from, the person they sent to help me didn't know how the projector worked and he had only worked there a week. So, we had to quickly find someone who could not only work the projector but also get the music video up on the screen. And that turned out to be a whole nother problem entirely." Joe explained.

"Why?" I asked, now more interested in the story than Gio was. "Didn't they say they had everything ready?"

"Yeah, they did," he said, turning a bit more toward me to talk. "But, apparently they thought I was bringing the music video with me on a flash drive, but they didn't tell me to do that. They just assumed that was going to happen. So then we had to adjust and quickly download the music video off YouTube and onto a flash drive to play in the projector. It was just a huge debacle. It was only supposed to take about 10 minutes to set up, but it ended up being like 45."

"45 minutes?" Gio asked, astonished that it took that long. Joe nodded.

"Yeah, and I was sweating the entire time. I was so nervous that it wasn't going to work out." Joe shrugged. "Thankfully it did though," he said as he squeezed his arm around my waist just a little tighter. Gio asked us a million questions. All about our relationship and marriage and all that.