VIENNA'S POV
IT'S SEVEN IN THE MORNING. That brings my total of “hours I’ve been awake and could’ve been sleeping instead” to seven.
It takes me a little while to remember that today was the day of Terrence and Angie’s wedding vows. Tess told me that it wouldn’t be such a big reception, but considering Angie was the typical debutante-turned-country-club-goer and Uncle Terrence’s family never moved away from Texas, she told not me not to be surprised if a hundred people come. At least their ranch house had their own zip code and was more than big enough. Only now do I realize why they didn’t just hold it at a church instead. Their ranch house was already bigger than a church.
I’m cocooned in the blankets, trying to force myself back to sleep. I keep closing my eyes, but my brain’s already too far gone. It’s a seriously futile attempt. Why do I even try? I spent the whole night awake anyway. I missed my chance, in more ways than one.
I decide not to waste any time longer sitting in bed and wrapping the mound of the comforter around my body, slipped out of the room in search of a good, hot shower. I grabbed a towel and some clothes to change into before the guests started coming, because I was more than sure that Angie would round us all up and ask us to do more things for her last-minute.
I’m headed to the bathroom in the upstairs hall of the family ranch house when the door swings open before I could do it myself. The roles are reversed this time when I see Elliot half-naked in the doorway, with only a towel wrapped around the lower portion of his body and another in his hand to rub his hair dry. His hair got longer, I noticed; it was more unruly and haphazard, but it was a dark brown mess of damp strands clinging to his forehead.
I expected the worst. I imagined him widening his eyes and not speaking a word to me, to walk past me in a silently angry mood. But he didn’t do that. Instead, Elliot’s mouth turned upwards into a morning smirk as he shuffled past me and into the hall.
“Good morning, Vienna,” he said kindly. I blinked at him, and his bare, toned upper body that was making me lose concentration. He certainly got bigger over the year, and he was almost two heads taller than me.
“Hi,” I said quietly.
“I kept the shower warm for ya,” he told me, before saluting me. His eyes were aloof and light, and he looked relatively happy.
I was more than confused. I half-heartedly salute him back, watching as he disappeared into his room.
Hobbling into the bathroom and turning on the shower in a daze, I stopped to glance at myself in the mirror. Last night, I hadn’t been completely honest with Elliot. Even Tess could see that I wanted to be with the idiot. Hell, I’m pretty sure Angie and Uncle Terrence know. My own mother commented what a cute little boy he was when we were both sent to the principal’s office that year I punched him in kindergarten. I wanted nothing else to be with him, but I didn’t want to rush into anything. I was almost twenty years old, living the life of my dreams; travelling around the world and helping people in need of love and food and so much more. I was going to Duke University, and spending months at a time in exotic and different countries with different cultures.
And there was Eli. That was the part I wasn’t totally honest with because I didn’t really know what we were. We hadn’t lost touch ever since I graduated, but he was on the opposite coast and I was on the other. Our talks were mainly limited to just phone calls, text updates about whether or not we passed an exam, and the occasional Skype call with the time differences. I tried it out, I really did. At the climax of it all, we slept together and stopped talking shortly after. The calls got cut short and the texts became awkward one-word responses. Maybe because it felt so strange, we didn’t know what to do with each other.
The fact that he’s probably on his way here right at his very moment doesn’t help. Seeing him again won’t clear my head. But he’s already on his plane here.
I just don’t want to go into something so fast without thinking. I needed to think first.
But even though I stood in the hot shower for about twenty minutes, it was just a disfigured haze in my mind.
* * *
I was halfway back to the guest room in a thin baseball tee and some pants when I heard a desperate piercing scream from the kitchen.
“Oh my God!”
It was Angie.
Instantly, I ran towards the stairs taking them three at a time, and behind me, I heard Elliot’s door swing open, his footsteps pounding right behind me in seconds. Another door flung open, much slower, and I could imagine Tess stumbling out, still half-sleep and woken up by the scream.
I turned the corner into the kitchen and saw Angie covering her mouth with one hand, another on her heart. Her back was turned to us and she was bent over the kitchen counter over something we couldn’t see.
“Angie?” Elliot asked, surging forward in front of me with his tall figure. When we reached her, we saw a box of cake big enough to fill the whole counter.
“Oh, it’s all ruined. Completely ruined. The cake shop messed up with my order!” Angie frowned.
A cake? That was all this was about?
“I ordered a simple cake, nothing they could mess up, I made sure of that,” Angie explained, flushed and red. “It had wedding bells with butter cream icing and piped flowers with edible vanilla blossoms on the corners and they send me this!”
When I took a closer look at the cake, it looked nothing like they described. It was a cake, alright. But not one for a wedding. It was decked out in multicolored sprinkles, and there were dog biscuits sticking out everywhere. It was a chocolate and strawberry flavored cake with red icing on top. The yellow, blue, and green piping spelled out “HAPPY 8TH BIRTHDAY GOLDIE, THE BEST GOLDEN RETRIEVER IN THE UNIVERSE.”
Tess came into the kitchen and stared at it. “Well now there’s a golden retriever out there who’s probably really confused.”
Angie sighed heavily, resting against the counter, her face in her hands. “This isn’t even the worst of it. The caterer dropped those boxes this morning,” she gestured with a limp hand to the kitchen table filled with white boxes, “And they brought the wrong order to me too! I ordered mini quiches, caviar in wedding bell shaped glass cups, smoked salmon for the non-veggie guests and a tofu castle for the vegetarian ones. And do you see any of that there? No! Because they sent me fried chicken. With tubs of gravy.”
“Wait, all those boxes are filled with fried chicken?” Tess asked suddenly.
Angie nodded dismally.
In seconds, Tess rushed to get a plate out of the pantry and started tearing through the boxes with glee.
Elliot and I exchanged a long glance. Behind him, the window opened up into graying clouds turning black.
“Oh, what will I do now?” Angie slumped into one of the bar stools, closing her eyes. “The girls at the country club will think of me as a joke. I tried so hard to be one of them, so fancy and lady-like, but when they see all of this, I’ll be the laughingstock of the club.”
I suddenly knew why Angie went to such great lengths to perfect every single detail of her wedding vow renewal. Maybe it wasn’t because she was a die-hard perfectionist. Maybe it was just because she wanted to fit in. She wasn’t just marrying into a new family, she was also marrying into a new town with new people. Leaving everything behind and adjusting was hard enough as it was. I should know.
“We can help,” I said suddenly. Angie’s eyes opened slightly, looking at me wearily.
“What was that, hon?”
“We can cook other things for you before they get here, and bake a cake to replace that one,” I suggested. Yeah. It seemed possible.
“Oh sweetheart, the guests will be arriving in two hours, and I’m not even sure if the flowers had arrived and Terrence is out in town getting the—“ Angie trailed off and mumbled into her own little world, while I looked across the counter to Elliot with pleading eyes.
His mouth opened into a little ‘o’. He looked skeptical. And a little pessimistic for once. I admit, two hours didn’t seem like a long time. But with Elliot’s somewhat present cooking skills and my nonexistent ones, we could totally annihilate this.
“Come on,” I mouthed. I gestured over to his step-aunt, who looked like the world was ending right before her eyes. I couldn’t stand to see someone so cheerful look so devastated.
Elliot closed his eyes, rubbed the back of his neck slowly and sighed. He nodded at me, and said, “I can help Vienna.”
“I’ll help too, after I eat,” Tess chimed in from the dining room table, raising her hand with her back turned to us and a plate full of chicken in front of her.
Angie’s eyes widened to the size of dinner plates. “You’re really sure, kids? I have to go get some extra tables and chairs from the storage downtown, but if you guys can manage for an hour or so—“
“We can manage,” Elliot said, a little unsure but nodding anyway.
Ten minutes later, Angie had gone with Payton and it was just us three. We were in the kitchen flipping through the cookbooks for ten minutes, clueless as to what country club ladies liked to eat.
“Why does Aunt Angie even hang out with those snobby people anyway?” Elliot asked, grabbing more cookbooks from under the counter. “If they’re so judgmental, why be with them?”
“Because dear cousin, great-grandma Flo has always been part of that country club since she co-founded it, so was Grams and so was Mom,” Tess said quietly. “It runs in the family. The James family practically built it, and Angie wants to be a part of the family.”
“So? You don’t go to the country club every week,” Elliot told her, smirking.
She shrugged as if the answer was obvious. “Their portions are too small. Have you seen those finger sandwiches? You need a microscope to see it on the plate. Ha, no thank you.”
I laughed a little in my seat, perched atop a bar stool and reading through recipes. Elliot’s eyes grazed over at me before he turned away. He didn’t look anything but calm, cool, and collected. Like last night never even happened. Has he already gotten over it and moved on so fast?
“We have to start cooking soon,” Elliot told us, shutting the dusty cookbook and ruffling his hair so much that it made him look even more easy on the eyes. “We barely have an hour and a half left.”
I sighed, before something popped into my mind. “Mini pizzas.”
The James cousins turned to me.
“What?”
“Mini pizzas,” I repeated a little quieter. “They’re tiny, so they have that elegant factor, since Tess mentioned their portions at the country club are small. And if you guys have toppings, we could have a pizza buffet bar. So the guests could serve themselves. There can vegetables or meat or sausages or no meat if Angie prefers…”
The James cousins, so alike in their eyes and their dark hazel hair stared at me blankly, and I could imagine the cogs and gears turning in their minds.
“Or maybe,” I shook my head, “Maybe not?”
“No.” Elliot shook his head.
“Oh. I mean I was just wondering outside the box—“
“What? No, I mean no, as in that’s brilliant idea,” Elliot said slowly. “That’s seriously brilliant.”
Tess watched us both, turning her head from Elliot to me before clapping her hands loudly. “Okay Romeo, you’ve pretty much overused the word brilliant so how about let’s get cooking, shall we, loverbirds, okay, let’s begin!”
Elliot and I looked at Tess with flustered cheeks and we mindlessly started hunting through the house for ingredients and pots and pans and pizza things. Once we had found all the stuff we needed, Tess started making some homemade sauce that she’s learned while watching Rachel Ray and Elliot and I were left to kneading the pizza dough.
Something went a little wrong with the dough mixture so it was a little harder than usual. It involved a lot of digging elbows and rolling pins, and by the time I had finished one small pizza, flour had gotten into my hair and cilantro somehow got into my bra.
Elliot had already finished rolling ten perfect circles and passed them onto Tess to pour sauce on. And I was just getting started on my second one. Swell.
Suddenly my phone started vibrating with a message.
FROM: Eli S.
“Plane got delayed. Apparently there’s bad weather coming for Texas. I might be a little late.”
I typed back, but it wasn’t much, considering all I said was okay.
My elbows were starting to get a little sore. When I looked up, Elliot was staring at me and catching me offguard.
“What?” I asked him.
“You need a little more flour so it won’t stick to the table,” he said, and before I knew it, he was by my side in seconds, rubbing flour onto my table. “Or maybe you can just shake your head and pour flour in that way.”
I smirked, muttering my thanks. Elliot was so close, I could practically smell his cologne, which was not too strong and overwhelming intoxicating.
“How do you, um,” I grabbed my circular piece of dough and wondered how Tess and Elliot threw it up in the air to catch it. I for one, was at a loss of explanation as to what the process was called, so I had to do a lot of spinning hand motions to ask Elliot how to do it.
“Tossing a pizza?” he asked after staring at me in confusion. He looked cute when he was perplexed. “You just take it in your hands, ball one hand into a fist and another hand with your palm flat and…”
Elliot didn’t need any words to explain when he grabbed the dough I was working on and tossed it into the air with ease, making it bigger and bigger with each toss. I grabbed a dough ball and started to toss it too, but right when Elliot told me to be gentle with it, I tossed it so hard, it stuck to the ceiling.
“I wonder what the country club ladies will say when they see that.” He struggled to stifle his laughter, and I punched him in the shoulder, saying,
“It was my first try! Do you guys have a broom or something to get it down—“
“—Trust me, it’ll come down.” Elliot laughed, a sound that both hurt and made my heart spin.
When we were done with the pizzas and put all of them into the two ovens, we started rushing to finish the cake. We had only an hour left and it wasn’t even close to being done.
“We only have red velvet mix and buttercream icing, nothing else!” Tess called from the pantry.
“Red velvet is sophisticated enough, right?” Elliot turned to me. We were standing by the counter, side by side.
“No clue. You’re the one who owns the country club,” I remarked.
“Not me, just my family on my mom’s side,” he said a little lowly, a little quieter.
When Tess came back with the baking stuff, she declared she would be tidying up the house before the guests arrive, claiming that Payton’s toys were all over the place and someone could seriously get hurt. But last I checked, the house was spotless; Angie had cleaning services come early in the morning and made sure of that.
“What, you’re leaving us?” I asked her.
“Yeah, that’s not gonna be a problem right?” she winked at me three times before saying, “Have fun.”
“She is seriously going to be the death of me,” Elliot rolled his eyes, whisking away at some batter. I grabbed a bowl of eggs and started cracking them beside him, doing something that even I couldn’t mess up.
“Hey Elliot?” I asked him.
“What?”
“Why did you say no to me when I asked you to the middle school formal?”
I don’t know where the question came from. It just came out. It was so long ago, it didn’t matter now, so it was harmless. It was a Girls ask Guys sort of thing, and when I had asked Elliot, who was in a grade above me, I was rejected.
Elliot got a little quiet, whisking a little louder. “Because I knew we wouldn’t have enough money to get me a tux.”
“What? That’s it?”
“Every other dude in the eighth grade wore a tux, and I didn’t want to you to be embarrassed,” he explained solemnly and a little embarrassingly.
“Seriously?” I was in awe. “I wouldn’t have been embarrassed. I was more embarrassed when you told me no.”
“I’m sorry. I really want to go with you, but…my family didn’t even have a car at that time. Things were rough. My dad…didn’t really have a steady job until I was in high school. How was I supposed to ask my dad to pick us up without a car?”
So it wasn’t because he didn’t like a stupid little seventh grader.
“Who did you end up going with?” he asked me.
I stopped beating the eggs, laughing a little bit. “Austin.”
“You’re kidding me,” Elliot laughed. “Now I seriously regret not going with you.”
I smiled a little to myself. For a while that was such an unanswered question, and it resulted in a feeling I couldn’t describe to pour through me.
“Austin’s going to be a dad,” I said slowly, suddenly.
Elliot stopped whisking. His eyebrows shot up. “What? Seriously? Who’s the mom?”
“Patricia, of course,” I shook my head. It wasn’t that I was jealous. God, no. Beyond far from it. It was just hard to imagine twenty year olds being parents. Especially Austin. God help that baby.
For a while, we were quiet. We were whisking away and when we finally put the batter into a separate oven, we began cleaning away the mess we made on the kitchen counter. Flour was everywhere, with whipped cream and olives dotting the table. The electric mixer was still plugged in so I started to look for the off button, about to press one when Elliot said, “No, not that button!”
But it was obviously too late, because what I had thought was the off button wasn’t, and the mixer, still coated in mounds of cake batter, flung drops and pieces of red velvet mix into the air at high speed. Cake flew everywhere. Onto the pantry, onto the floor, onto our clothes and our faces. I screamed before turning it abruptly off, yanking the cord out. But it didn’t matter, because red cake mix was flung onto Elliot’s face, which was much worse than mine. Where I had gotten a few drops, he had taken the real beating; there wasn’t a spot where cake batter didn’t splat his face. His face looked like one big cherry.
My first reaction was gasping. Then of course, naturally, I laughed. I couldn’t stifle it, and I was laughing hard as I ripped off a paper towel and touched the side of Elliot’s cheek to hold him steady. Without thinking, I started wiping off the batter off his face. We were closer than ever, our faces inches away and his warm breath on my neck. I had to reach upwards to get to his height.
It was a silent thing. I wiped it all off as he watched me, those brown eyes never leaving my face. God, he smelled so good.
I was reminded yet again of what I had to lose. I had said no to him, I had told him that I would think about it, and he sure as hell didn’t deserve that. How could I think about him when I couldn’t think whenever he’s around?
The distance between was closing, or was it just my imagination? I couldn’t tell the difference these days. Suddenly, we heard a detaching noise from above us, and like a gracious piece of pizza being flung down from the heavens, the pizza dough that had stuck to the ceiling fell straight on Elliot’s head.
The dough completely stretched and covered his face, matting his hair down. I laughed gleefully at the sight of him.
“We are such a mess,” I chuckled, trying to pry the pizza dough off of him.
“Remind me never to be in a kitchen with you again,” he said, but he was silently trying to hold in his laughter too. “Damn, this is sticky. It’s getting sticky. F-ck.”
He stumbled blindly off into the bathroom, telling me he’d be back, and right as he left, Tess and Angie had somehow come back into the kitchen without me hearing and Angie stared above her.
“Why is there a big circular stain on the ceiling?”
* * *
Our mini pizzas were a success.
The elderly guests really loved them, and apparently they were chewy and soft, against my original judgment. They especially liked the personalized glass bowls that held the toppings, which Tess and I decorated at the last minute. Angie practically mowed us down with breath-stealing hugs when she found out about the pizzas.
Everyone started pouring in the second Elliot iced the cake, and the house looked grand and magnificent. It seemed like there was not a space in the house that wasn’t occupied by standing relatives all chatting gleefully with each other. They were sitting in the kitchen, the dining room, the living room with happy faces and all searching for the bride, if they got lucky. Angie was currently upstairs getting dressed.
I had learned that a vow renewal wasn’t exactly a wedding. The wedding had already happened, but a vow renewal is another shot to experience it again with more people who couldn’t have come the first time. It was when the bride and groom restated their vows in front of the people they loved. It was a family affair, held at the house and in the backyard, even though those black bulbous clouds looked pretty ominous outside.
I was currently in Tess’ bedroom, watching Tess twirl around in a dainty blue skater dress that puffed up around her legs when she spun. It was lacy and rosy, and completely suited her. I had only brought one ‘fancy’ dress for the vow renewal, and it was a deep purple dress made of soft satin-like fabric that stopped above my knees with a cutout in the back, revealing only my bare skin. It was usually saved for cocktail parties. I had no idea what to pack for it, and now I was second-guessing the dress, mainly because my back was so exposed. I reached over at the suitcase I wheeled in to Tess’ room and was about to pull out a cardigan, when Tess stopped me.
“No, don’t wear a cardigan, it’ll ruin the whole dress. Just keep it that way,” she smiled at me.
“Are you sure?” I glanced at her, the cardigan still in my hands.
“Positive,” she grinned. “Besides, a certain someone will love the dress too.”
I sighed. I knew where this was going and I shook my head, getting ready to deny whatever Tessa was thinking.
“I thought you guys had made up,” she said suddenly, her eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “Did something else happen?”
“We’re just on standby, or whatever you call it when you’re thinking it through,” I admitted. “We only have this week together.”
Tess sighed, grabbing a box of bobby pins and a brush before sitting down on her bed next to me. She silently started pinning my hair up. “Is it because you’re afraid?”
“No—“
Oh. Hold on. Was I? Impossible. Elliot was Elliot. Nothing to be afraid of.
Tess started styling my hair into a small chignon with ease. “I know you’re probably thinking about what’s gonna happen when you guys leave again. But I mean, here you guys are, again, right? If it happened once, who’s to say it won’t happen again?”
I left it at that, without responding, only letting Tess perfect my hair in silence, mainly because Tess had a habit of being right. I tried to ignore how my phone had been silent, devoid of Eli’s updates. My stomach twisted in a knot at the thought of him. Was inviting him a good idea?
When we had walked downstairs, Elliot was conversing with some relatives. I had caught his attention and he kept on talking, but his eyes constantly grazed over me. Tess was instantly enveloped by some doting aunts who claimed how ‘grown-up’ she was looking while pinching her cheeks, leaving me standing at the staircase by myself, smiling at all these people that I didn’t know.
Elliot started walking towards me, ending his conversation with a man that could’ve looked like Uncle Terrence’s twin. He was wearing a sky-blue tux complete with a matching light blue bowtie that matched the color of Tess’ dress. The color only made his hair and his eyes look darker.
“Hey, you look really nice,” he told me, slipping his hands into his pockets and smiling a little.
“Thank you,” I self-consciously touch the purple fabric of my dress, feeling my back become cold. “You do too. Very blue.”
“It was supposed to be the theme,” he shrugged, looking around and down at his shoes.
“Nice to see I didn’t get the memo,” I teased.
“You still look nice,” he repeated again. I could feel my ears heat up.
“I see you got the pizza dough out of your hair,” I smirked, noting how he styled his hair in a rising cowlick that, dare I say, made him look even better.
“Uncle T had to help me shampoo it out, not the best experience in the world. That man has seriously big hands, he almost decapitated me,” he chuckled softly, making my heart light. He even smelled even better, which I thought was inhumanely impossible.
Something then caught the corner of his eye, and I turned to follow his gaze up the staircase. Angie had emerged and was making the whole walking-down-the-staircase-with-heels-and-fabulousness look perfectly easy. The entire house had shifted into hush mode, with the ladies praising Angie’s dress. It wasn’t a full-out ball gown wedding dress, but a simple laced white dress that fringed at the bottom and hugged her waist. Imagine one of those thirties’ flapper dresses in a white color combined with a whole bunch of lace and a stunning red-headed lady and you had Angie.
Uncle Terrence suddenly appeared beside Elliot patting his shoulder and throwing me a soft smile before staring up at the stairs at his wife.
“Uncle T, you really know how to pick them,” Elliot said, smiling and patting his back.
“I sure do. I think the skills run in the family,” Uncle Terrence threw a mischievous wink Elliot’s way, making him instantly redden up, like the red velvet cake batter had never left his face.
When Angie got downstairs, everyone was ushered outside where there were chairs set up to watch them take their vows, and where the weather had suddenly brought warmer air in the sixties, even if just last night it felt like the Arctic. Since Elliot and Tess were family, they had to stand at the front and leave first. But just before I was about to follow them out, the doorbell rang. It must have been a stray guest or a late relative.
I swung open the door, the wind rushing in and blowing my hair back, when I locked eyes with the person at the door. My stomach instantly dropped, and I didn’t how to feel.
“Vienna,” he said to me. He held his duffel bag and was dressed in khakis and a blouse.
“Eli,” I breathed.
* * *
[a/n] only a couple chapters left & about four or five chapters to go before the book finishes! today was a snow day (or more like an ice day) for me so here's an update :) GIF to the side shows both Elliot's and Vienna's outfits - thanks to yesalltheships from tumblr for these aMAZING CRACKSHIP GIFS that you'll see in later chaps!!
hopefully you enjoyed, thank you for reading lovelies xx
-paulina