AllFreeNovel
Share Us
My cheeks were flaming, and I hated it. My hand lifted in a small gesture toward the door. “I have to … I’ll be back in a little bit.”
Aiden nodded, and as I turned to go, I knew he was watching me.
“So let me get this straight …”
“Yes.”
Molly paused. “You don’t know what I was going to say. How can you say yes?”
Even though I was behind a dressing room curtain and she couldn’t see, I rolled my eyes. “I already know what you’re going to say.”
“You just left?”
“Yes.”
“Isabel!”
Angling to the side, I slid the zipper of the sky blue dress up and huffed when I couldn’t get the eye hook closed. “What? It’s not like I expected him to be standing over my shoulder like a giant hulking shadow, and yes, I just … left.”
“Guess I know who’s not going to win employee of the month …” Her voice trailed off. I stuck my hand out from behind the curtain with my middle finger raised. She swatted it back inside. “I never knew you to be a chicken.”
Instead of arguing with her over something so stupid, I simply rolled my lips between my teeth and tugged one last time at the zipper. As I studied my reflection in the mirror, I couldn’t decide if the dress just wasn’t right for me, or if my body was so used to workout gear that it now actively rejected any finer materials.
“Are you dressed yet?”
My hands fell by my sides. “Yes. I don’t think this color works on me, though.”
“One, I find that highly unlikely, and two, show me.” Molly tugged the curtain aside, and when she caught sight of me, her smile was massive. “Iz, I love it. You look so pretty!”
With a skeptical glance at the mirror, I tugged at the drapey things over my shoulders. “There are frills. On my body.”
She laughed. “You don’t have to choose that style. I’m just trying to decide on the colors. I like the blush pink, but it might be too summery for a fall wedding.”
“The blue,” I insisted. “I will feel naked in that pink one.”
“Definitely blue,” Lia called from across the space.
Our two youngest sisters, Lia and Claire, separated by all of two minutes at birth, were sharing a dressing room. “Come on, you two,” Molly called. “Iz is already dressed.”
“Hang on. Lia’s new mom boobs are huge, and she can’t get her dress zipped.”
Molly and I grinned at each other because really, they were. She’d given birth about eight weeks earlier, and honestly, she had the rack of a centerfold if I’d ever seen one.
While we waited, Molly pulled out her giant wedding binder and made some notes after flipping to a bright pink tab. It was no surprise that Molly was the most organized bride-to-be on the planet, and also no surprise that she had zero Bridezilla tendencies so far, something that was making this whole “watch my big sister get married” thing a lot easier.
“Where’s Paige?” I asked.
“She had to stay home with Emmett. He wasn’t feeling well, and Logan is at training camp.” Molly held up her phone and snapped a picture of me. “But I promised I’d send her pictures.”
As her fingers tapped out a text to our sister-in-law, I took a seat on the large ivory ottoman in the middle of the room. No one else was in the dress shop with us, so I leaned back on my hands and listened to the laughter of Lia and Claire as they struggled to close up Lia’s dress.
Out of nowhere, I felt very, very lonely sitting in that room with my sisters.
Molly was getting married.
Lia was living with her boyfriend, Jude. With the addition of their son, and Jude’s new gig playing soccer for Seattle, I knew it was only a matter of time before they made it official too.
Even Claire, the shyest of the four of us, found her person in bad-boy snowboarder Bauer Davis.
