I smile back, dazed. “You’re really tall,” is all I can manage. Because the man is freakishly tall and my brain is clearly still rebooting.
He winks. “Ya dig?”
I shake my head and laugh because I’m instantly reminded that my new husband looks like a Frank Lucas impersonator. He’s draped in a floor-length, crushed velvet duster in a shade of royal purple that borders on offensive. It’s trimmed in fauxsnow-leopard fur that spills over the wide lapels and cuffs, paired with matching flared trousers that hug his thighs a little too well.
He looks like a fever dream from a 70s street-style magazine. Yet somehow, the sheer height of him and the way he wears the absurdity makes it work.
“Okay, pimp-a-licious. Exactly how tall are you?”
“Six foot, four inches,” he replies with a grin, looking down at me.
“Wow. I mean, yummy. I mean…fuck.” Drunk-me is so uncultured. Thanks God the footage won’t aire.
“Okay, lovebirds, let’s move,” Chelsea interrupts, suddenly between us. She’s got one hand on Luca’s velvet shoulder, the other pressed to the headset looped around her ear as we watch her shuffle freshly-married strangers through a pop-up wedding assembly line.
“Group three’s on deck,” she whispers into the mic clipped to her blazer. “
I blink. “So…Wait. That’s it? Are we—”
“Married?” Chelsea interrupts, excitedly. “Yes! Let’s keep it moving. Photo op’s next, then confessional interviews. You’ll have a champagne toast in the holding room, or feel free to venture off to honeymoon land!”
Luca squeezes my hand, and I swear I feel the kiss again. Still lingering.
He keeps holding my hand as we exit the chapel, and I look over at him.
I’ve just married a man whose last name sounds like a cartoon villain and who looks like Huggy Bear Brown.
Luca Chillmonger.
The name has to be fake. Which makes this little adventure even more fun. Delicious, even.
I blink at the ink drying on the marriage license, the studio lights overhead blazing. Luca—or whatever his real name is—casually stands beside me like he just signed a lease on a one-bedroom apartment and not a legally binding commitment to a woman he met through a wall.
We pose for the wedding photos, a flashbulb-induced haze blurring the edges of the room before we’re ushered into the “confessional.” The associate producers seat us shoulder-to-shoulder on a crushed velvet couch, bathing us in soft, deceptively flattering light before they start firing off questions like a cross-examination.
We navigate the answers—clumsily, playfully, and perhaps with a bit too much honesty—but only after securing a ironclad promise: if we opt for an annulment, this footage stays in the vault. They agreed, though the hungry look in the producer's eyes tells me they’re betting on us being a disaster they can't wait to air.
“What was going through your mind when you first saw each other?”
“Do you believe this could be the start of something real?”
“On a scale of one to ten, how attracted are you to your new spouse?”
One of them even asks if Luca’s height freaked me out. I’m only five-foot-four, and standing next to him feels like standing next to a mountain range. My mother would be absolutely scandalized if she heard my answer. “My new husband is a tree I have been preparing my entire life to climb.”
Thankfully, that segment finally wraps up. I decide then and there that I need to hydrate. And by hydrate, I mean more tequila—I need a serious infusion of liquid courage if I’m going to survive the rest of this night.
I’m hopeful that we might actually get a moment to breathe, but my optimism is short-lived. Chelsea swoops in again,shoving a branded binder into our hands before we can even catch our breath.
“Inside, you’ll find next steps, schedules, and talking points in case anyone asks you about the show and your involvement,” she instructs, ticking everything off the list.
“This is surprisingly thorough for a Vegas wedding we didn’t even know was happening,” I say with a nervous laugh.
“No kidding,” Luca says. “But at least I ended up with the prettiest girl in the pod.”
He actually made me blush. I never blush on a first date. It sends the wrong message. But Lord, my va-jay-jay is currently preparing a carrier pigeon itself to this man’s penis.
Maybe there was something to everyone’s warning-labels about Vegas because I’m ready to throw out all my morals. This man better stop looking at me like that!
