Page 56 of Crushes to WHAT

“I love you,” I declare, all worries about it being ‘too early’ long gone. “Freaking freak, but do I love you, Emerson Wright.” I throw myself at him, wrapping my arms around his neck and pressing my lips to his.

He kisses me back readily, head tilting for more as he grips me closer to him.

Beyond us, my family cheers, clapping and whooping and whistling. Amia’s voice rings out above the cacophony. “See? This is how you get married! Quickly!”

Emerson and I laugh as we break apart, and the rest of my family laughs with us—with the sole exception of Wolfe, of course.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

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A courthouse wedding is no excuse for bad hair.

Almond

“Al, come on,” Poem half laughs, half sighs. The skirt of her Maid of Honor dress swishes, white feathers dusting the ground. “You don’t need to give Mrs. Wright a full makeover for this. You can do it before your big ceremony in a few months.”

“What a mean, terrible, horrible thing to say to me.” I sniff, distraught, and continue to section a beaming Penelope’s hair. “This is her only son’s first wedding. I’m not going to let her feel anything less than her best for it. Don’t be ridiculous.”

Standing primly on tile and plastic, the women of my and Emerson’s families watch with varying degrees of amusement—and, in Eris’ case, scorn—as I grab my scissors and start snipping. Penelope won’t have the best hair she could have, since I only have time for a cut, but her color isn’t that bad, either. She told me she wouldn’t let her cousin mess with more than her cut.

I know where Emerson got his intelligence.

“Poem’s right,” Eris grumbles, placing her hands over the white fabric of her not-a-bridesmaid-dress-because-I’m-not-letting-someone-with-an-attitude-be-my-bridesmaid-even-if-I-do-like-her-as-a-person-usually dress. “Her hair was fine.”

Penelope frowns at her daughter. “My hair was not fine, and you know it. You said yourself that you wished you’d had time to help me do something with it before we had to be here.”

Eris’ nose wrinkles.

“Almond will fix you right up,” Mom interjects. She delicately pats her own hair, and I hiss at her. She’s going to make the curls fall if she doesn’t leave it alone.

Mom drops her hand to the pale, opalescent fabric at her waist and bares her teeth at me in a simile of a smile. “Hiss at me again, Almond, and we’ll be having a chat. Wedding day or not, you’re to be respectful.”

I apologize immediately. If she drags me out by my hair for one of her “chats”, it’ll mess up the soft waves I gave myself this morning.

Amia finds a hammer on top of a tower of paint cans and holds it up for inspection. “This hammer is really dirty,” she notes, letting it swing down beside her stark-white dress.

Mom, Leora, Poem, and Eris all leap to remove the tool from her grasp.

Leora reaches her first and deftly takes control of the hammer, careful not to let it touch her own pearl-white dress. “If you want to get your dress all covered in dirt, there are much funner ways of doing it than with Uncle Emmy’s hammer.”

Amia wipes her hand on the side of her dress, leaving dirt smudges behind. “Sorry,” she says. “I won’t touch anything else that’s yucky!”

I press my lips together so I won’t laugh as my mother sighs and grabs her purse—and the stain-removing pen within. “Maybe if you hadn’t made us all wear white, then forced us into a construction zone, we wouldn’t have to worry so much about messing up our outfits,” Eris muses, loud and grumpy.

“Maybe,” I agree, shuffling around Penelope to cut her other side. “But any little bloops can get edited out of photos, and even if they aren’t? It’s proof that we lived this day. My niece picked up my almost-husband’s hammer, which he’s been using to fix up my studio, which I’m using to cut his mom’s hair. We’re connected, and we’re alive, and a little bit of dirt or a couple strands of hair clinging to our clothes remind us of those things.”

“I think that’s more than a couple strands of hair,” Leora says wryly, eyeing the lower half of my dress—the half my clear work apron doesn’t cover.

I shrug. As pretty as this dress is… My point stands. Plus, I can shake most of the loose hairs off, and whatever’s left should abandon me with the swipe of a lint roller.

“Where’d you even get a formal dress last minute?” Eris huffs, stepping right around my point to find something else to disparage. “We’re supposed to believe you just had that lying around?”

I mean… yes. The same way I believe they all had pretty white dresses just lying around. It’s not like I produced a full-blown ivory wedding dress. “I bought this a few years ago for a bookish fairy ball I ended up being unable to attend,” I inform her. “I think this is a much better use for it, though. I’m glad I saved it.” Not that it was ever at risk of leaving my home without a minimum of one wear. It’s gorgeous. Pink, of course, with a corseted top covered in soft, flowy tulle. Flower appliqués and blush-pink pearls dot the exposed boning from my hips to my neckline, where they join together with dainty gold branches to flow up and over my shoulders. Soft tulle draping covers my breasts between the corset and the delicate branches.

I feel, and look, like a pink fairy princess. Emerson’s pink fairy princess.

I hope he loves it as much as I do.