AllFreeNovel
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She went into the dressing room and tugged the blue curtain over the opening, then she undressed quickly, slipping the simple dress up over her shoulders, and zipping it. She was extremely satisfied to see that it fit. It came just to the middle of her calves, sort of a 1950s style. Not terribly bridal. She didn’t know why she cared.
Would she and Gus stay married forever? Would they stay married just long enough that they would be established as a family, with him fixed in everyone’s mind as the baby’s dad? She supposed there was no real way to project that. He might not want to fall in love and get married someday, but she sort of had.
She stared at the mirror, at the girl there who looked scared and hollow-eyed and a little bit tragic.
“Pull yourself together,” she said to herself.
She stripped the dress off and got dressed again, coming out to see Gus holding a frying pan. “This is a damn good pan,” he said, pointing to it.
“Well, let’s get the dress and the frying pan. That seems...wedding appropriate.”
“I ought to get you a ring,” he said.
“Oh. I...”
“We need rings,” he said. “For the ceremony.”
“Gus,” she said, feeling slightly uncomfortable. “We don’t need to go to all that trouble.”
“I’m marrying you, Alaina. If that’s not the chief trouble in all this, I don’t know what is.”
“We can get rings here,” she said, pointing to the glass case by the registers. Where there were rings, necklaces and...
A doll head.
There was a doll head.
“No,” he said, clearly spotting the doll head when she did. “Not doing that.”
They bought their items, and walked out of the shop. “Let’s drive over to Gold Valley.”
“It takes like three hours to get there,” she said.
“I know. But there’s a jewelry store there that’s supposed to be really good.”
“You justknowabout a jewelry store?”
It seemed unlikely Gus had a thing for jewelry.
“I happen to know that Wolf bought Violet a ring there. Yeah.”
“I’m not Violet,” she said, looking up at him. “And you’re not Wolf.”
Wolf and Violet had gotten married last year, after Violet had gotten pregnant during an affair they were carrying on while he was visiting family in Copper Ridge. She had come back to Four Corners and married him, and Alaina couldn’t imagine the place without her.
But the big difference was, the two of them were...romantic.
She and Gus were very not.
“Our marriage license is as legal as theirs,” he said.
“Yes but...”
The man was offering to buy her a ring. Maybe she should settle down and quit protesting. They got back to the truck, and he opened the door for her again. She climbed up inside. Waited for him to get in the cab. “What are we going to do on the drive?”
“Play slug bug?”
She looked at him and saw that the corner of his mouth had turned upward.
