AllFreeNovel
Share Us
A woman screamed. From the depths of the Mediterranean-inspired grotto, Helen Gustavson emerged and pointed a shaking, wrathful finger back into the shadowy depths of the grotto.
“What kind of people are you? I have children here! Children!”
Everything came to a dead stop. The orchestra, the wedding party, perhaps even time itself.
Cameras flashed. Voices murmured. People glanced at each other and at the groom and then at the grotto. The Gustavsons, looking collectively shell-shocked, scurried out after their white-haired matriarch. They all marched through the rows of guests and exited to the lobby.
The grotto wasn’t done coughing up people, though. One was the bride’s stepmother who was stuffing her tits back into her surgical bandage of a dress. The guy who casually followed her out seemed familiar. He had the haughty look of a frat boy who’d just nailed half the cheerleading squad. They waded a couple of steps out and then came to a rather comical stop. At that point there wasn’t a pair of eyes in the house that couldn’t guess what the unsuspecting Gustavson family had wandered into.
“Bart?” wailed the distressed maid of honor. And that was when I remembered where I’d seen Frat Boy before. We’d met during yesterday’s rehearsal. He was a groomsman and the girl’s fiancé.
“Karen!” yelled Allen Tidewater. And his wife—she of the rearranged cleavage—had the grace to look slightly sheepish as she bit her lip and backed into the stone face of the grotto.
That was the moment Kaylie Tidewater decided to lose her mind.
“Bitch!” she screeched as she dropped her father’s arm and flung her bouquet to the ground. “I knew you’d find a way to fuck this day up!”
Strangely, Kaylie’s wrath was not directed at her stepmother, or at Bart, or even at me. She stalked over to her sister, snatched the weeping maid of honor’s rose bouquet, and stuffed it right down the middle of the poor girl’s cleavage.
“Dammit, Kaylie,” hissed Allen Tidewater before he stepped into the catfight and earned a fingernail in his left eye. He howled like a banshee and dropped to his knees.
There were tons of gasping, a few muffled screams, and paparazzi swooping in for their payday. For a few terrible seconds, I was just a motionless bystander watching it all unfold before I jumped into action. Realizing I had already lost all control, I made a desperate grab for the bride so she would stop trying to suffocate her sister with long-stem roses. Unfortunately my chunky Coach watch got caught on the delicate fabric of the bridal train, and I lost my balance, going down in a cloud of lace and limbs and instant infamy.
Eventually the ceremony did proceed, although of course the prewedding highlights were instant fodder for every celebrity gossip site on the planet.
And naturally I was fired the very next day.
Lucy listened to the entire story. “Wow. That’s crazy. How the hell can you be blamed for the fact that the bride’s stepmother was getting porked in a closet by, ah, who was it again?”
“The maid of honor’s fiancé.”
My sister snickered. “Sounds positively incestuous.”
“And it wasn’t a closet,” I argued. “It was an ornamental grotto.”
She snorted. “Well, I guess that makes the situation classier.”
“It doesn’t matter. I screwed up by encouraging uninvited guests to sneak in, and then I failed to defuse the situation.”
“Bull. It wasn’t even your job.”
I chuckled madly. “Well, now it’s really not.”
“Mel.”
“Luce.”
My sister sighed. I missed that sigh. I wished it wasn’t coming from so far away. Lucy was living in San Francisco these days. Eighteen months apart in age, we’d been more rivals than friends growing up, but something vital had shifted when our parents were killed in a motorcycle accident four years ago. That tragedy became the demarcation line of my life. I was still reeling when I uttered an ill-advised “I do” to my college boyfriend, though our relationship had long been on shaky ground. We divorced barely a year later. I hadn’t even changed my name. But I did learn the hard way that I didn’t have as many friends as I thought I did. My sister was always my unwavering ally, possibly my only one.
“In any case,” she said gently, “that’s a damn sucky chain of events.”
“Totally sucky. James-level sucky.”
Lucy gagged at the mention of my ex. “Oh god, it’s not that bad, is it?”
“I guess not. He had a baby, you know.”
“You’re kidding.”
