In her sweetest voice, Cashmere said, “Everything is going to be fine, Avril. If you keep worrying, I’ll send our moms in here to calm you down.”
Okay. Fine. I’d get a hold of myself. I didn’t want to stress my very pregnant moms out. Everything was done. I’d planned every detail to perfection.
Nothing was going to go wrong.
All too soon, it was time—the moment I’d fantasized about and worked so hard for… it was finally here.
The moment my dads joined me to walk me down the aisle, two of them immediately burst into tears. Pa Nix hurriedly brushed at his eyes, muttering, “My baby girl is all grown up.”
Daddy-Lo was crying freely as he told me, “You look so beautiful.”
“Don’t cry, Daddy-Lo. You’re going to make me cry, too,” I sniffed loudly, fanning myself.
Really.
Don’t make me cry.
There wasn’t time to go fix my make-up after this.
I took a deep breath and pulled myself together. My dads were all around me, three on each side. The heavy doors to the ceremony site were pulled wide open.
There was a literal gasp from my guests as they turned and took me in… the good kind of gasp, not the bad one. Mother and Momma Rains, seated at the front, both started to tear up. They watched me, beaming widely.
Then my eyes met David’s.
As I stared into the eyes of the man I had chosen, everything else in the world faded away. All of my anxieties, all the stress of this event, disappeared… until there was only him.
He stared at me slack-jawed… in complete disbelief. The only thing that I could read in his eyes was raw yearning—and a heat so intense that itburnedall the way from the altar.
All of his fierce passion, all that fervent heat—it did something to me, loosened something deep inside me… all the pressure that I had put myself under to make this wedding perfect—it burst like a child’s bubble. Every inch of my body was filled with bliss. I wanted to run and skip to him. I wanted to giggle and throw my hands in the air. I wanted to toss my hair back and scream with glee…
I had never wanted anything in my life more than I wanted to be with him… when I never even imagined that I could ever be with someone like him. Maybe I thought that there was something broken inside me, how I wasn’t like my brothers and sisters. How I wasn’t born special like the others… there was always a part of me that felt like I didn’t deserve a man like David.
But he had chosen me, anyway.
Now I got to keep him.
This man who made my heart race… who made me feel alive.
This man wholovesme.
I practically floated down the aisle on my way to him. I was giddy as I joined David under an archway of royal purple wisteria. The officiant began going through our vows that I had run through my imagination for so many years…
“Do you, David Brockman, take Avril Stryker to be your lawfully wedded wife?”
The way David was looking at me now… nothing I had ever imagined had come close to this.
“I, David Brockman, take you Avril Stryker, to be my lawfully wedded wife. To have and to hold from this day forward. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and health, I will love you and cherish you for all the days of my life.”
I felt his vows burn deep in my lower belly.
After wanting this ceremony for my entire life… now that I was in it, all I really wanted was to run away with my soon to be husband, to wrap my arms around him and never let him go.
“Do you, Avril Stryker, take David Brockman to be your lawfully wedded husband?”
“I, Avril Stryker, take you, David Brockman, to be my lawfully wedded husband. To have and to hold from this day forward. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and health, I will love you and cherish you for all the days of my life.”
Yes, I might have spent my whole life fantasizing about this moment—but I would throw this whole ceremony all of it away… for him.
