The Wedding Bet

By Cupideros

Copyright © 2013 Blue Ribbon Books

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

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June, 2012

Hi. Spoiler alerts coming. First, I’m not much of a storyteller. My stories are certainly not funny. No. They won’t be repeated around the water cooler or whispered in the women’s or men’s bathrooms on breaks and lunch. This might be because people want a lot of blood and guts, high-drama, guns and violence and I’m good and settled with my Happily Ever After (HEA) or Happy For Now (HFN) endings.

Second, this story is about that most banal of subject’s romance. I mean, if you’ve seen one romance, you’ve seen them all. I don’t blame you, reader, if you want to skip to the very last page, read it and pass the book on to your girlfriends.

Third, you don’t know me. Wait a minute! Maybe you do know me. I run a successful wedding catering business in Joinrite City, population just under one million. Sprawling Joinrite City expands every day with new people pouring in from the more popular cities known in the movies and atlases. My name is Megan Bedrosian and I have a heart-shaped face, long neck, cute pointed chin, and very expressive blue eyes to go along with my thin lips. I wear my sandy blonde hair in an off-the-shoulder flip business hair style. Some men say I am attractive, but not in a va-va-voom fashion. I’m perfect for the wedding business. Everyone says I should be married and will have no trouble getting married for that matter. But I’m way too busy for that. You want proof? Look at my too-many commitments on my wedding planner calendar for other girl’s weddings. It would be irresponsible to drop their plans just to get married myself.

I have a small nose for a woman who talks a lot. My nose lets my clients know I’ll keep things to myself. Secrets and all. I honor and keep every bit of scandal that crosses my coral-stained thin lips, before, during and after the wedding. And my slender body allows me to try on my wedding client’s bridal dress, if she’s too busy for a first fitting. Not that I do that often. A getting-married girl ought to try out her own wedding dress—for good luck—if nothing else. Besides, I cater weddings not design wedding dresses.

The thing is my slim figure and willingness to go the extra mile persuades my client that I can deliver the best catered wedding in the east side of the state. Doesn’t matter if she’s a first-time bridal virgin or non-virgin, war bride marrying in a hurry before her beau goes off to foreign lands, shotgun wedding bride, marry-me-before-my-baby-bump-appears bride or a let’s-move-me-out-of-my-parent’s home bride, I’m the wedding caterer who will see to their every need—only the food of course. I don’t match up the flower girl dresses; although I tell them if the purple cake is a more of a mauve-grey purple, or reddish-blue purple or violet purple.

Right now I’m dabbing my blue eyes as tears spill on to my blush applied cheeks. Cynthia, the cute one from our block, the homecoming queen, prom queen, campus cutie, first in our class, just got married in a beautiful ceremony in a big old fashioned Protestant church. She’s kissing her new husband Vic, some soccer-crazed stock investor who will no doubt leave her washing the clothes, caring for their 2.5 children, but that’s all in the future. They should try to avoid the part about chores.

She looks so beautiful in her white dress. They danced. They cut my three-tiered wedding cake. I made sure the bride statuette stood slightly taller than the groom, just for equality’s sake. Because Cynthia is a progressive feminist; she leaves others to do her feminist dealings for her. They each smeared cake all over the other’s mouths. Although some cake batter managed to be consumed and they paused like frozen by an Instagram photo and both turned to me in the back, and said, “This wedding cake tastes amazing, Megan!”

Then everyone crowded around my baby and cannibalized every sweet powder, and red and blue purplish icing and the tiny pink and red roses and the heavy drapes along the side the children loved best of all. Finally all the bridesmaids, the most wholesome bridesmaid of all, Olivia, dragged me into the line of single women waiting to catch the bouquet of flowers.

Olivia formed part II of our best-friend triad when we were in high school and college (Cynthia, the leader, Olivia, and I). All the flower girls cheered for their favorite woman to catch the flowers, cousins, nieces at the huge family marriage. Cynthia smiled, looking absolutely radiant; the tiny smudge of purple cake on the left side of her lip, most took for a beauty mole aka Cindy Crawford, I knew better. A wedding cake baker knows her icing and dough no matter what size or shape or place.

I thought Cynthia aimed for me, but Cynthia’s popularity prevented me from being sure. I know very little about the bouquet tossing, except to know several of the women lined up before me played soccer in high school and in college, too. If anything they knew how to tap the flowers to Olivia whom it all predefined, I think, should be next in our triad to be married off.

Me, I only played badminton and you don’t even use your hands in that sport except to pick up a fallen flower after you lost a point. So the odds of me catching the thing bordered on the astronomical number of zero. An alien in Roswell probably have a better time of meeting the president than I would of catching the group of bound flowers which no doubted wanted a big swig of water by now.

One….

Cynthia shouted without looking over her shoulder at the mayhem of grown women reliving their slumber party days, shuffling, pushing, positioning, spreading their tired legs, several even dropped out of their reddish purple high heels for a better chance. Olivia made me stand next to her in the front row. But during all the precatch maneuverings, I managed to slip back to the last row of crazed bouquet flower girls and relaxed. I smiled. I had other things to do like make a lot of more money catering weddings and taking my trip to Flanders—the land of Hamlet.

Two....

Women stretched their arms high and wide, their fingers spread. I slipped a further extra foot back from the throng of women. I remained outside the front line of determined, fierce faces of femininity. An outcast. At least one foot from the throng waiting for the flowers of eternity, hoping their capture would bring about the man of their dreams. My hand clasped in front of my empty lower belly. And I listened to the ruffles of Cynthia’s skirt and veil as she made the necessary adjustments. That stark silence. The caught breath of twenty women magnified the silence.

“Three!”

Cynthia let the flowers go, but apparently the flowers seemed reluctant to leave her sweaty hands. The bouquet went up in a high arc and landed near the first row. Now erupted the mad screams and scuffling, fighting over soon-to-be-dead flowers. I smiled watching the bouquet bounce left, back, right, forward, right, back again one girl said, “It’s mine!”

Another woman said, “No, I got it!”

The third woman a little older said, “Let go!”

I watched in utter amazement as twenty of my best friends transformed into soccer cavewomen. Reaching, batting, tapping the oversized bouquet badminton flower.

“Uphmm!”

“Oh.”

The flowers flew right into my clasped hand by some mistaken act of Goddess or God; or an inspired by an overdose of PMS induced wedding hysteria.

“Megan caught the flowers!” Someone yelled.

“Megan?” A few women dusted the dirt off their long dresses.

Other women pulled themselves off the church’s stone tiled flooring.

For a second, holding the bouquet in my hand, I tried to dismiss my responsibility. I imagined and kept to my dream of traveling to Flanders and setting up another catering business. I looked forward to building my next wedding client’s hot-air balloon cake. I stared aghast at the wedding bouquet in my hands.
How did I get these
? As the frustrated, love-lost faced women gathered around me as if to jump on me and tackle me because I had the rugby flowers.

I said in my softest shy and apologetic voice. “It was an accident. Honest!”

Olivia came to my rescue. She stood beside me. “Megan didn’t mean to catch the bouquet of flowers. It was a catapult accident.”

Amber, a onetime soccer goalie suggested a retoss.

Cynthia rushed forward holding up the hem of her wedding dress, dragging because she’d removed her heels. “No! No! No! You are so not bringing me bad luck by having a retoss.” And the banana-shaped Cynthia flipped her long curly blonde hair back. Cynthia Trixie Tinderholdt had a beach-girl-forever figure. Her short straight blonde hair swept back behind both ears.

Short bangs swept over to her left side, made her oval face and I-know-what-you’-did eyes belong on the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. Her high boobs were natural and she looked great in any color of white made. Cynthia had a thing for dramatics. “To honor and keep, that’s what you told me weddings were all about, Megan.”

“Yes, but,” I tried to explain that meant for the people getting married and not certainly for me catching the wedding flowers when I in no way tried to. “Normally, I’d agree Cynthia. We both go a long way back. I certainly don’t deserve these flowers. Olivia deserves them.”

“Yeah,” clamored several girls. “It’s Olivia’s turn to get married.”

Before Olivia spoke up, I thought to defend my honor and keenness. Olivia beat me to it, defending my honor and keenness that is.

“No. It’s fate. It must be time for, Megan,” she said after easing the crowd down from its high energy emotional reaction. “Megan, what do you say? Megan?”

You should know Olivia is my very best friend. She’s always been there for me. When I had my period the first time; when I thought I received my first kiss from a boy behind me, only this old woman’s dog, small hand-sized-dog, licked popcorn off my cheeks. I knew I was in good hands and Olivia looked liked future MILF mom.

Olivia had a rectangular face and a mom smile and shoulder-length dark caramel hair. Her body looked more like a triangle shape, but she wore stripes tops all the time and jeans when she wasn’t helping people in the Public Library of Joinrite City. Put Olivia in a pair of distressed jean short shorts and blue-black stripped tee and you’d think of her as your hot sister or hot mom. Olivia’s paramour waited in the wings to marry her some day, once people stop fearing her scholastic mind.

“You can have them!” I tried to hand the flowers to my best friend since eighth grade. She’d always wanted to be married, but her past four boyfriends are missing in action, signed up for the war or venturing into outer space. What was I to do?

“No they’re yours.” Olivia turned to the crowd of women around our Triad.

All the women circled me, smiling wickedly, like they planned a wedding dance to bring a husband raining down.

“It’s official.” Olivia said with an enthusiastic shout. “We have to get Megan married by year’s end.”

“Agree,” said one girl.

“Ey, Ey!” said the pirate girl I never liked who had three tattoos too many.

They caught me engaged in this philandering relationship to the bouquet flowers. “O-kay. I’m agreeing to this under one condition?”

“What?” answered Olivia?   

“If you cannot find me a suitable mate, in one year’s time, you’ll never ask when I’m going to be married again. And I’m excluded from any more wedding bouquet tosses.”

Cynthia said, “That’s so doable. You’re cute and courageous and have that always-there smile.” Cynthia made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “We’ll get you married in six months time.”

The women nodded it sounded reasonable enough.

“That’s all it takes to find a job in a normal economy. Six months,” said Olivia.

I thought to myself,
Megan, what have you gotten yourself in for this time?
Marriage in six months! I felt certain if I did nothing I would not get married. But Olivia defined loyalty more than best friend and Cynthia worked as a Public Relationships specialist in a big PR Firm. So I had to be clever. I decided on a plan of my own to end the women’s dream of planning my wedding. Because besides how could I bake a wedding cake for my own wedding?