Breaking Tackles: A Taking Flight Novel (22 page)

When Adam and I walk through the door, there’s no noise at all, and then, a second later, a chorus of voices yells “Surprise!” and music begins playing.

I look around the room, at the faces of family and friends, taking it all in.

And then I register what the room looks like.

There’s a giant banner that reads, “They’ve Chosen Forever!” in the entry and catering waiters clad in all black are carrying trays of appetizers. Looking through to the living room, I see that the furniture has been cleared out and there’s a fully stocked bar in one corner, enormous floral arrangements on cocktail tables covered in black and white fabric, and that there’s a DJ.

“Are you surprised?” my mom asks, pulling me into a hug.

“Completely,” I say, looking at Adam. “I’m going to have to talk to this one about my feelings on surprises.”

“Don’t you dare,” my mom says as Adam laughs. “Let him do nice things for you. It’s sweet.”

“Future sister-in-law!” I hear a male voice say, and I look up to see Michael followed by a pretty, petite blonde.

Though Michael and Ashton were together a couple years before getting married, I’ve never met her. There was no reason for us to meet back then, and they got married right before Adam and I started dating. I thought we’d meet during the holidays last year, but the newlyweds ended up going to Cabo San Lucas since they didn’t really get to have a honeymoon on account of football season starting up soon after their wedding.

“Hey, Mike,” I say, genuinely glad to see him.

“This is my wife, Ashton,” he says. “It’s about time you two met.”

“It is,” I say, turning to the blonde. Because I’ve always found reality TV to be absurd, I didn’t know who she was by name when the two started dating. But after Googling, I learned a lot about her.

She was on a show about successful, attractive entrepreneurs in Dallas who were single and looking to date. If the Internet can be trusted, Ashton was the most popular person on the show and had a very well documented relationship with another cast member that ended in the penultimate episode.

It was all very dramatic. Apparently.

“It’s so nice to meet you,” she says, going in for a hug. “And so many congratulations on your engagement! I hate that I wasn’t there in New York to witness the proposal.”

“If she had known there’d be an exciting engagement in addition to the NFL Draft, she would have rescheduled the meetings she had that week,” Michael says and Ashton rolls her eyes.

“The sad part is that that’s true,” she says. “You did get my gift though, right?”

“Yes,” I say, remembering the funny wedding planning advice book she sent and the cute Kate Spade necklace. “Oh God, did I not send a thank you note?”

“I’m sure you did,” she says, smiling sweetly. But I’m pretty sure that I
didn’t
, even though I meant to, and now I feel like a jerk.

“I really love the book. And the necklace,” I say.

The truth is that I haven’t read the book yet because wedding planning has been the last thing on my mind. When I reach my goal weight, I’ll start thinking about it. I haven’t worn the necklace because, even though it
is
very cute, I find the thought of wearing a necklace that says “mrs” very preemptive.

“I’m so glad,” she says, sounding sincere and warm. “I’ll let you get to the rest of your guests, but it’s such a pleasure to meet you. I’m looking forward to getting to know you better.”

As they walk away, I look around the room and find my friends standing together with Ryan and Rob. Adam is off talking with our dads, Jason, and my oldest brother, Tony, so I decide to take the opportunity to hang with my friends for a minute.

“Hi, friends,” I say accusingly.

“Oh, stop,” Kate says. “This party is great. You know you’re happy we surprised you.”

“You guys I already know are into the surprises. But my freaking family?” I say, looking at Ryan and Rob.

“You don’t even want to know the threats that were leveled at us by Mom and Vicki if we spilled this,” Ryan says.

“He’s right,” Rob adds. “We kept the secret because we value our extremities.”

“This party is really nice,” Willa says, snagging one of the passed hors d’ouevres off a tray. “And the food is great.”

“Have you had the stuffed mushrooms yet?” Sophie asks. “I didn’t know mushrooms could be that good.”

“And the Brussels sprouts with that glaze stuff on them,” Luke adds.

I haven’t even thought about food since I got here, and even though both mushrooms and Brussels sprouts are things that I can eat, I don’t feel remotely hungry.

But then a waiter walks by and when the smell of the bite-sized crab bisque bread bowls hits my nostrils, my mouth begins to water, and I snag one. Even though it comes with a tiny spoon so that you can eat the soup with some sense of decorum, I put the entire thing in my mouth and nearly moan at how good it is.

Carbs are so delicious.

But then I realize I’ve completely cheated on my diet. No more food for the rest of the night.

“Courtney,” my mom says over my shoulder. “I hate to take you away from your friends, but Vicki and I have something for you in the kitchen.”

“Two minutes?” I ask, and she nods.

“You doing okay?” Willa asks.

“I’m overwhelmed,” I say. “This is kind of ridiculous for an engagement party, don’t you think?”

“But it’s so nice!” Kate says. “And there’s a DJ.”

“There is a DJ at my surprise engagement party,” I say, exasperated. I know I should be grateful that my fiancé and family and friends wanted to throw me a party, but I would have been completely happy sitting in a living room that still had furniture in it and just hanging out instead of this.

“Still,” Kate says. “It’s a cool party.”

I sigh and Sophie asks, “Do you need us to run interference with your mom for a minute?”

“No,” I say. “I’ll just go see whatever this most-likely third surprise in two days is.”

“If you see more of those Brussels sprouts in the kitchen, send them my way,” Luke says.

I can’t help but smile at him before heading to the kitchen.

Once I’m there, I see my mom, Vicki, and Ashton all sitting at the small eat-in table on the far side, away from the catering bustle.

When I sit, I notice that there’s a very thick white scrapbook on the table in front of them. If this is a scrapbook of Adam and me through the years, I’m in such a weird mood that I might actually cry.

My mom smiles and says, “Vicki and I have been thinking, and we know how much you have going on with school and the new long distance. That’s a lot of stress already on your plate. Wedding planning can be very stressful, so, we, with Ashton’s help, have been putting together some ideas for you.”

She opens the scrapbook and I’m bombarded with photos of churches and dresses and flowers and paint chips that I assume are supposed to be color themes. As she turns the pages, there’s just more and more.

“These are all venues in the area,” Vicki says. “Linda and I have called most of them to check on pricing and the dates available. We were thinking that it makes sense for you and Adam to plan the wedding for late spring or early summer next year, but I’m sure you know that that is peak wedding season, so we really do need to nail down a date as soon as possible so we can start booking all the vendors.”

“All you need to do,” my mom says, “is pick a date, look through this, and let us know what you like best. Then we can take it from there.”

Looking at the photos, none of this looks right. It’s all so ornate and over-the-top and not me at all. Hell, one of the color schemes they’ve picked out is
pink
for God’s sake. These two women have known me my entire life, but as I flip through this scrapbook, it seems as if they’ve never met me.

I realize that I’m shaking my head, that my brow is deeply furrowed, and that I’ve picked the scrapbook up, but am clutching it so tightly that my knuckles are going white.

“Courtney,” I hear Ashton say, her voice calm but questioning. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, sure,” I say, my voice sounding high and foreign. “My mom, future mother-in-law, and a near perfect stranger who is my future sister-in-law are just sitting here planning my wedding for me when they know that Adam and I want a long engagement.”

There’s silence when I say this. I know I should stop there, but I don’t.

“I’d maybe be okay with it if any of these—I guess you would call them options— were palatable, but none of them are. Mom, when have I ever in my life wanted something the color pink? Why would you think I would put my friends in Pepto Bismol-colored dresses? None of this looks like anything I would ever want. So, it looks like you’ve all wasted your time trying to take over my wedding since you think I’m just too stressed out to deal with it myself. Did you ever even consider that I know what kind of wedding I’d like? No, you didn’t. Because you didn’t even bother to ask.”

There are tears in my eyes and when I stand to storm off, my legs feel wobbly and I have to use the back of my chair to steady myself. When I’m stable, I turn and flee from the kitchen, past the living room, and up the stairs to Adam’s room, where I close and lock the door.

Adam

I see Courtney rush past me and all but sprint up the stairs. A couple of the other party guests look at me questioningly, but I just smile and then follow her.

I see her slip into my room and I hear the door close and lock behind her.

This isn’t normal.

Maybe the party wasn’t a good idea. I thought it would be fun, but maybe I should’ve told her this morning so she was prepared for it. I head down the hall and knock on my own bedroom door. It’s silent for a few moments and then I hear Courtney ask, “Who is it?” in an incredibly irritated-sounding voice.

“It’s Adam.”

She unlocks the door but doesn’t open it, and when I open the door, she’s lying on my bed, her face turned away from me.

“Hey,” I say softly, walking over to the bed and sitting on it. “Everything okay?”

“No,” she says, sniffling. “It definitely isn’t. Our mothers have taken it upon themselves to plan our wedding for us since they’ve decided I’m not doing a good enough job of it.”

“Oh,” I say slowly, trying to understand why someone wanting to help would upset her.

“You wouldn’t understand,” she says. “Well, maybe you would. Go downstairs and ask your mom for the scrapbook. After looking through it, I assume you’ll be back up here with me, wondering how the people you’ve known longest in your life could so completely not understand anything about you.”

“So, just to make sure I know what’s going on, our moms have some sort of scrapbook that they’re using to plan our wedding and it made you mad.”

“Basically.”

“Because it wasn’t anything you liked?”

“Because they didn’t ask me!” she yells. “Neither of them ever asked me what I want out of this wedding. Instead they just started planning it for me, saying that they know I have a lot on my plate and that they didn’t want me to have to stress out about planning a wedding, so instead of even asking me what I might want, they began planning for us and told me I should just point to a picture and pick.”

I open my mouth to say that that doesn’t seem half bad—pointing and picking and then being able to sit back and not worry about anything until the day of sounds great, actually. But I know that that is the absolute wrong thing to say right now.

As I’m trying to figure out what to say to make Courtney feel better, there’s a knock on the door.

“Do you want me to answer it?” I ask.

“It’s probably Sophie, Willa, and Kate.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Yeah,” she says.

I cross the room to open the door, but it’s Ashton, not the other girls.

“Hey,” she says, looking nervous. “Can I come in?”

I look over to Courtney, who has sit up, and she nods.

“Sure,” I say to Ashton, and she walks in and closes the door behind her.

“Courtney,” she says. “I’m so sorry about what happened down there.”

“It’s not your fault,” Courtney says. “I’m sure you were roped into the planning by Vicki.”

“Well,” Ashton says, “it was my idea to surprise you with a wedding scrapbook.”

“What?” Courtney asks, her voice edgy.

“I’m not sure if you already know, but I’m an event planner,” Ashton says. “When Vicki and Linda called and told me that they wanted to help you plan the wedding because you didn’t seem interested in doing it, I told them that it sometimes takes brides a while to get excited about planning because the whole thing can be so overwhelming. So I suggested that the three of us put some ideas together and give you a scrapbook. You could look through it, tell us what you like and don’t like, and then we’d have a better idea of what kind of wedding you wanted.”

This all makes a lot of sense to me, but then again, I’m not a girl. And though this seems like a logical thing to do, Courtney still looks like she wants to field dress someone.

“But why didn’t anyone ever ask me?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” Ashton says. “I thought they had and that you had shrugged them off or told them you had too much going on.”

I clear my throat and the girls look over at me. “In all fairness, you did tell them when we got engaged that you hadn’t even thought about the wedding and that you wanted a long engagement.”

“Right,” Courtney says. “And since this summer neither of them has so much as asked me about wedding plans.”

Ashton grimaces and says, “I see.”

“Besides, it’s not just my wedding,” Courtney says. “It’s Adam’s, too. I want the wedding to reflect both of us.”

I jerk my head up and say, “Wait, what?”

“A wedding shouldn’t be about me. It’s about us,” Courtney says. “I want your opinions on the day, too.”

“Courtney, I just want to marry you. I don’t care about the day or where it is or what I’m wearing or the food I eat. The rest of the details don’t matter at all to me.”

“No wonder you’re marrying him,” Ashton says, which makes both Courtney and me laugh. When the laugher dies down, Ashton continues, “Well, I just wanted to come and apologize. I hope that this hasn’t ruined anything between us.”

Courtney shakes her head. “It’s not your fault that my mom and Vicki pulled you into this. Besides, you didn’t know that I’d be a basket case today.”

Ashton smiles and says, “You’re not a basket case. Believe me. I work in the event planning industry. That meltdown wasn’t anywhere close to nuclear.”

“Thanks,” Courtney says.

“If you do want some help with the planning once you decide when you want to get married, please let me know.”

“Thanks, Ashton,” I say, and Courtney adds her thanks as well before Ashton heads out the door and back down to the party.

“So,” I say to Courtney, who is looking less pale. “What now?”

“I guess we need to go back down there. I probably need to apologize to our moms.”

“It kind of sounds like you don’t,” I say.

“Seriously?”

“They did something that really upset you and went behind your back to do it. I think you’re justified in being upset.”

“How are you real?” Courtney asks.

I lean over, kiss her softly, and say, “If I have to choose between our moms and you, I’m on Team Courtney.”

“I don’t think I deserve you,” she says.

“Nonsense.”

“No, really,” she says. “I’ve been a crazy person, and all you’ve done is be nice to me, planning surprises and trying to make me happy.”

“I know things have been tough lately,” I say. “So if there’s any way I can make that better, I’m going to. But I promise to cool it with the surprises.”

She laughs and says, “A surprise every once in a while is nice. But this many in one year is a little extreme.”

“Good to know. So. Ready to go back down to the evil surprise engagement party?”

“Yeah,” she says. “But only if we can get the DJ to play something that isn’t electronic acid jazz.”

I snort and say, “I’m sure we can work something out.”