Invitation

Given that there was someone inside the house that was blind to everything except the brightest of lights, hearing crashing echoing through the room in the dead of night was an immediate reason to be concerned. Finding that, despite waking up as the crashing was still happening, the blankets on the other half of the bed were already in disarray, the chances that the culprit of the middle-of-the-night disruption was actually Aimee were slim to none, but if it wasn’t her, that meant that something else was happening. Something else that Green was fairly certain he wanted no part of, if he was being honest with himself; there would be time to figure out what had happened in the morning, after he’d been able to go back to sleep.

That plan didn’t work, as he’d barely been able to close his eyes once more when he heard someone come into the room, feet dragging across the floor. “I don’t know what she’s doing, but Mum’s out there making more noise than she needs to,” Bridgette told him, sitting down on the empty side of the bed and making it very obvious that he wasn’t going to get away with not taking action. “I tried asking her what she was doing but she said it was a surprise, which is…normal for her, I guess.”

“Being difficult? Yes, that’s normal for her. Being awake in the middle of the night and making enough noise to raise the dead? Not as normal. You can leave this to me, maybe she’ll tell me what she’s up to.” That’s what he said, and that was what he hoped his daughter believed he was going to do, but the truth was that he had zero intentions of getting up and investigating anything—something that she realized after a few moments of him not moving. The pillow she threw at his face was deserved, and it was enough of a jolt to properly wake him up to do what he was going to have to.

When he got out to where the noise seemed to have come from, which was obvious based on how there was actual light present there in the room, he looked around to see if the reason for the noise was still around, or if she’d hidden herself to avoid confrontation. Not seeing her, but seeing a disaster zone of knocked-down books and papers, he had half a mind to go back to the bedroom and ask Bridgette to clarify what she knew to have happened, because he was slightly considering the possibility that she was responsible for it and was trying to blame someone else. But if that were the case, then he shouldn’t have woken up alone, and then that would raise the question of where in the world his wife had gotten off to.

That was an easier question to answer than he expected, when he noticed that the front door to the house was being pushed open, and there was someone sitting outside in the moonlight doing the pushing. “Are you going to explain what it is you’re doing awake right now?” he asked as he walked towards the doorway, carefully avoiding the door as it swung to rest fully open. “You made a lot of noise in there, you should at least tell me why that was.”

“Couldn’t sleep, mind got to thinking about things,” Amanda replied, craning her neck and arching her back until she could see the person approaching her. “You know, same stuff as usual. Except this time, I decided I’d actually do something about it.”

“About…it,” he repeated, coming to stand in the doorway and shaking his head down at her. “You’ll have to be clearer about what ‘it’ is, there’s a million things you could be talking about right now.”

“You know, the thing I said I wanted to do. We talked about this, remember? You said as long as no one got hurt and I didn’t get too uptight about things, I could try to put it together. This was like a couple weeks ago, you can’t have forgotten!” Leaning back forward, Amanda’s head was still tilted back and she was clearly looking up at the stars above. “Please tell me you haven’t forgotten, oh please.”

“If we were having this conversation at normal hours, I’m sure I would remember, but you’ll have to give it to me this time.”

Without looking, she grabbed something out of her lap and held it up so that he could grab it, a handwritten note of some sort that she had clearly been writing in near-darkness. “I might have gone ahead and reserved the villa for the whole day, so that we can make this re-do happen. When I couldn’t sleep, I decided I was going to make invitations for everyone to make it feel like it’s really happening again, but I didn’t know where the crafting things were so I dropped a bunch of things looking for them.”

“Invitations, just like last time. You really want to make this happen.” His eyes reading over the messy words on the page, Green thought back to when she’d first made invitations, about how much effort and work they’d had to put into them, only for the ceremony they were for to be crashed without warning. While that day had ended up fine for them, and had introduced them to one of their two children, it hadn’t been the wedding of her dreams that she’d been planning, and it was something that she’d brought up a few times before.

Now that their second anniversary was coming up, she’d gotten the idea to try the whole thing again, without there being political drama or anything for them to be dealing with and taking a break from. There was no chance of someone else stumbling upon the ceremony and ruining it, they were fairly certain, so she’d been allowed to plan this under the condition that she not let it get too much to her head. Hearing that she was really trying to make it like the first time was a bit concerning, but there wasn’t going to be any stopping her now that she was in the process of writing her invitations again. This second wedding ceremony was going to happen, no ifs, ands, or buts if she had any say, and he wasn’t going to get between her and what she wanted this time.

It wasn’t an easy thing to put together, but it was harmless and it wasn’t like the first time had gone perfectly for them. “You better get on sending these out soon, before you know it it’ll be time to start traveling to get there in time,” he said to her, dropping the invitation note above her head and letting it float down onto her lap. “But before that, mind coming inside and cleaning up the mess you made?”

“I can do that, might be for the best that I do before Aimee gets up and hurts herself on something that fell. Can’t have her ruining a second wedding, can we?”