“What? Where?” Omar patted his hair, somehow missing the cake saw entirely.
“No, higher. No, the other side. Omar, there’s a cake saw on your head.”
“A what on my what?”
I caught Jeremiah’s eye and had to bite my lip to keep from laughing at his expression of polite panic.
The photographer had given up entirely and was now sitting at one of the tables with his head in his hands, occasionally looking up to capture whatever fresh disaster was unfolding.
“I’ll be scarred for life,” Elliot declared from somewhere behind me, though he was laughing as he said it and taking pictures with his phone.
“This is why we can’t have nice things,” Shane muttered loud enough to be overheard, still tangled in fairy lights with Omar’s cake saw hat somehow having migrated to his own head.
“Promise me we won’t invite these people when we get married,” I said, then immediately froze as I realized what had just come out of my mouth.
Jeremiah’s eyebrows shot up, and a familiar grin spread across his face. “Whenwe get married?”
Heat flooded my cheeks. “I meant if.Ifwe get married. Hypothetically. In some distant, theoretical future that may or may not—”
“You said when,” he interrupted, his grin widening.
“I misspoke.”
“Did you?”
I looked at Jeremiah—reallylooked at him—taking in the way his eyes were sparkling with amusement and something deeper, something that made my heart skip in ways that should probably have required an emergency helicopter ride to Grady Hospital.
“Maybe I didn’t,” I admitted quietly.
He leaned over and kissed me, soft and quick, while around us our friends continued their campaign of organized chaos, completely unaware of how the Earth had just moved beneath both our feet.
“Good,” he whispered against my lips. “Because I was thinking ‘when,’ too.”
From across the room, Debbie’s voice carried clearly over the din: “And when Daddy and Willie Wee get married, I’m going tobe the flower girlandthe dragon princess, and everyone has to wear sparkles!”
It was, without a doubt, the most raucous, unhinged, ridiculous wedding reception I’d ever attended.
It was also absolutely perfect.
Chapter 40
Jeremiah
The drive home was an exercise in managing a sugar-high five-year-old who’d apparently consumed her weight in wedding cake and was now vibrating at frequencies that only dogs could hear.
“And then Mrs. H made the pipes go WHEEEEEEE and the security man was like, ‘Ma’am, please stop,’ but she was like, ‘This isculture,’ and then the alarm went BEEP BEEP BEEP, and Omar had cake on his head and—”
“Button, breathe,” Theo said from the driver’s seat, catching my eye with an expression that was equal parts exhaustion and amusement.
“How much cake did she actually eat?” Theo muttered.
I did a quick mental calculation. “Three pieces of traditional, two of the woodworking table, plus she ate most of the fondant hammer with a coating from the chocolate fountain thingy.”
“She what now?”
“I dipped everything in chocolate,” Debbie chirped helpfully. “The strawberries and the cookies and that piece of cheese thattasted funny but looked pretty . . . oh, and the hammer. That was so yummy.”
“Our daughter covered cheese in chocolate and ate it?” Theo’s knuckles went white on the steering wheel. “She’ssogoing to puke later.”
