For now this is just some Waige fluffy fluff. I may continue it if I get some inspiration but I honestly have no idea. Review please, getting through this hiatus will be a team effort. ;)

As it turned out, he and Paige were a formidable wedding planning team.

Paige had the organizational skills to stay on top of Happy's list and the knowledge of what needed to be added or given higher priority. Walter could then map Paige's data to create efficient routes for errands and a timeline of optimal completion for each task.

He'd thought this would bore him to tears. But Paige's enthusiasm was strangely infectious.

Perhaps it was simply appealing to see her smile so much. She was the polar opposite of Happy and while the mechanic wasn't drawn to the glitz and the glitter, Paige certainly was. Her face seemed to light up every time they went into one of these places, where the walls were always painted pink and the air filled with cheesy ballads. Walter knew why Happy had assigned them these jobs. She wouldn't last ten seconds.

The genius, unsurprisingly, was inclined to share Happy's sentiment. But there weren't many places he wouldn't follow Paige Dineen, and a flower shop did rank among the less harrowing locations they'd been together.

Walter was focused on their next task—find me a DJ that doesn't suck, will ya?—which Paige, as the garage's preeminent expert of music from the last decade, had jumped at. He was scrolling through websites on his tablet, weeding out everyone who fell outside Happy's designated price range.

"Walter?"

"Mm?"

"What do you think?"

His eyes flicked up and he knew instantly that he wasn't prepared for the sight that greeted him. Paige's delicate fingers were wrapped around the stems of a calla lily bouquet, holding it slightly away from her body. Her skin looked brighter against the petals, mingling with her broad smile to make her practically glow. She'd worn a white shirt that day, with slightly loose sleeves and three buttons at the top, and Walter knew the color was simply tricking his brain. She was wearing jeans. Jeans. Not even close to a wedding dress. Pull it together.

He gripped the tablet hard.

"T-They're…" They weren't for Paige, they were for Happy. Would Happy like them? How was he supposed to know? "Nice," he finished in a mildly convincing voice.

"Yeah. I think so too." There was a slight pink tinge in Paige's cheeks. She'd seen him staring. He was an idiot for being so obvious. But she didn't appear uncomfortable.

Walter blushed harder, because he just had to win at everything, even embarrassment.

The florist, a woman in her fifties with dyed blonde hair and dark roots, glanced between the two of them and smiled. "When's the big day?"

Paige ripped her eyes away from his and grinned sheepishly as she placed the flowers back into their display vase. "We're, uh, shopping for our friend. She's a little overwhelmed by this stuff. She doesn't want anything too girly."

"Sure. We get a lot of untraditional couples nowadays. Want to do something different. I can make some suggestions?"

The liaison spared Walter another glance, and he offered a quick nod before funneling his attention back toward his DJ search. If Happy and Toby had a fraction of the reaction to each other that he had around Paige, Walter doubted they would be able to hear any music over their own roaring heartbeats.

"You're quiet."

Walter pressed his lips together. He knew he'd been mostly silent on the ride back to the garage, but it seemed safer that way. One look at Paige with that bouquet and he nearly blurted out that he loved her, with the florist and fifty-six species of flowers as his witnesses. They had weeks more work left and the genius wasn't sure how long he could keep his head on straight.

The sight of any of the other women he dated in a wedding dress would have sent him into a panic. Hell, he'd been married before and it had never affected him in any particularly powerful way. But seeing Paige in this environment made him realize just how different everything was now. How much the idea of that future with her scared him because it didn't really scare him at all.

He decided to change the subject. He needed to get out of his head. "I was thinking. About, uh…" Paige angled in the passenger seat to face him better. It was a subconscious method to encourage Walter to open up to her. He wondered if she even realized she was doing it. "You know a lot about weddings. But when we looked into Drew, there was no record that the two of you were ever married."

She didn't answer immediately, and Walter wondered if he'd hit a sore spot. Drew was a topic overwhelmingly avoided at the garage, and Paige revealed very little about their relationship before its complicated end. It was far in the past; perhaps she didn't see the point in dredging it up. But he was curious.

"Y-You don't have to answer that."

Paige shook her head. "No, it's…it's okay." In his peripheral vision, he could see the liaison fiddle with a thin silver ring on her right hand. Cheap costume jewelry, but the instinct was the same. "I don't know if I could really say that Drew and I were engaged. I mean, he never got down on one knee and proposed, or anything. But we did plan to get married. It was just something we sort of mutually acknowledged would happen, if that makes sense."

Walter shrugged. "You had Ralph. The three of you were living together."

"Yeah. And I've been a bridesmaid before. I helped some of my friends out, like, the girls I went to college with." She glanced down at her hands. "So I knew where to start. I looked at dresses and picked out flowers and had," Paige huffed out a laugh, "I don't know, a font for the invitations and everything. But no date. And Drew kept postponing setting one until eventually he just didn't really want to talk about it anymore."

Walter bit the inside of his cheek, a ridiculous pang of jealousy spiking through him. Drew had everything and he'd given it all up, abandoned a family that loved him to chase an immature dream. It was illogical.

"I-I'm sorry." He glanced over at Paige, hoping that his expression reflected sympathy but not pity. She hated pity.

Paige gave him a sad smile. "Thanks. But, uh, it was obviously for the best. When Drew started leaving for longer and longer periods, I realized that what I really wanted was stability for Ralph. I wasn't doing it for my own happiness, and we were never going to be very stable with Drew anyway, so…but fortunately it hasn't tainted the process for me."

Walter's lips curved. "I'm sure Happy's grateful for that."

"I'm sure." She tipped her chin toward the genius. "Your turn, dude of honor."

"Uh…" He frowned. "Happy and I didn't do any of this wedding stuff."

"Yeah, I know. I bet it was the least romantic wedding in history. But that's not what I was asking."

The light ahead of him turned red and Walter braked hard to make up for his delayed reaction time. "Sorry," he mumbled, shifting in his seat. God, she scrambled his brain so easily. "What was the question?"

Paige grinned and reached out, lightly bumping his arm with hers. "You were awfully interested in being best man for someone who never believed in love or marriage. Or weddings, at least. Was it just your competitive streak or did the great Walter O'Brien get swept up in the spirit?"

Heat crept into his cheeks again and he double-checked the light as it changed to green. His foot eased over to the gas pedal. "Happy married me to keep me in the country. That was a big sacrifice. And it caused a lot of problems with her and Toby, so…I feel like I owe them, I guess?" Walter wondered if Paige would think that sounded impersonal and added, "I w-want to. Do all this. To repay them…well, mostly Happy."

She smirked, her amusement evident. "I thought you would be more concerned about them getting married, that's all. Given your reservations about their relationship."

"They clearly aren't going to listen to me anyway."

Another laugh escaped Paige's lips, but there was a strange hollowness behind it. Walter cleared his throat. He wasn't always good about telling her the truth. This seemed like an appropriate time.

"And, uh…" His gaze met hers, briefly, before he stared ahead at the road. "They're making it work. They hit obstacle after obstacle, a-and they keep going. I still have my concerns, but I think that if they love each other…" Walter wet his lips with his tongue. "T-Then it's worth trying."

Paige's eyes widened. He'd said the right thing. "Huh."