A/N: This is something that I wrote for a challenge that redhandedjill gave me. Let me know what you think - more to follow, in a series of one shots.
Day, #2.
It all seems very familiar to him, and he supposes this is for several good reasons.
The hustle and bustle is still out of his comfort zone; people keep asking him questions about things he doesn't know the answers to, things about flowers and colors and the locations of bridesmaids he's met maybe twice (today).
Not for the first time, he asks himself just what the hell he's doing.
He's sitting in an annex (he thinks it's called an annex, it's been a long time since he's been this far into a church - except when there was a dead sailor in a catacomb, but he hardly counts that) with his elbows on his knees and a silver flask in his hands. He's not entirely sure if drinking in a church is acceptable (he doubts it), but he says,
"Never stopped you before, Jethro,"
and tosses a mouthful back, letting it sit and burn his tongue for a brief moment.
Bourbon has been his drug of choice since -
But never mind about last time.
It'll do him good, he thinks. Good to wake up next to someone (regularly) for a change. Good to have someone to come home to. A reason not to stay at work for eighteen to twenty hour stretches of time, and maybe something cooked on a stove or in an oven occasionally.
Love, too. Funny that never came up first in his "why" list.
Someone - her father - knocks on the door, tells him that it's time, and just a few moments later he's standing with his hands clasped in front of him, and damn but he feels old, too old for this, and there is music and the sound of people rising (it's all so auditory, because the rest of his mind is for some reason wondering where he put that flask...)
He is back in the present, briefly, when her hand presses into his and he can feel a false nail snag on a loose thread in his rented tux, and he remembers his brief line and smiles at all the right times.
He is happy, after all. It's not as if she's an ogre. Just the opposite, in fact, she's beautiful (enough), and there's really no one to compare her to (often), and he will be happy with her (for the most part). She can cook a decent steak and has even beaten him at a game of golf. (She has a mean swing.)
When the words come and he bends to her level and brushes scarlet hair out of her eyes, she smiles brilliantly, and he tells her (and himself) that he loves her,
But when he kisses her and her lips taste like some sort of petroleum-based gloss and her teeth click against his in that single millisecond of silence in such a way that it's just uncomfortable, and he comes away with some pink, feminine substance left clinging to the corner of his mouth, he can't help but flash rapidly back to the reason that when he kissed her, he expected to taste stars and summer nights and smell honeysuckle on the wind.
He licks his lips and smiles that sideways grin she loves so much.
(He's never told her that it only means he's giving her half a smile.)