i. the rain
It is 2:00 on a slightly unusual Tuesday afternoon, and the air is filled with something that warns Stevie of the presence of something good. She welcomes the feeling, and though the pouring rain drenches her hair and clothes completely – something most girls would freak out about, but frankly, she doesn't care – she doesn't allow it to dampen her mood in the slightest. When she enters the quaint little apartment she has been sharing with Zander for two and a half years now, she is surprised to find a note on the kitchen table that reads:
Gone out to pick up something. I'll be back a bit late. I'll bring dinner, too.
-Z
Stevie shrugs, heading down the hallway to Zander's bedroom and brushing past the door of her own without a second thought, opening the drawer in Zander's room where she knows he keeps his shirts – it's not like she hasn't been forced to put away his laundry for him enough times to know exactly where everything goes. She picks out one that looks particularly comfortable, pulling off her own soaking wet teal t-shirt and replacing it with his. She then makes her way across the hall and finds a pair of clean sweatpants from her own drawer, welcoming them onto her hips after slipping out of the wet pair of jeans.
Tossing her wet clothes into the drier and pressing "start", she slips into the kitchen and fixes herself a cup of tea, and spends the next hour awaiting Zander and her dinner, drinking tea, scribbling down song lyrics and strumming away on her bass.
When she hears the door open, she cranes her neck from her position on the couch, smiling at Zander as he enters.
"Hey," she greets shortly.
Zander nods. "Are you wearing my shirt?" he asks.
"Yeah. My clothes got wet. It was raining when I got home," Stevie explains. Judging by how dry Zander is, it isn't raining anymore. "Where's the food? I'm starving," she adds after a moment.
He rolls his eyes. "Relax, princess. It's right here." He brings a couple containers of Chinese takeout over to the couch, handing her one of them along with a plastic fork, and they dig in as they please, reaching over to poke their fork into the other's container whenever they want a bite of the other dish. Stevie is taken by surprise when she catches sight of something shiny about three quarters of the way through her container, buried among the noodles and vegetables.
Frowning, she moves the noodles around it over with her fork, gasping when she can see the entirety of the shiny little thing. A ring.
"Zander, is this –?" Stevie scoops the ring out of the noodles a moment later, holding the sticky, silver thing in the palm of her hand as she looks it over. Casting a look at Zander, her eyes brimming with tears, he nods and she lets a tear roll down her cheek, wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing his soy-sauce-smothered lips.
ii. the party
For the first time in her life, Stevie could not be more grateful for her best friend's ability to plan parties. Kacey takes charge of the entire wedding, making the bridal shower, her "small side project", look like a party worthy of the royals of England. Fortunately, however, Kacey does manage to downplay her party planning eccentrics enough to allow the input of the bride and groom for this occasion, careful to take every one of Stevie's suggestions ("an abundance of mini tomatoes" and "blue wildflowers, not something stupid like roses") and add every one of her desired guests to the guest list ("the Gibson family" and "Aunt Melanie and Uncle Brad – and we can ask him to make fudge!" and "don't forget Nelson's grandparents"). Even with Kacey doing most of the work, Stevie finds herself constantly exhausted and extremely busy, and it isn't until the day of the bridal shower that she realizes she doesn't have anything to wear.
Being Stevie, of course, she doesn't own a single dress, so she can't improvise. She desperately browses her closet for something acceptable, cursing herself for not owning at least one decent dress. She could go shopping, but there's only about an hour until the party anyway, and she doesn't feel like rushing off – besides, dress shopping has never been her forte, considering she's never exactly bought a dress before.
After pondering the possibilities for about ten minutes, Stevie finally makes a decision. She walks down the hallway to Zander's room again – she's surprised that they still haven't merged bedrooms yet – no, screw that, she's surprised they haven't slept together yet, it's like there's an unspoken agreement that they're both waiting until marriage, which doesn't make much sense considering they've been living in the same apartment for three years now and they're engaged and neither of them are religious, and it's then that she realizes she actually wants to wait until marriage even though she doesn't have any reason to – and digs through his drawers until she finds her favorite shirt of his, one she has never worn before but has always fantasized about wearing, and changes into a fresh pair of her own ripped jeans.
After swishing on some mascara and a light coat of lip gloss, she looks down at her hand, admiring the engagement ring that adorns her finger for a brief moment before she takes in her appearance in the mirror. Zander's shirt, ripped jeans, slightly messy hair that she is much too lazy to brush out, and converse shoes. Kacey would not approve. But this is her bridal shower and if she wants to go wearing her fiancé's clothes, then she will.
Needless to say, Kacey's reaction is priceless, and after a failed attempt to convince Stevie to run home with her and change into one of her dresses, finally gives up and leads Stevie away to the champagne. Stevie is having such a fantastic time the rest of the evening that she doesn't even complain when she realizes what brand of champagne this is – where Kacey is getting the budget for this party, she has no idea, because there's no way Stevie and Zander have enough to pay for this.
The evening remains a blur, but Stevie vaguely remembers kissing Grace on the cheek when she arrived – which is the type of thing only really girly girls do, she realizes; since when does she kiss her friends on the cheek? – and playing a very slurred rendition of Last One Standing with Kacey, at the end of which she practically collapsed on top of her friend in a fit of reasonless laughter.
When she arrives home, Zander looks even drunker than she is from the bachelor party Kevin and Nelson threw him, so Stevie assumes that he had a good time, and kisses him on the cheek before heading down the hallway to her bedroom.
"You're wearing my shirt," he mumbles, and, reaching the entrance to her bedroom, she steps inside, pivoting and leaning against the doorframe, saying nothing, but winking at him friskily before shutting the door, giggling to herself as she realizes just how drunk she really is before sinking into bed.
She texts Kacey at some point before she dozes off, a text she doesn't remember sending until she reads Kacey's response the next morning:
Why am I still a virgin?
iii. the song
In the midst of a heavy make out session at some point a few weeks after the bridal shower, Zander and Stevie's shirts both somehow end up on the floor. And Stevie can handle this – the way his hands on her bare back send shivers down her spine, the way he kisses her neck that makes her want to cry – but as soon as he reaches for the latch of her bra, she bolts upright, breaking her lips from his in a gasp of protest.
Jumping up from the couch without explanation, she reaches for the nearest shirt – which happens to be his – throwing it over her bra and smoothing down her hair as she darts off to her bedroom without so much as a second glance at her confused fiancé.
Closing the door behind her, she pulls out her bass and grabs few sheets of rumpled paper and a pen from her desk. She pours her emotions out into a song, staining the paper with tears and ink-blotted lyrics, scribbling down cords to go with the words as she strums them out.
The song ends up being something about how surprised she is that Zander has stuck around this long, how strange and pathetic she is for wanting to save herself for marriage, how she doesn't know if she'll ever be ready, and how lucky she is to be getting married. When the song is complete, she closes her eyes and plays it, singing along in a voice laced with emotion.
When she opens her eyes, drawing the final chord, she notices Zander sitting on the floor a few feet away, still shirtless. Judging by the look on his face, he heard the entire thing. Stevie gulps, staring at him and waiting for him to fill the silence, but he doesn't say anything. Instead, he scoots across the carpeted floor to meet Stevie, lifting the bass strap over her head and setting the instrument aside, brushing her hair out of her face with his hand, and kissing her softly on the forehead.
"I will never make you do something you're not ready for, okay?" he promises, meeting her gaze with a look of sincerity and concern.
She nods, and he wraps his arms around her, pressing her close to his bare chest, encased in the comfort and safety of his t-shirt as she cries softly against him.
iv. the rehearsal
In Stevie's opinion, nothing is stupider than a wedding rehearsal dinner. What kind of once-in-a-lifetime event requires rehearsing? Thankfully, this time Kacey remembers to take her dress shopping for the occasion, and the blue and purple cocktail dress she chose looks nice, but Stevie's a bit worried about the weather – they're eating dinner outside, after all, and it's September.
The rehearsal goes relatively smoothly with Kacey taking charge as usual, and before they know it, it's dinner time. The catering company Kacey arranged for the rehearsal dinner is cheap and surprisingly efficient and delicious, and Stevie is sure to pull Kacey aside and tell her just how thankful she is for all the help. Kacey insists it's nothing, but not without reminding Stevie that Kevin is due for a proposal any day now, and that soon she'd have her own wedding to plan – with Stevie's help, of course. Stevie just laughs and gives her maid of honor a hug before excusing herself to go find Zander.
Zander is having a drink with Kevin and Nelson a few tables away. She greets him by coming up behind him and pecking him on the cheek, stealing the glass of champagne from his hand and taking a drink, ignoring his protests.
"Give me your jacket," she demands, setting his glass down on the table beside them and nodding at Kevin and Nelson in greeting.
"What?" Zander frowns.
"Give. Me. Your. Jacket," she repeats, reaching for the leather jacket around his shoulders. "This dress is chilly." She motions at the strapless shoulders of the cocktail dress, and he sighs as he sits up in his chair to remove the jacket, handing it to her with a pout. Smirking with triumph, she pecks him on the lips and slips into the chair beside him, quickly striking up a conversation with Kevin and Nelson, and offering snarky remarks to her fiancé whenever he attempts to speak, teasing him in the way she does so well, wearing his jacket proudly for the rest of the evening.
v. the gig
Gravity 5 has a major gig about two days before the wedding, but luckily Kacey has done enough pre-planning that it doesn't interfere with anything. The gang is hanging out backstage moments before the show, trying to figure out exactly how to announce Stevie and Zander's upcoming marriage to the fans – not that most of the fans don't already know. (Stevie still hasn't managed to figure out how fans end up knowing every single thing about celebrities' personal lives. The fact that Kacey hasn't exactly kept the wedding low-key doesn't really help either.) In a frenzy of ideas, Nelson jumps from the couch to announce his plan, accidentally dumping his glass of Coca-Cola all over Stevie's shirt in the process.
"Nelson!" Stevie gasps, jumping up from her chair as well to examine the damage. Frowning, she looks around the room as Nelson apologizes profusely.
"Zander! You're wearing two shirts. Give me one," Stevie demands, whipping off her wet shirt. Zander mumbles as she removes one of his shirts and hands it to her.
"What an incredibly feminine thing to do. I thought only girls wore two shirts over top of each other," Stevie teases as she pulls his shirt over her head, and Kacey and the others burst into laughter with her.
"Stevie, are you really going onstage in that?" Kacey asks a moment later.
"Why not? My other shirt's ruined. And besides, isn't it a perfect way to announce our upcoming marriage?"
And it is; the gig begins with the gang playing Only You Can Be You and Stevie announcing somewhere in an instrumental break that she's sorry for her lack of fashionable attire, but that she spilt Coke on her shirt and her fiancé doesn't exactly have the best fashion sense. The crowd bursts out laughing and cheering, and Stevie waves her left hand in the air, allowing the ring to catch in the stage lights, and crosses the stage to kiss Zander full on the lips.
Honestly, she has never been this excited for anything.
i. the honeymoon
Of all the things Stevie would have imagined her wedding being, she definitely didn't expect it to be quite as perfect as it was. Likewise, the party afterwards was equally amazing, and, after getting almost drunk and hugging Kacey and the others goodbye, Stevie and Zander change out of her wedding dress and his tux and are on their way to the airport.
The honeymoon was the one thing they hadn't planned; they had decided they were taking the next plane out of town as soon as the wedding was over, and that it didn't matter where they ended up.
It turns out the next departing flight still open for boarding is to Italy, and they eagerly purchase the tickets, boarding the plane and thanking the elderly lady who kindly moves over a seat so the honeymoon couple can sit together. Stevie squeals with delight as the plane leaves the ground, and they spend the plane trip talking about their future together and hilarious moments between Gravity 5 and the fact that Kevin proposed to Kacey at the after-party of Stevie and Zander's wedding hours ago. Stevie absolutely cannot wait to see what Kacey comes up with for her own wedding, and it is then that Stevie wonders when Nelson will propose to Grace.
They spend their first day in Venice riding a boat to a few famous sites and stopping at way too many Italian restaurants – both of them love Italian food, and Stevie's pretty sure they spent more time eating than they did looking at historical sites. They collapse into their hotel room early evening, not sure how many hours they have been awake and completely exhausted from the jetlag, but not too exhausted to rip each other's clothes off and fall into bed pressed into each other.
She slips on his boxers to get out of bed and get something to eat in some ungodly hour of the morning, and Zander groans as he notices what she's wearing.
"Great, now I'll be missing a pair."
Stevie snorts as she tosses him a cookie from the open box on the table by the coffee maker. "You won't need them."
The next morning Stevie wakes up to find Zander is no longer in the bed, but there is a note on his pillow that reads:
Mailed most of our clothes home and hid the rest. We won't need them.
-Z
Stevie grumbled to herself, feeling very exposed as her bare body sliding from the sheets. "Zander!" she called angrily. "Where are you? Get back here with my clothes!"
"In here!" Zander calls from the bathroom.
Needless to say, the morning starts with shower sex.
In a fit of giggles, Stevie insists, "Okay, you have to give me my clothes now," as she climbs out of the shower.
Zander shakes his head. "Didn't you read the note? I mailed them home. And you're not getting back the ones that are left. Come on, let's eat breakfast."
'Breakfast' turns out to be left over wedding cake, which somehow ends up in Zander's hair and on Stevie's nose and stomach at some point.
There is always a catch, to every vacantly obvious situation Stevie somehow gets herself into, always a consequence she somehow does not foresee. She learns the hard way that spending the rest of the life with a man that steals her clothes and makes her spend her first time in Italy ordering Italian food from room service between sex is not going to be easy, but is definitely going to be worth it. She washes the cake out of his hair and they somehow find themselves discussing names for future children that evening.
Maybe things are better left unforeseen, she decides. She'll have a hell of a time guessing.