Disclaimer: Any of the characters you recognize from the Twilight series belong to Stephanie Meyer. Any other characters belong to the talented author, yay4shanghai. Her stories are my favorites and you can find her in my favorite authors list on my profile.

Ava's POV

"'Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, when life gets hard, when things change, true love remains the same."- One Tree Hill

"You look beautiful," my mother gushed as my big sister Chloe, finished the final touches on my make -up. In all honesty, I didn't see the point of putting on all this make- up. I don't care if the make-up claimed to be a 100% water-proof, I was a cry baby and it was definitely be coming off.

"Don't tell me she's already crying," my baby sister, Hope, said as she strolled into the room. She wasn't necessarily baby anymore, 17 and supernaturally gorgeous, but to Chloe and I, Harrison and Hope would remain the babies of our family no matter how old they were.

"You better not be! Your walking down the aisle in 20 minutes, cry your eyes out after," Chloe said teasingly and Hope laughed softly besides her.

I wasn't use to being primped and beautified, as a full time working nurse, I didn't have time to find new hair styles and make up techniques. Whoever came up with the idea that nurses were some type of sex icon, were terrible off. Being a nurse was mostly hard work, but it was a rewarding career.

Chloe ran into what used to be my bedroom and grabbed a large dark bag which held my wedding dress. The dress was not easy to find and most definitely not easy to pay for. With my sister Chloe being an ex-fashion model, not even two days after I announced my engagement she dragged me through a million designer shops in order to find the "perfect" wedding dress. All the dresses were beautiful, but I had something against buying a dress that cost as much or more than my car, that made the search a bit harder.

I found the winning dress at a small boutique in Seattle. It was a bright white, slim fitting dress that ruffled near the cleavage. To be honest, I don't think Eli would care much if I walked down the aisle in a white tee shirt and jeans, but this specific dress sang to me. It was a product of many hours of overtime at the hospital, but it was well worth it.

We didn't plan a large wedding for one of the two reasons. One, we shared whatever family we had. My mother's parents died when I was a teenager and my biological father and his family didn't know me, so our guest list was kept short and limited. Reason number two being that the size of our wedding held no significance to us. My Uncle Levi said that he knew this day was coming years before, so in my mind, the fact that I was marrying my childhood love was more valuable than any multi-million dollar wedding.

"You're lucky Ava," Chloe said as she proceeded to take my hair out of the curlers. She was almost as ecstatic as me when it came to the wedding, almost.

We were lucky, something that my mother never fails to remind us. Fate had been extremely generous to us, blessing my mother with the unconditional love known as an imprint, my sister Chloe with a successfully modeling career and an extremely wealthy husband the Hollywood producer, and me, with Eli. To other people, it might seem like fate ripped me off. My mother was a star a dancer, my sister a top model, and the best thing I had to show was my best friend. I'd never look at it like that though, because there was not a thing in this world I would trade my relationship with Eli for.

*~*

I don't remember as clearly as I wish I did the first day Mark and Jordan introduced Eli to our large extended family. Eli was adopted by Mark and Jordan, just like Phil had adopted Chloe and I. When I was little, Mark and Jordan were my favorite wolves. Jordan bought me pretty picture books about ballerinas and Mark was my very first crush. At four years old, I was in complete puppy love with Mark Uley-Varn. My mom told me it was not appropriate to have crushes on married men, so my "love" for Mark was short lived.

Eli was born deaf like Levi Varn. When I was younger, I couldn't imagine what it would be like to live a life without sound. You could never hear voices or the simple beat of a song, a world without music seemed terrifying. I noticed several times before Eli came around that Levi seemed so sad at times, I could never tell if it was because he was deaf or just because he missed Devlin. I couldn't fathom what it must feel like to lose a sibling, I loved my family entirely too much to lose any of them.

Some people didn't understand how Eli and I worked. Communication was the key to connection, so how could I bond with someone that couldn't hear me? Unlike Levi, Eli was not completely deaf. If I spoke loud and clear enough, he could understand me, but that didn't stop me from learning sign language better than English. Although most of our conversations were signed rather than spoken, there was nothing a hearing man could give me that Eli couldn't.

Eli and I had shared two common traits as children that made us becoming friends inevitable. We both were the most carefree of children and had boundless energy. We were the child duo, never separated for a period of time longer then two days. When Mark and Jordan brought him to Disney Land when he was seven, I cried the whole week. There wasn't a person in this world I loved more than him; I knew that at a young age, the love just gradually changed over the years. If we would have remained best friends and nothing more, I could have been okay with it, but thankfully that's not what life had in store for us.

He was and still is everything to me. In my short 25 years he had been; my best friend, my first crush (second if you count his father), my boyfriend, my fiancé, and by the end of today, he'd be my husband.

One of the many things I love about Eli and I is that everything about us came naturally. Growing up in La Push, I realized that most of the couples were the product of imprinting. Although imprinting seemed great, I liked having the reassurance at the end of the day that Eli was with me because that's what he wanted; a mythical force hadn't demanded he fall in love me. Falling in love was confusing enough, no need to make it more complicated.

It wasn't the simplest thing getting to this point, but that didn't really matter because I was going to be Ava Uley-Varn, and that's all that mattered now.