Disclaimer: I don't own the situations or characters portrayed herein. I'm just playing with them for a while.
Rumors of My Death Part 2
It was a strange but welcome irony that Joe was planning on getting married around the same time Amanda was. It took a weight off his mind and his heart, knowing that Joe did not, in fact, want Amanda back. He still had nagging doubts about that, but he pushed them away firmly. No one in their right mind could possibly plan to marry one woman while still in love with another. He himself certainly wouldn't.
In less than a year, Joseph King had somehow found the time to meet, date, and get engaged to a woman, between days spent with his sons on a schedule that could be generously described as sporadic at best. He would have felt almost sorry for this unknown Carrie woman, except that he was so grateful for her taking Joe's attention off Amanda.
For her part, she was angry. He couldn't blame her. She had spent so long speaking so well of Joe, with little or no reason to. When it came time to share her news with him, he'd dropped a bombshell on her instead, then asked her to promise that "if" she got remarried, she wouldn't tell him the same way. His reasoning? He didn't think he could take it.
Sentences like those provided fertile ground for the dreaded insecurities that Lee had about Joe's ability to actually get over Amanda.
He realized as soon as he did it that smearing cake on her face probably brought back unsettling, if not just plain bad, memories. She'd kept her cool in front of Billy and Francine, even laughing a little.
But he found her waiting for him in the Q Bureau with a wedding cake — a particularly heavily-frosted wedding cake — and a tenuously pleasant expression. He knew what was up the second he laid eyes on it.
Good to know, he thought. Don't do the cake thing with her.
It was a little difficult to explain being covered in wedding cake for the second day in a row. Billy only laughed and told him to go home and change.
He didn't particularly care about the gossip. After all, they were getting married in two weeks, and he could hardly wait.
