A/N: I really appreciate all the reviews I've been getting. You guys are such an encouragement. I still don't own Pride and Prejudice. But I'm really enjoying writing this story and reading your feedback.

Chapter Sixteen: It Just Takes Some Time, Little Girl

Lizzie's POV

My youngest sister and her new husband were back in Meryton for their wedding dinner at the Longbourn. Wow, that really does look as weird as it sounds. After all, we are talking about my sister who is only seventeen-years-old. Dude, I'm twenty-five and Jane is twenty-six. We're old enough to get married. Mary is even old enough to get married. But Lydia isn't even eighteen; she shouldn't be getting married. I want to get married. I'm old enough to get married, unlike Lydia. Why on earth did I screw everything up with Will? He's a great guy.

Dinner was interesting, to say the least. The bride was trying to drink alcohol despite the fact that she was not old enough. We were all seated around a table in the dining room trying to enjoy a nice family dinner with my youngest sister and her new husband. "I don't understand why you won't let me have one glass of wine. I just got married," Lydia whined. "This is my big, special day."

"You're seventeen years old," my father replied sternly. "If the health inspector finds out that I've allowed you to be served alcohol in my restaurant, I will lose my liquor license."

"Oh no, you won't," she told him in her "I know everything" voice. "I'm your daughter. They'll understand if it's your daughter. It'd be another thing if it were some random girl we don't know but it's me. I'm your daughter. They won't care."

"Tell us about the ceremony," Jane said, trying to distract Lydia from the wine that wasn't even on the table because none of us were drinking.

"It was so small," she said. "But Damien wore this gorgeous suit that Will Darcy had loaned him. He looked stunning in it; I'm sure he looked much better than that Darcy would. My Damien is much more handsome than Will Darcy anyway. And my dress was absolutely stunning. It was off the rack, which was horrible, but we had so little notice so we couldn't do things properly and have one custom-made for me. Well, we could have but it would have been too expensive. Or at least that's what Aunt Sophie said. She is such a stick in the mud. I don't know how you girls can stand her."

"Why did Will Darcy loan Damien a suit?" Jane asked. This was the same question I was thinking but I was afraid to ask it. And I bet Will probably looks much better in it than Damien did but I'd never say that out loud, especially not with Damien there.

"Because he was the one who made all the arrangements for the wedding," Lydia said in a very nonchalant tone. "He was also the best man, which was just horrible. I would have rather had one of our friends there, like Sean. But Uncle Ed said that we had to do it this way. I don't see why they were being so ridiculous. We should have had a big, fancy wedding, like Charlotte is going to have. Our wedding was so bland and boring. The only people there were Dad, Uncle Ed, Aunt Sophie, and Will Darcy. Aunt Sophie wouldn't even bring the cousins, which was stupid. The whole thing was a joke."

"Will Darcy was the best man?" I asked.

"It had to be that way," Damien said quickly. "He's known me forever and he was the only person I could get on such short notice. But anyway, I hear he's dating Caroline Bingley now. I'm not sure it's true but I heard it from a pretty reliable source."

I nodded. Those words were like a knife to my heart. I did NOT want him to be involved with that witch, but I also couldn't see him being involved with her. He couldn't stand her; he'd made that crystal clear at Pemberley just a few weeks earlier. But I also knew that I couldn't marry him. Lydia had destroyed every chance I might have ever had with him. Even if he had been somehow involved in arranging my sister's wedding, he still wouldn't want to marry me.

But I wanted to know what all of this meant. I wanted to know what Lydia meant when she said Will "was the one who made all the arrangements for the wedding." So I did the only thing I could think of. The next morning, I called my aunt Sophie who explained everything to me. "It was Will Darcy who found your sister and Damien. He did all the work in all of this. Then he brought them to your uncle and me afterwards. He told your uncle to take all the credit; he wanted none of it. He was just happy to have been able to help."

"But why?" I asked. "This is such a scandalous situation. Why would he want to associate himself with this? I know he doesn't want anyone to know about it but he was the best man in the wedding. People are going to find out about that. Does he not care?'

"I think he does care very much, but he cares about something you wouldn't think of immediately," she replied cryptically.

Charlotte returned to Michigan the day after Lydia's wedding. It was time for my best friend's long-awaited wedding. I couldn't believe this was finally happening. I remember when we were five and we played house with our dolls. I remember when we stayed up until three in the morning talking about the guys we had crushes on. I remember when she totaled my car our sophomore year of college. I remember when she told me that she was dating Ethan. And I remember when she told me they were engaged. My best friend was marrying my cousin in a few short weeks. And within the next week or so, all my Bennett relatives would be rolling into town. My dad's family is pretty sane although the Collins family is pretty wild. Ethan's parents divorced when he was about four and his dad remarried a couple years later. Now his dad has a whole other family. Ethan is really close to his dad and his younger half-siblings. He has one full-sister, Norah, and two half siblings; his brother, Michael, is nineteen, and his sister, Felicity, is seventeen. And all these people and their family members would be flooding Meryton for the wedding. Both the bride and groom are from large, very involved families. And then Mrs. Catherine DeBourgh would be coming to town.

I was so glad to have Charlotte around but at the same time this meant the wedding was for real. My best friend really was getting married. She was going to get married and they were going to have babies and things were never going to be the same. I remembered when we were seven and Charlotte was a bride for Halloween. Now she really was going to be a bride and a wife. She had grown up; she was old enough for all of this, unlike my little sister. It was hard to believe that we were old enough to get married. I wanted to get married but I had no prospects; I'd taken care of that for myself. I was one the one who had pushed Will Darcy out the door; he'd never been anything but kind to me except for the first time I met him.

Charlotte and Ethan had met in high school and things had always been easy for them. He'd liked her from the minute he walked into Mrs. King's first hour AP Biology class junior year of high school and Mrs. King told him to go sit next to Charlotte because she was "smart and she pays attention in class. She'll help you get settled into the way things work around here." At the time, Char had been head over heels for Steve Logan but he hadn't been interested in dating anyone. Then, a year and a half later, he asked me to go to senior prom with him and so Char agreed to go with Ethan. And everything is history from there. They started dating their junior year of college after over two years of "pseudo-dating."

Planning the wedding was insane. We were having the bridal shower about two weeks before the wedding, which was ridiculous but it was the way Char wanted to do things. She didn't want to fly back and forth between New York and Meryton anymore than she had to. Truth be told, Jane and I had done most of the wedding planning that summer because Char only wanted to come home for Memorial Day and dress fittings and then for her wedding. I think she was really starting to fall in love with New York City.

The day after Charlotte's return, I was at the grocery store picking up some essentials when I literally ran into Charlie Bingley. We were in produce by the lettuce and we just crashed into each other. I just stared at him for two solid minutes while he apologized profusely. "I feel so awful," he kept repeating. "I'm so sorry." Then he looked up at my face and gasped. "Lizzie Bennett, I'm so sorry! I didn't mean do hit you and I wasn't expecting to see you."

"Well, I do live here in Meryton," I replied. "I am, however, surprised to see you here. I thought you were done with Meryton except for the occasional weekend visit."

"I was," he said slowly. "But I had a long talk with Will recently in which he suggested I move back to Meryton for a while. He thought the slower pace of life would be good for me. My dad died of a stress-induced heart attack a few years ago and Will is afraid I might suffer a similar fate if I don't slow down. And I'm only thirty years old. So I'm taking a more hands-off role in Bingley Publishing and becoming more involved with the hotel. I think it'll be good for me."

"This was Will's idea? I thought he hated Meryton."

Charlie shook his head. "He did at first but with time he grew to realize how charming and wonderful this town is. I wouldn't be surprised if he came to visit me for a week or so some time in the near future."

"That would be nice. Our stay in Virginia was unfortunately cut short and I would have liked to have spent a bit more time with Gianna, Emily, and Will."

"How are all your sisters doing?"

I sighed. "Well enough, I guess. Lydia got married on Saturday and moved to California this morning. Jane is keeping busy with work and I never know what Mary and Katie are doing, so yeah, life is pretty much normal. How are you doing?"

"I'm keeping busy," he replied simply. "Running a hotel and a large publishing company don't exactly leave a guy much time for a social life."

I nodded. "Try being a teacher; then you'll never have a life except in the summer and even then you're still doing school-related work. I don't know why I do this except for the fact that I love the kids. Plus right now I'm helping get ready for my best friend's wedding and somewhere along the lines she decided that I needed a date to the wedding so I had to go out and find one."

"Were you successful?

"Yeah, I asked a friend of mine from work if he'd go with me and he agreed. His name is Kyle and we met in college and somehow he ended up working in Lakeview the year before I did. It's weird because he's not from this part of Michigan but he ended up living here."

"Is he just a friend or is he something more?"

I smiled. "No, he's just a friend. We're good friends and I don't know that I could ever date him. He's one of those friends you jokingly flirt with and stuff, but you couldn't be more serious."

He nodded. "I have friends like that."

Charlotte had called me up two days after I returned home from Virginia informing me that I needed a date to her wedding and my mind immediately jumped in longing to Will Darcy. Unfortunately, I knew he'd never even consider the idea; my sister had run off with his worst enemy and he wouldn't want anything to do with me ever again. So I called Kyle Kilpatrick, a friend from college and a coworker at Lakeview, and found myself a date to the wedding. Kyle and I had met at Mass one Sunday when we were in college and had become friends. We'd never been more than friends; we were just really good friends. He teaches chemistry and biology at Lakeview and a lot of his students really like him. Lydia thinks he's hideously ugly but I think she's just ridiculous. In my opinion, Kyle is very attractive; the thing is that his personality and mine would never work long-term. He's tall and skinny, being very athletic, of course; he plays tennis and ultimate Frisbee. Actually, he also coaches both men's and women's tennis at Lakeview. He has wavy dark brown hair and piercing blue-green eyes; his skin makes most people think he's Italian but he's actually Irish, as evidenced by the last name "Kilpatrick". He and his twin brother, Alex, were born on St. Patrick's Day in 1982; once while having an unusually stupid moment I asked them why neither of them was named "Patrick" being that they were born on St. Patrick's Day and they are from a good Irish-Catholic family. Kyle just looked at me and said, "Our last name is Kilpatrick; Patrick Kilpatrick would just sound stupid."

But anyway, I called Kyle up and he happened to be free the day of Charlotte's wedding. So we were going to the wedding together. Kyle is a reasonably good dancer and he won't get drunk; plus he'll be entertaining. And he can drive me home. While Jane is driving to the wedding and all, she won't be driving me home because she's planning on drinking at the wedding and just spending the night in a room at Lucas Lodge. That's my sister for you. She seems all calm, cute, quiet, and docile, but if you give her the opportunity and she will drink. She doesn't do it as much as she did before her break-up with Charlie, but she'll still get a little tipsy when she has the opportunity. And she's already warned me that she will be doing this at Charlotte's wedding. "After all, I'm twenty-six and single with no prospects in sight. Give me one good reason when I shouldn't imbibe heavily at my friend's wedding."

I mentioned the incident in February but she said that was different. "This time I know what I'm doing. I'm not doing this over some stupid boy. This time would be about celebrating my friend's marriage. There will be a few glasses of wine and a couple of beers involved; it won't be nearly as serious."

Will's POV

Charlie moved back to Meryton the first Monday of August and I arrived in the sleepy Northern Michigan town three days later. Charlie's hotel, the Netherfield, was full of tourists because Lucas Lodge and the Longbourn were both booked full of people in town for Charlotte Lucas's wedding to Ethan Collins. My own aunt was coming to Meryton the day before the wedding to witness her employee's wedding. But for now, I was just in town to relax and spend time with Charlie. The day he arrived in Meryton, Charlie ran into Lizzie Bennett and had found out who the mysterious wedding date her father had alluded to in Chicago was; his name was Kyle Kilpatrick and he was a teacher at the same school as Lizzie. My friend had met this Kyle fellow the night before I arrived when he went out to dinner with Jane, Lizzie, and Kyle.

Charlie was back at it again, trying to win Jane's heart. The night before he left for Meryton, I had told him the truth about Jane, including the information about the night she'd landed herself in the hospital. He was stunned that I'd lied to him but more stunned at his sister's lies. For the first time in his life he actually saw her for what she was. And he also saw Jane for what she really was. She was one of the more amazing women on the face of the earth. I had to rank her sister, Elizabeth, above her. My mother was also obviously above her and being the good Catholic boy that I am, I also put people like the Virgin Mary above Jane, but I'm not sure that Charlie did. I think in his mind she was some sort of Madonna with light brown hair.

This time Charlie was going to win Jane's heart; after seeing them together once, I was predicting an extremely sappy Valentine's Day proposal and a wedding probably around Christmas the next year, just to complete the sappiness of the relationship. I was not one to propose on Valentine's Day and I knew Lizzie wouldn't want a Valentine's Day proposal. She announced that at dinner on Saturday when I was having dinner with Charlie, Jane, Lizzie, Kyle, and Lizzie's friend, Jenny Putnam. "I want to get proposed to on a special day," Lizzie announced. "New Year's Day was lame; Ethan could have been so much more imaginative. I don't want to get proposed to on Christmas, New Year's, Valentine's Day, Thanksgiving, my birthday, or any day that already has significance in my life. I want it to be a singularly important day in my life."

"I like the idea of a Valentine's Day proposal," Jane replied. "It's romantic."

Her darker-haired sister shook her head. "It's too cute for me. I want something original; I want my proposal and my wedding to be something that no one else has ever had ever before."

"Well, I'll tell you that no one has ever married a girl like you before," Jane teased her sister.

"The Bennett sisters always have been the most affectionate sisters known to man," Kyle commented. "The first time I met Jane she and Lizzie were trying to see who could insult the other one more within ten minutes."

"I've never really seen them get like that," Charlie said. "Jane always comes off as an angel or something."

"Ha!" Jenny said with a laugh. "That's an act. I would have to say that in some ways, Jane is worse than Lizzie because you never see what's coming next. She looks and acts all innocent but really she's a little troublemaker. She's great when it comes to practical jokes and mind games."

"Oh my gosh," Lizzie gasped. "Kyle, do you remember when we had you convinced that Austin was dating some girl who lived in California?"

"You lied to me for so long. I can't believe I actually bought that crap, especially considering the source," Kyle shot back.

"Hey, it was your own fault. We invited you to come over to our house for dinner and then we were going to watch Last of the Mohicans. During the movie, we were going to have Jane call Austin pretending to be Victoria and everything was going to go over perfectly. We'd have duped you and then we'd apologize and it would all be great. But then you couldn't be bothered to show up at our house because you were too tired from your Frisbee game and then you were watching the Michigan game."

"Hey now, no insults, that was a great game. But yeah, I was stupid to believe you guys for that long."

She just smiled at him and he laughed at her. "You two have known each other for too long," Jenny said. "Lizzie, you have too many surrogate brothers in your life."

"Yeah, I'm never going to get married," she sighed. "I let Steve slip through my fingers and now he's going to marry Becca and I decided that this hunk of manliness was too much for me and let him go free."

"Hey, I'm still single," he replied.

"Yeah, but Alex is more my type," she replied.

"Alex is Kyle's almost identical but actually fraternal twin brother," Jane explained to Charlie and me.

"We look a lot alike," Kyle told us. "And when we were in college, he would come visit me pretty regularly and a lot of our friends had problems telling us apart. Lizzie has never had a problem with that although she always seems to want to call me Colin or Connor."

"You have a brother named Connor!" she protested.

"He was fourteen when you met him and he doesn't really look like me," was his response.

"Kyle, she still gets Jane and I confused," Jenny said. "Face the facts, bud; she's just bad with remembering names."

"She doesn't have any problems with Will's name," Jane pointed out.

Lizzie blushed and said, "That's because he has the same name as Shakespeare. If any of you had a name in common with the Bard, I'd remember it more easily."

"Do you remember your students' names?" Charlie asked her.

"After they sit in their assigned seats for a month, yes," she replied hotly. "My problem isn't really remembering names as much as it is the number of people I know with similar names. I know a Kyle, a Carl, a Colin, and a Connor; I'm bound to get confused at some point."

"But what's really bad is when you have four kids with the same name in one of your classes," Kyle said. "Last year, I had four girls named Nicole in my class and I think all of them wanted to be called Nikki."

"Umm, that wasn't as bad as when you had a female student whose name was Kyle," Lizzie pointed out.

"There was a girl named Kyle?" Charlie asked.

Kyle nodded. "She was a really nice girl but her name was Kyle and it was pronounced the same way I pronounce my name. To make matters worse, some of the other students in her class thought it would be funny if she and I were to get married and be Mr. and Mrs. Kyle and Kyle Kilpatrick."

"That sounds a little scary," I commented.

"Yeah, marrying someone who has the same first name as you is a little weird."

"Don't marry anyone named Wilhelmina," Lizzie told me.

"Yeah, so don't marry any characters from Ugly Betty," Jenny told me.

I smiled. This group of friends was all over the place with their literary and cultural references. One minute they'd be talking about the art of the Italian Renaissance and the next minute, they would be arguing over which character on Heroes had the coolest powers. And in books they could easily go from discussing literary classics like Oliver Twist and North and South to The Devil Wears Prada or the newest Jasper Fforde book. They were really into Jasper Fforde; he wrote basically mockeries of famous literary works like Shakespeare, Dickens, and others. They enjoyed discussing the quality of Kenneth Branaugh's interpretations of Shakespeare's works but they also liked to argue about the poor man's personal life. These were the kind of people I wanted in my life; they were smart but down to earth.

Later that night, we ended up at Lizzie and Jane's condo watching The Producers. Apparently, Lizzie loves the movie but Jane only thinks it's "okay". But Kyle, Jenny, Charlie, and I all like it, so Jane had to put up with Will Farrell, Matthew Broderick, and Nathan Lane. And in the end, she was rolling around laughing her head off as much as the rest of us. Of course, she was also snuggling with Charlie most of the movie too. I was amazed at how quickly she'd taken him back after everything that had happened earlier in the year. And so after Kyle and Jenny left, I asked Lizzie about it while we did the dishes. "I don't know how she can do this after everything," she told me honestly. "Will, if I were her, I would have killed him before I would have ever let him back in my life and in my heart. She told me just a few weeks ago that if she ever saw him again, there would be no chances of her falling in love with him ever again. She told me she was done with him."

"And he never stopped loving her," I told her. "So when he came back into her life, he still loved her."

"And she probably still loved him despite what she told me so she had no problems taking him back."

I nodded. "I get the impression you're a little harder on this kind of thing than your sister is."

She smiled. "My dad says I'm a man-hating feminist but I think really I'm just a very bitter and cynical woman. And no, those don't mean the same thing."

I laughed. "I believe you. I don't think you hate men or that you're feminist. But I would guess that you've been treated badly by some guys in your life and your reaction has been to build up defensive walls around yourself and close out most guys. That would also explain why your closest guy friends are two guys you knew in college, which was probably before you were hurt too badly."

I could tell by the expression on her face that I'd hit the mark a little too closely. She looked at me and I could see tears in her eyes. "What has Jane been telling people about my life? Does she go around revealing all my secrets to people?"

I shook my head. "No, Lizzie, no one told me any of those things. But I've known you since November, which really isn't that much time in the grand scheme of things but it has been enough to realize that someone hurt you very badly and you recoiled inside yourself. You let certain people in to your heart and you show certain emotions and feelings but for the most part you play your cards close to your vest. I just wish I could prove to you that not all men are jerks. There is a difference between boys and men."

She just stood there staring at me. I wanted to hug her and make everything better. I wanted to undo all hurts that had been inflicted on her and tell her truths to all the lies she'd heard. I wanted to take her pain away and make her life better. But I wasn't sure she was ready to let me in that far, especially when I'd just made her think that I could read her like a book. I couldn't really, but I'd observed her long enough to make a few pretty good guesses about her life. And I wanted to improve her life. I wouldn't tell her this just yet, but I would seriously consider moving to Meryton if that would make her happier. But we weren't dating; we were friends and that was a good place to be for now.

A/N: Okay, so the wedding is in the next chapter and she is not going with Will; she will go to other weddings with him, but not this one.

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