A/N: If you want to find out more about Japanese wedding receptions, there are a number of sites that I found when I was researching this. Since this place eats links, I won't post them here, but they can be easily found on Google.
Carly had been in charge of planning the wedding reception, and for the most part she decided to follow the traditional Japanese style. She'd gone with the usual color scheme of red and white, and the meal was built around fish and other seafood. Carly's doctor had told her that she'd have to be careful about which fish she ate, but this turned out to be a moot point, since Carly was so excited she could eat hardly anything at all.
Then there was the candle-lighting ritual, the lavish gift-exchange, and the speeches in honor of the couple (when it was Crow's turn to speak, Carly had to restrain Jack from lunging at him more than once). Carly was very pleased at how smoothly things went. It was almost perfect, except for one thing. She knew Jack was sad that Martha hadn't been able to make the flight over. A couple of times, she caught him staring wistfully off into the distance, but a pat on the hand and a few whispered words had been enough to bring his focus back.
There was one addition to the activities that was strictly American, and that was the dancing. Most Japanese receptions were too formal to allow that, but Carly had thought it would be fun. Besides, quite a few of the guests had grown up in Satellite and/or were younger people, so they didn't seem like the type who'd be overly obsessed with propriety. Carly had planned to do a couple of dances with Jack, then sit back down and watch the others enjoy themselves.
What she hadn't found out until just days before the wedding was that, in America, the married couple was expected to do the first dance on their own, with no other people on the dance floor to obscure missteps.
"Um, Jack...I'm not very good at slow-dancing," she confided sotto voce.
"Neither am I," he replied.
"Really? I would have thought that they taught you back when you were King."
"Well, they didn't."
"Oh," Carly said in genuine surprise. This seemed like it would be the exact sort of thing Jack would be good at.
"Then I guess we'll just have to look stupid together!" she concluded cheerfully.
So they did. And, at the very least, Carly didn't hear anyone laugh at them.