Meg Cabot - Queen of Babble Gets Hitched

I’m on the phone with the restaurant’s maître d’ when the buzzer to my apartment goes off, causing Snow White to burst into a cacophony of yips and Ava to squeal excitedly, “The food’s here!”

“The food can’t be here,” I say. “I’m still on hold with Guiseppe.”

Ava throws me a panicked look. She’s changed from her rubber lederhosen into a pink velour sweatsuit. Although she has the word “Juicy” written across her rear end, I find this preferable to her many outfits that actually reveal her rear end, or at least the brown-cheeked moons of it. And so I am allowing her to wear it. But only indoors.

“It’s the paparazzi!” she cries. “They’ve found me! Already!”

“It can’t be the paparazzi,” I say. “Unless you told someone you’re here.”

“Only my mom,” Ava says. “And Tippy. And he wouldn’t tell anyone. He knows what it’s like to be hounded mercilessly by the press.”

I still don’t have the slightest idea who DJ Tippycat is, but I take her word for it that he wouldn’t rat her out. I hand her the phone and go to the wall intercom and push the TALK button. “Who is it?” I ask in my meanest voice, which I reserve only for answering the intercom.

“Lizzie, it’s me,” Luke says. “Can I come up?”

I stare at the intercom as if live snakes have suddenly come bursting out of it. Luke? In all the excitement with Ava, I’d completely forgotten about my fight with him.

Ava hasn’t, however. She bolts upright. “Is that Luke?” she asks, her bright eyes wide. “Are you gonna buzz him in? I can totally make myself scarce. You won’t even know I’m here. I’ll hide in the bathroom.”

I continue to stare at the intercom, uncertain what to do. On the one hand, I’m still really, really mad at him. On the other hand… it’s Luke. I love him.

At least… I think I do.

And yet… could he have been a bigger jerk?

“Unless you want me to pour water on his head,” Ava offers generously. She’s gotten up from the couch and gone to the window, where you can look down and see whoever is standing in the doorway—providing they aren’t hiding beneath the awning, as the UPS man is wont to do when it’s raining. “Because I could totally do that for you, if you want me to. Or pee. I could pour pee on him. I haven’t gone yet. I could go in a cup and dump it—”

“That’s okay,” I say quickly. “I–I’ll just go talk to him outside. You go ahead and order. I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

Ava looks dubious. “Are you sure? Because I’ve been holding it all day—”

“I’m sure,” I say. “And you really shouldn’t hold it, Ava. You could give yourself a urinary tract infection that way. I’ll be right back.”

I grab my keys and hurry out of the apartment and down the stairs, a little leery of leaving Ava to her own devices in my place… but also a little relieved to have a moment to myself. Even if, the next minute, I know I’m going to have to be dealing with Luke.

Who says, “Oh,” when I undo the many locks to the outside door and step onto the stoop into the warm evening air beside him. “I thought… I thought you might buzz me up.”

“I can’t,” I say unsmilingly. “I have company.”

Luke looks surprised. I’m pleased to see he isn’t smiling, either. At least he’s taking this thing seriously. So often, when we argue, he seems to think my anger is amusing, as if I’m a kitten who’s upset about someone hiding her catnip mouse. I’m not a kitten.

And I’m tired of being treated like one.

“Company?” he echoes. Now he’s smiling. “What, did you and that girl from the limo go and pick up some sailors while you were out cruising around or something?”

“No,” I say, still not smiling. “Ava’s going to be spending a few days at my place. She and her fiancé just broke up, and she can’t go back to her place because it’s being staked out by the paparazzi.”

Luke’s smile vanishes. “Lizzie,” he says. “Jesus. So, you’re just letting her stay with you? Why can’t she stay in a hotel?”

“Because—” I break off and glare at him. “You know what? Who cares? She’s not. She’s staying with me. What’s the big deal?”

“The big deal,” Luke says, “is that she’s a client. And you’re treating her like she’s a friend. You can’t get business mixed up with your personal life, Lizzie. This is exactly what we were just talking about, back at the restaurant.”

“Oh, really,” I say. I’m ignoring, with effort, a man who is walking by with an Italian greyhound on a leash. The man is pretending he’s not listening to our conversation, but he totally is. I don’t care, really, except that the dog is distracting. It’s so… skinny. I know it was born that way, but it’s still freakish. How does it digest its food with such a tiny stomach? “And just what does my grandmother’s drinking problem have to do with the fact that I refurbish wedding gowns for a living?”

Luke reaches out to grab both my shoulders in his hands and gives me a gentle shake.

“Hey,” he says in a gentler tone than he’s used until now. “I’m sorry about that. Okay? I know I was out of line, and I apologize. I tried to apologize there in the restaurant—I chased after you and would have told you so right there, but you jumped into that limo and were gone. If everyone standing out there hadn’t told me that was Ava Geck you were with, I would have… well, I totally would have thought you’d been kidnapped or something.”

“No, I wasn’t kidnapped, Luke,” I say, trying not to notice how good his hands feel on my skin. I can’t let sensations like that distract me. “I just… we just… I want… ”

What am I saying? What do I want?

Where am I going with this?

Why won’t that man take his dog and go somewhere else? Seventy-eighth Street is really long. Does his dog have to pee right there in front of my shop?

“Luke… I’ve been thinking. And I think… ” The next thing I know, words are coming out of my mouth that I honestly don’t remember thinking. They just come out of my mouth. Like air.

Or vomit.

“Luke,” I hear myself say. “I think we need to take a break.”

Oh. My. God.

T he first hand-printed wedding invitations in the Middle Ages were done in calligraphy by monks, who were commissioned to do so by royalty. By the time metal plate engraving had been invented, engraved invitations—the kind that come with a fancy sheet of tissue paper on top, to keep the print from smudging—became more popular than calligraphy. This same kind of engraving is still used today (and is why you still get tissue paper with fancier wedding invitations). The traditional double envelope in which wedding invitations are so often sent stems from the fact that in olden times, mail was delivered via horse, and no one wanted the dainty hands of the recipient to be dirtied as she opened her invitation. It was assumed a butler would open the icky outer envelope and hand the clean inner envelope to his mistress.

How sad for us modern, butler-less mail openers, daily soiling our hands on germy outside envelopes!

Tip to Avoid a Wedding Day Disaster

Remember, your wedding invitations should never be mailed at the last minute… but you don’t want to mail them out too early, either! The ideal time is somewhere between eight weeks and one month before the actual wedding day. Six weeks in advance is perfect.

And please, never use a laser-printed address label on your invitations. That’s considered beyond tacky. Handwritten only! Yes, you can advertise for and hire an engineering student with impeccable handwriting for this task.

LIZZIE NICHOLS DESIGNS^™

Luke stares at me. “You think we need to what?” he says, his grip on my shoulders loosening.

“Oh!”

I let out the sound in a whoosh. At least I think it was me. I realize I can’t even be sure what sounds are coming out of my mouth anymore. That’s how little control I have.

I sink down onto the top step of the stoop and hug my knees to my chest. The man with the dog, I notice, has hurried away. Apparently, he is no longer enjoying the show—the show of a girl in vintage Shaheen going crazy right in front of him.

“Lizzie.” Luke sits down on the step beside me. “What do you mean, you think we need to take a break?”

“I don’t know,” I groan into my knees. God, what is happening to me? “I just… I mean, you’re going to France for three months anyway… so we’re kind of taking a break, whether we want one or not.”

What am I saying? What is coming out of my mouth? I do not want a break from Luke. I do not. I love Luke.

Don’t I?

“It’s just,” I hear myself saying, though at no point did I formulate the words in my head beforehand, “I know that you love me, Luke. But I don’t always feel like you respect me. Or at least… not my job. It’s like you think it’s just this hobby I have that I’m doing for fun until something more serious comes along. But that’s not what it is. This is really what I do. What I want to do for the rest of my life.”

Luke blinks down at me with his gorgeous, sleepy eyes. “Lizzie, I know that. And of course I respect what you do. I don’t know what would ever have given you the impression that I don’t. All I meant, when I said that about Ava, was that I’ve worked in the business world for a lot of years, and we just never let our clients take advantage of us the way I think you sometimes do.”

“It’s not what you said about Ava,” I explain. “It’s the way you just thought I could leave with you to go to Paris for the summer. You know. When you brought it up.”