Meg Cabot - Queen Of Babble: In The Big City

Ack! Oh, my goodness!

Um, I guess he’s already awake. Considering that he’s now lying on top of me.

“Good morning,” he says. He hasn’t even opened his eyes. His lips are nuzzling my neck. And other parts of him are nuzzling other parts of me.

“It’s eight o’clock,” I cry. Even though of course I don’t want to. What could be more heavenly than just lying here all morning making sweet sweet love to my man? Especially in a bed under a real Renoir, in an apartment across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NEW YORK CITY!

But he’s going to be a doctor. He’s going to cure children of cancer someday! I can’t let him be late for his first day of orientation. Think of the children!

“Luke,” I say, as his mouth moves toward mine. Oh! He doesn’t even have morning breath! How does he do that? And why didn’t I jump up first thing and hurry into the bathroom to brush my teeth?

“What?” he asks, lazily touching his tongue to my lips. Which I’m not opening, because I don’t want him to smell what’s going on inside my mouth. Which appears to be a small party given by the aftertaste of the chicken tikka masala and shrimp curry from Baluchi’s that we had delivered last night, which was apparently impervious to both the Listerine and Crest with which I attempted to combat them eight hours ago.

“You have orientation this morning,” I say. Which isn’t an easy thing to say when you don’t want to open your lips. Also when there are a hundred and eighty pounds of delicious naked man lying on top of you. “You’re going to be late!”

“I don’t care,” he says, and presses his lips to mine.

But it’s no good. I’m not opening my mouth.

Except to say, “Well, what about me? I have to get up and go look for a job and a place to live. I have fifteen boxes of stuff sitting in my parents’ garage that they’re waiting to send me as soon as I can give them an address. If I don’t get it all out of there soon, I just know Mom’s going to have a garage sale, and I’ll never see any of it again.”

“It would be more expedient,” Luke says, as he plucks at the straps to my vintage teddy, “if you would just sleep naked, like I do.”

Only I couldn’t even get mad at him for not listening to a word I’ve said, because he manages to get the teddy off with an alacrity that really is breathtaking, and the next thing I know, his being late for orientation—my job and apartment search—and even those boxes sitting in my parents’ garage are the last things on my mind.

A little while later he lifts his head to look at the clock and says, in some surprise, “Oh. I’m going to be late.”

I am lying in a damp puddle of sweat in the middle of the bed. I feel like I’ve been flattened by a steamroller.

And I love it.

“I told you so,” I say, mostly to the girl in the Renoir above my head.

“Hey,” Luke says, getting up to head to the bathroom. “I have an idea.”

“You’re going to hire a helicopter to pick you up here and take you downtown?” I ask. “Because that’s the only way you’re going to make it to your orientation on time.”

“No,” Luke says. Now he’s in the bathroom. I hear the shower turn on. “Why don’t you just move in here with me? Then all you’ll have to do today is look for a job.”

He pops his head—his thick dark hair adorably mussed from our recent activities—around the bathroom door and looks at me inquisitively. “What do you think about that?”

Only I can’t reply, because I’m pretty sure my heart has just exploded with happiness.

There are many different styles and cuts of gowns for brides who choose a traditional long dress, but the five most common are:

The Ballgown

The Empire Waist

The Column or Sheath

The A-line

The Fishtail

LIZZIENICHOLSDESIGNS™

But which shape gown is right for you?

That is the universal question, asked by every bride in the history of time.

One Week Earlier

“Well, at least you’re not moving in with him,” my older sister Rose says, as ten shrieking five-year-old girls take turns whacking a pony-shaped piñata hanging from a tree limb behind us.

This stings. Rose’s remark, I mean. The five-year-olds I can’t do anything about.

“You know,” I say, irritated, “maybe if you had lived with Angelo for a while before you got married, you’d have figured out he wasn’t your perfect soul mate after all.”

Rose glares at me from across the picnic table.

“I was pregnant, ” she says. “It’s not like I had much of a choice.”

“Uh,” I say, eyeing the five-year-old who is shrieking the loudest, the birthday girl, my niece Maggie. “It’s called birth control.”

“You know, some of us actually take pleasure in the moment,” Rose says, “instead of obsessing over the future all the time. So birth control is not the first thing that springs to mind when a handsome man begins making love to us.”

I think of lots of ways to reply to this, as I sit there watching Maggie decide that whacking the piñata with her stick is less interesting than whacking her father with it. But for once, I keep my mouth shut.

“I mean, God, Lizzie,” Rose goes on. “You go off to Europe for a couple of months and come back thinking you know everything. Well, you don’t. Especially about men. He won’t buy the cow if he can get the milk for free.”

I blink at her. “Wow,” I say. “Could you be getting more like Mom every day?”

My other sister, Sarah, can’t keep from snorting into her plastic margarita glass at that one. Rose glares at her.

“Oh,” she says. “You’re one to talk, Sarah.”

Sarah looks shocked. “Me? I’m nothing like Mom.”

“Not Mom,” Rose says. “But don’t tell me that wasn’t Kahlúa you were pouring into your coffee this morning. At nine-fifteen.”

Sarah shrugs. “I don’t like the taste of coffee straight.”

“Oh, whatever,Gran.” Then, narrowing her eyelids at me, Rose continues, “For your information, Angelo is my perfect soul mate. I didn’t have to live with him before we got married to know that.”

“Uh, Rose,” Sarah says. “Your perfect soul mate is currently getting racked by your eldest.”

Rose looks over and sees Angelo crumpled to the ground with his hands pressed between his thighs. Maggie, meanwhile, is now whacking the side of her parents’ minivan, to the enthusiastic support of her birthday-party posse.

“Maggie!” Rose shrieks, leaping up from the picnic bench. “Not Mommy’s car! Not Mommy’s car!”

“Don’t listen to Rose, Lizzie,” Sarah says, as soon as Rose is out of earshot. “Living with a guy before you marry him is the perfect way to find out if you two are compatible in the ways that really count.”

“Like what?” I ask.

“Oh, you know,” Sarah says vaguely. “If you both like watching TV in the morning, or whatever. Because if one person wants to watch Live with Regis and Kelly in the morning, and the other person needs absolute silence in order to face the day, there can be fights.”

Wow. I remember how mad Sarah used to get if any of us turned on the TV in the morning. Also, I had no idea Sarah’s husband, Chuck, was a Regis and Kelly fan. No wonder she needed that Kahlúa in her coffee.

“Besides,” Sarah says, running a finger along the side of what’s left of Maggie’s horse-shaped birthday cake, then sucking off the vanilla icing, “he hasn’t asked you, right? To move in with him?”

“No,” I say. “He knows Shari and I are getting a place.”

“I just don’t understand,” Mom says, coming up to the picnic table with a new pitcher of lemonade for the kids, “why you have to move to New York City at all. Why can’t you stay in Ann Arbor, and open a bridal gown refurbishment boutique here?”

“Because,” I say, explaining for what has to be the thirtieth time alone since I got back from France a few days before. “If I really want to make a go of this, I need to do it in a place where I can have the broadest customer base possible.”

“Well, I think it’s just silly,” Mom says, plunking down onto the picnic bench beside me. “The competition for affordable apartments and things like appointments to get cable installed in Manhattan are cutthroat. I know. Suzanne Pennebaker’s oldest daughter—you remember her, Sarah, she was in your class. What was her name? Oh, right, Kathy—went to New York to try her hand at acting, and she was back in three months, it was so hard just to find a place to live. What do you think opening your own business is going to be like?”

I refrain from pointing out to Mom that Kathy Pennebaker also has a narcissistic personality disorder (at least according to Shari, based on the many, many boyfriends Kathy stole from girls we knew around Ann Arbor, then dumped as soon as the thrill of the chase was over). That kind of thing might not have made her too popular in a place like New York, where I understand heterosexual males are in somewhat short supply, and the womenfolk not opposed to using violence to make sure their man stays that way.

Instead, I say, “I’m going to start out small. I’m going to get a job in a vintage clothes shop, or something, and get to know my way around the New York City vintage clothing scene, save my money… and then open my own shop, maybe on the Lower East Side, where rents are cheap.”

Well, cheaper.

Mom says, “What money? You aren’t going to have any money left, once you’ve paid your eleven hundred dollars a month just for your apartment.”