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Travis stared at his phone in consternation.
“What does this mean?” he asked finally, turning the screen so Wes could see. There was a litany of texts from Alex, a stream-of-consciousness rambling about the indisputable timeless elegance of floristry along with a series of images Travis could only assume she’d found on Pinterest.
Wes rolled his eyes. “Tell her no,” he said plainly. “She’s been chattering at me about our wedding theme, I told her that we aren’t interested in that level of botanicals, she’s trying to change my mind and has apparently decided to go through you.”
Travis blinked, processing. “The flowers are... very pretty,” he allowed.
“You say that until it’s our wedding day and you’re cranking yourself full of antihistamines,” Wes deadpanned, which was a salient point, Travis suffered from the kind of hay fever that could star in Claritin commercials.
“Does a wedding need a theme?” Travis asked in lieu of a response. “Isn’t the theme wedding?”
Wes held up a finger to forestall that thought, then flitted quickly into the kitchen, returning with a stack of magazines and what Travis realized with a sinking feeling of dread was a three-ring binder.
“The theme is less a theme in the way you might think of, say, a birthday party having a theme, and more of a mood you’re trying to cultivate with your design,” he explained, passing the stack of magazines to Travis, “I marked some things that I’m interested in with sticky notes, tell me what you think.”
Travis quickly flipped through the magazine on top of the stack, his eyes stumbling over the words French chateau-style on one page and the luxe sophistication of art deco on the next. He sat the magazines on the coffee table with a resounding thunk , a headache building behind his eyes.
“I think that all sounds very expensive and not very necessary,” he admitted. “Does it have to be... this? Could we not just get married and have a party?”
Wes’ face dropped in surprise. “A wedding is not quite the same as a party,” he argued, without bothering to stop and consider whether he really felt like arguing about this; Travis just brought that out in him sometimes.
“A wedding is exactly a party!” Travis scrubbed both hands over his face. “That’s what it is. We get married and we have a big party so that everyone we know can tell us how happy they are that we got married.”
Wes’ face screwed up in frustration. “ Everyone we know?” He told himself he wasn’t whining. “Because that’s a lot of people, Travis; and don’t think I forgot that you invited our entire therapy group without asking me first if I wanted to do that.”
Travis huffed. “Why wouldn’t we invite our therapy group? I don’t even think that we would be together if we hadn’t gone to therapy, they should be there.”
A scowl worked its way inveterately onto Wes’ face. “ We did the work to get to where we are,” he countered, “they were just there.”
Part of Travis wanted to concede that point, but another part was loath to concede anything when he and Wes got like this.
“Besides,” Wes continued, “we can’t invite hundreds of people to something as formal as a wedding, it’s going to become grossly over-expensive.”
Now Travis was scowling too. “So then let’s make the stupid thing less formal instead of cutting out people who would otherwise want to celebrate with us.”
Wes hauled himself off the couch, pacing over to the kitchen door and then back. “I’m not doing this with you, Travis.” He stalked once more to the kitchen door and leaned against the door frame, pressing his thumbs against his forehead. “I let Alex steamroll over me when she planned our wedding and I’m not going to do it a second time.”
Travis was off the couch and in his space in an instant, truculent and agitated. “I am not here to pay the bills your ex-wife left behind,” he said hotly, close enough that he could hear the way Wes’ breath hitched in his throat.
Wes swallowed twice, then closed his eyes. “You’re right, I’m sorry.”
Travis worried his lip with his teeth. “I’m sorry too. This isn’t really that important.”
When Wes opened his eyes, he seemed tired. “It really is, though. I'm a little bit stressed out about this. But I don’t want to take that out on you.”
Travis laughed softly and leaned his head on Wes’ shoulder. “I don’t even care, baby, I really don’t,” he confessed. “We can just go to the courthouse and do it, or fly to some island somewhere and elope. It doesn’t matter.”
Wes gently knocked his head against Travis’, considering. “Elopement isn’t such a bad idea,” he chuckled, his voice quiet in Travis’ ear.
“Mm.” Travis turned his head, pressing his mouth to Wes’ collar. “Your mom would kill us.”
Wes groaned. “God, she would,” he agreed, picturing her ire when she found out. “Better just plan the stupid wedding.”
Travis grabbed his hand and walked backwards towards the couch. “Show me what you were looking at in these magazines.”
Four hours later, there was a knock at the door; Travis carefully extricated himself from the piles of magazines and stacks of torn-out pages surrounding where they sat cuddling on the living room floor.
He opened the door to find Alex standing on their porch. “Well, you’re not the pizza I ordered,” he remarked with a frown.
She raised her eyebrows. “Do you two ever cook at home?”
“ Most of the time we cook at home!” Wes yelled from the living room. Travis stood to the side and gestured her inside with a tilt of his head; she nodded in thanks and walked past him through the kitchen and into the living room.
“We do work more than fifty hours a week, though, so pizza is warranted sometimes,” he added reasonably as he followed behind her.
“What are you doing here?” Wes asked, scratching something out in the binder and writing something different next to it.
“Neither one of you was answering your texts so I called you both and you didn’t answer those either.” She stooped to look at a magazine page on the floor by her foot. “Is this an advertisement for an artisan cotton candy bar?”
Travis smiled, ebullient. “Yeah, we can pick like six flavors of cotton candy to offer and then they’ll sit there and make cotton candy at the reception, isn’t that the coolest thing you’ve ever heard in your life?”
She looked at him through her eyelashes. “It’s certainly something,” she half-agreed, then turned to Wes. “Have you ever even had cotton candy?”
He rolled his eyes. “Yes, I’ve had cotton candy.”
Her expression was surprised and maybe a little impressed. “Huh. I wouldn’t have thought Holly would’ve allowed that kind of thing.”
Wes bit his lip; behind her, Travis giggled quietly. “She didn’t, the first time he ever had cotton candy was with me. It was when you guys were still married,” he explained, “we were at the county fair trying to contact a suspect and he told me he’d never had it and I made him try some.”
“It was very sweet,” Wes recalled with a grimace. “I probably will not be having any at the wedding.”
“It is just sugar,” Alex agreed. “You tried cotton candy for the first time while we were married and you didn’t come home and tell me about it?”
Wes huffed. “You would have made fun of me.”
She just nodded, because she would have.
“Second,” Wes continued, in spite of Alex having forgotten he had another point, “the cotton candy artist was Travis’ pick. Because it’s his wedding too.”
That statement was pointed and itching for a fight in a way that she was choosing to ignore in favor of laughing, “I can’t believe there’s even a market for cotton candy at weddings. What kind of a wedding are you two even planning?”
“Uh, an awesome one,” Travis said seriously. “There is no event ever that would be made worse by the addition of cotton candy.”
“Brain surgery, don’t want your fingers to be sticky,” Wes said immediately.
“Quilting bee, same reason,” Alex added.
“A murder trial, probably.”
“ Alright,” Travis cut them off, “I get it. Fucking lawyers.”
Wes smiled brightly; in spite of having decided that it wasn’t the thing for him, he still loved it when anyone made reference to him as a lawyer. Travis knew that, too, so he did it whenever he reasonably could.
“We’re just working on the guest list now. We decided on a, uh, garden-party-slash-upscale-picnic kind of vibe,” Travis said.
“Sage and white for the colors,” Wes continued, “with dark wood accents, and possibly some pale pink and pale green elements in the flowers, alongside the white.” Alex perked up almost imperceptibly.
“I know an excellent florist, let me just...” she assured him, digging in her purse for her phone, probably to find the phone number.
“I don’t want the one from your wedding,” Wes cut her off, holding up one hand.
She blinked in surprise, then raised her eyebrows dangerously. “Why not?”
He met her eyes, unwavering. “Well, we’re looking at botanical gardens for the venue, so there’s a certain amount of, obviously, plant presence inherent to that choice,” he began, “so I’m looking to counter that by keeping the additional florals... refined and understated.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Would you not say that the florals at my wedding were refined and understated?”
“Not at either one of them,” he answered boldly and remorselessly.
Thankfully, there was a knock at the door right at that moment. “That’ll be the pizza, I’ll grab it!” Travis said in a rush. God, I’m going to kiss this delivery driver.