Page 13 of Knot Your Bridezilla (High Fructose Corn Syrup Verse #2)

AVRIL

I was on the verge of a full-on mental breakdown. This was all too much. I couldn’t keep it all in anymore. The pressure kept building inside of me, and I needed to talk to someone about it.

My moms would be perfect…

All I wanted was for them to listen to me and to tell me that everything was alright. I totally would have told them everything, except that they were pregnant again. Both of them.

I know that they liked to tell me I could come to them for everything, and I also remember Father and Daddy-Gee sitting with some of us older kids.

He let us know that even though our moms didn’t like to talk about it, they did have health complications.

They were technically “geriatric” pregnancies.

Which was a weird thing to associate with one of my moms. Both of them still looked phenomenal.

Absolutely stunning. They literally still looked like they could be models.

Models who had gotten pregnant, but still.

But our dads let us know, while completely beating around the bush and getting red in the face while doing it, that it would be best not to stress our moms out right now.

Daddy-Gee looked around furtively as if he was worried Mother would be summoned through the walls if he talked about her, before muttering something about preeclampsia.

How she would never mention it, but she got headaches and had high blood pressure…

So yeah, I wasn’t going to call either of my moms right now.

I swear to God, after this current pregnancy was over, I was going to start personally slipping birth control into their morning coffee.

But anyway, I couldn’t talk to my moms right now, and Zane was starting to get on my nerves.

Luckily, I had an army of sisters.

I wasn’t about to talk to my older sister. Not that I don’t love Rebel—I do. But she’s obnoxiously happy with her pack and I didn’t need the kind of toxicity that came with talking to someone who was perfectly happy with their lot in life, when everything in my life was starting to fall apart.

I also didn’t want to talk to Cashmere—she was too sweet.

I didn’t want empathy. I didn’t want understanding right now. Cashmere would probably just go bake me a dozen snickerdoodle cookies with pink frosting to help me “get over” my ex. That would be absolutely disastrous for my wedding diet.

After everything I’d been through, I refused to put myself into a situation where I have to turn down the softest, fluffiest sugary perfection of Cashmere’s fresh-baked snickerdoodle cookies—that sounded like the absolute worst self-punishment.

What I needed was to talk to someone who was more of a middle child. Someone who… what was a nice way to say this? Screw it, I can’t think of a nice way to say it when I’m literally on the verge of spiraling. Okay, so one of my sisters is a little bit of a bitch.

Like… it’s not her fault. Chloe is not trying to be a bitch. It’s just like, hard-wired into her personality.

Also, she isn’t like the bad sort of bitch.

It’s not like she would try to sabotage me for her own gain, or do some mean-girl toxic bullshit.

It was more like… I could count on Chloe to not let me get away with my own bullshit.

She was the sort of girl who would call me out, even if it hurt my feelings…

and everyone else’s feelings along the way.

Anyway, I called Chloe and she picked up on the third ring.

“I’m so glad you picked up the phone. I didn’t know who else to call. I don’t want to stress out our moms right now. The only one who knows about all of this is Zane, and honestly, he’s just pissing me off right now.” Okay. I was rambling. Off to a great start.

“Okay, what is going on?” Chloe’s voice sounded like she was scowling at me.

“Well, I’ve been going on a bunch of dates, and on every single one, everything has just been going horribly wrong.”

“Woah. Slow down. I feel like we are missing a good chunk of the story here. So you’re dating? A bunch of guys? Aren’t you engaged?”

“No, I’m not with Dylan anymore.” Odd. I’d been with him for so long, and already it felt weird to say his name.

He was an ex to me. Not a name. It was like he had never existed at all and was just exed straight out of existence.

“He cheated on me. I walked in on him when he was inside some other girl.”

“Oh my God, I am sorry. That fucking little asswipe.” Chloe went off on a very detailed rant about all the ways she would like to torment and torture my ex on my behalf. Which was very supportive and all, but not why I’d called her.

“Yeah, forget about him. So obviously now that Dylan is out of the picture, I’ve been scrambling. Zane helped me set up a dating app, but you would not believe how awful it’s been going.”

“Why would you even need to do that? I mean, while I agree that the best way to get over a man is to get under another one, it sounds like this is stressing you out.”

“Because the wedding is in four months!” Even saying the number out loud was going to give me hives.

I was rapidly running out of time to make any last-minute adjustments to make this event run smoothly—and that wasn’t even talking about the worst wedding glitch, if I ended up walking to the altar all by myself.

“What wedding? You told me that you broke up with your fiance… you aren’t still planning on marrying that cheating little piece of—”

“Obviously not. That’s why I need to get somebody else.”

“So… let me get this straight. You are just trying to go on a bunch of dates until you find some guy that is good enough to marry you after just a few months?” Her voice went all calm and flat in a way that I did not trust at all.

“Yes! I’ve gone on dozens of dates and they’ve all been awful.”

“Has anyone told you that… maybe marrying someone you barely know isn’t a good idea?” Chloe was talking to me slowly, like she was saying this to an idiot. Or to a young child—which was basically the same thing.

“Obviously, marrying someone I don’t know isn’t a good idea. I’m not stupid.”

“Uh huh,” Chloe said in a way that indicated that she believed the opposite. “So if you know that it isn’t a good idea, why are you doing it?”

“Well, let’s see. Maybe I don’t want my wedding to go up in flames because I’ve spent all my money on the deposits.

Or maybe it’s the fact that I spent hundreds of hours and over a year planning everything until every last detail was perfect .

My wedding is literally exquisite perfection.

It’s everything that I have ever imagined for myself, and I can’t give that up without a fight. ”

“But Avril, the wedding is just one day. There’s a whole marriage that comes with it. You are talking about tying yourself to some stranger because of what you have planned for one ceremony .”

“No. Listen—”

“Avril. Look. I know that this wedding is important to you, but you can’t do this.

If you let the family know what happened, we will all pitch in.

We’ll help you with the deposits and planning.

You can’t just marry any random guy that you meet on some dating app, no matter how important the wedding is to you.

These things take time. Even if it takes a couple of years to find the right guy, at least you won’t end up marrying some psycho monster. ”

“Yeah, but you aren’t listening to me. If I have to wait five or six years to find the perfect guy, and plan everything again, do you not realize that I’m going to be five or six years older?

I could have wrinkles by then!” My voice ended up a bit screechy as I started borderline screaming in panic.

Okay. So, maybe talking to my bitchy sister wasn’t the best move. Was it rude to just hang up now? Maybe I could still get Cashmere to bake me some cookies. After this conversation I might end up needing one—or three of them.

“Wrinkles are natural. If you have laugh lines, that just means that you have lived a full life. Marriage is about more than just a party, it’s about finding your life partner or partners.”

Great. Now Chloe was speaking as if she were talking me off a ledge or something.

She didn’t get it. She really just didn’t get it.

Yes, finding your soulmate or life partner was important and all that, but I wasn’t going to be young and beautiful forever.

I didn’t throw down my entire life savings on a wedding, just to have to see wedding pictures with disgusting wrinkles all over my dried up and withered old hag face—not when I was so close to having everything perfect.

I was young now! The decor was planned now. I was going to have this fucking wedding while my face card was still lethal.

She didn’t understand . Yeah, a good life and laughing was great and all, but the only thing that was certain was that I didn’t have wrinkles now .

“I’m young and beautiful. I need to take advantage of that while I’m still in my prime.”

“You can still find the person that you are meant to be with, even when you are older.” Chloe attempted to reassure me.

Chloe didn’t get that my problem wasn’t with finding the right man… she really wasn’t hearing me out on the whole inevitability of aging thing.

Was the fact that I wanted to look pretty on the most important day of my life so hard to understand? And if my own siblings didn’t get it, how would anyone understand me?

Chloe sighed deeply, as if she could sense that she wasn’t getting through to me. “Are you sure that this is what you really want? What if you met the perfect guy, but couldn’t end up with him because you’ve already planned a wedding and the timing was wrong?”

Weird.

That was almost exactly the situation that I found myself in with David.

“Well,” I swallowed, as I suddenly got choked up.

Hastily, I swiped at the wetness that burned at the corner of my eyes.

That was not happening. I was a mature adult, and I wasn’t going to cry over this.

I took a deep breath to give me strength and whispered my confession…

“Honestly, the one guy I met that I really like… I don’t think he would ever marry me.

” It wasn’t fair. None of this was fair.

Why did I have to feel the most intense attraction I’d ever felt in my entire life for a guy that I couldn’t have?

Guys as hot as David… they didn’t want to settle down and get married.

At least not to a woman who wasn’t even an omega.

You know what, most of the time I didn’t mind being a beta.

It seemed like omegas had things kind of rough.

They had to deal with going to the Institute.

Chloe had complained about that for weeks.

They had to deal with weird pheromonal stuff like scents and heats.

Even though I had multiple siblings that had to deal with all of that…

when it wasn’t a part of one’s day-to-day life, it all just felt kind of weird.

But I would have dealt with all of that—the Institute, the perfuming, everything— if it meant that I had a shot with David.

“Avril, I’m really sorry… but if you want to get married, and this guy doesn’t want to marry you… then the two of you aren’t compatible. You just want different things.”

“Yeah. You’re right.” My voice was a whisper as I forced the words out.

There was one thing I had gotten right—Chloe didn’t sugarcoat things for me. She told it to me straight, letting me know exactly how crazy it sounded for me to just push forward with my wedding plans. Somehow, seeing my situation more clearly just made everything feel so much worse.

“You gave me a lot to think about. Thank you.” Abruptly, I ended the call. It was bad enough that I was going from the verge of a mental breakdown to being right smack dab in the middle of breaking down. The last thing I needed was to start crying on the phone with my sister awkwardly listening.

Saying the words out loud made my reality feel unbearably true—there was one thing stopping me from going after the man my heart ached for, and that was the wedding of my dreams.

Maybe some people just didn’t get to have the fairy-tale ending.

Whatever choice I didn’t make would rip out a piece of my heart—and I would just have to learn to live with that.