Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [117]
Half-way round, the boy broke off the kiss, and fell on to his knees on the floor of the gondola, which wobbled ominously. Tom glanced at the gondolier, expecting an admonishment, but he was smiling beatifically. When he looked back at the guy, he had assumed the age-old pos ition, and was pulling a ring box out of his denim jacket.
‘You have to be joking!’ Tom muttered. Natalie slapped him surreptitiously.
‘Jennifer, will you be my wife?’ He had a southern drawl, and, for a moment, Natalie felt like she was on the set of Jerry Springer.
But Jennifer clasped her hands in delight, and tears welled in her eyes. ‘I will. I will.’
Another wobble, and he was back beside her, hugging her. Then he punched the air and shouted, ‘She said yes!’
Rapturous applause erupted on the canal banks, and the gondolier burst back into song. When Natalie looked at Tom her eyes were full of tears too.
‘I can’t believe it! You’re crying!’
‘It’s wonderful!’
‘I’m the only sane person in Las Vegas.’
‘You’re a killjoy. You haven’t got a romantic bone in your body.’
‘I bloody well have.’
‘Sssh.’ Now Natalie was sitting forward and kissing the young couple, congratulating then.
The guy leant forward, and pumped Tom’s hand. ‘Good to meet y’all. Brad and Jen. Can you believe that? As in Pitt and Aniston. Except we’re Stuckey and Jones. Soon to be Stuckey.’ Jen Jones clung to Brad’s arm.
Tom put his arm round Natalie. She buried her face in his neck. ‘As in Pitt and Aniston! Can you believe it?’
W for Wedding
‘Ha!’ Natalie nudged Tom.
He nudged back. ‘Ha! What?’
‘W for wedding. My turn. W.’ She blew on her knuckles and rubbed them on her lapels. ‘Back to you, Tom.’
‘Yet again you go for the straightforward, no-advance-planning-required option. I don’t think you’re taking this as seriously as I am.’
‘Sssssh! Bit of respect for Elvis!’
At the front of the chapel Elvis, very much in his deep-fried-peanut-butter-sandwich phase, was massacring ‘Love Me Tender’, while Brad and Jen looked from him to each other like new recruits to the Moonies.
‘Bridge and Suze would love this!’
‘Is it going to take much longer? I thought these things were supposed to be quickies?’
‘Oh, stop moaning. Don’t you think it’s beautiful?’
‘I don’t. The two of them are the end of the bloody world and this is the tackiest venue I can imagine. There is nothing remotely beautiful about it, and I can’t imagine for the life of me why you agreed to do this in the first place.’
Natalie looked hurt. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise you felt so strongly.’
Tom relented. ‘I don’t feel all that strongly. It’s just that it’s our last night – I thought we might be doing something else, just the two of us, instead of being stuck in here.’
Natalie raised an eyebrow quizzically. ‘No,’ he added. ‘Not that.’ A pause. ‘Necessarily.’
‘We’ll go as soon as it’s finished. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
Brad and Jen wanted ‘y’all’ to go with them to a steak-house to celebrate. ‘You were with us at the start of all this, seems fitting you should see the night through with us too.’ Natalie won an Oscar for convincing them that newlyweds should spend their first night of married life alone together.
‘Am I cramping your style?’ Tom asked, as they waved the couple off.
‘No more than usual,’ she joked. Then she wrapped an arm round his waist. ‘Besides, I quite wanted to spend the last night with y’all too.’
They found a bar where the cabaret was going on around them all the time, and ordered drinks. It was too noisy to talk, and for a while they just sat, watching the people. There were all sorts – families with babies in strollers, silicon gold-diggers in Juicy Couture tracksuits, sipping drinks with umbrellas and looking available, blank-eyed croupiers, short-skirted waitresses and old women with a cigarette in one hand and a bucket of quarters in the other. But