That's Amore! - Janelle Denison [56]
They heard what sounded like a gasp on the other side of the door. And Efi had to agree with what she guessed was her mother's response. "Diana, you may only be a year younger than me but I'd prefer it if you do not refer to sex in any manner around me until you're at least forty, okay?" Another eye roll.
"I don't know." Efi rubbed her stocking feet together, glancing at her shoes near the door where she'd kicked them across the room earlier. "Maybe this is what they mean when they talk about cold feet." She looked at her sister. "Do you suppose Nick is going through the same thing?"
Out of the long line of people who had tried to convince her to unlock her bedroom door, Nick hadn't been one of them. Of course, she knew her mother probably hadn't let him anywhere near the stairs, much less her bedroom door, but still…
He had to know something was wrong. Didn't he?
Or did he take their relationship so much for granted that he believed no matter what, she would be at the church tomorrow on time?
Diana put her arm across her shoulders. "So are you done with your temper tantrum now?"
Efi squinted at her. Then she nodded and smiled. "Yes."
"Good. Mom says there's plenty of leftover karithopita and I'm dying to dig into it. Let's go."
Efi motioned for her sister to lead the way. She followed her to the door, opened it for her … then slammed it straight after, immediately driving the lock home so she was once again alone in the room.
It wasn't all that long ago that the idea of her mother's walnut cake seemed able to solve any dilemma. But now her problems loomed a little larger than a handful of walnuts, cake and syrup.
SOMEWHERE AROUND MIDNIGHT the knocking finally stopped, the women probably surrendering to sheer exhaustion. The last word had come from her mother.
"We all know what you're going through now, Efi. Get some rest. Everything will look better in the morning."
Efi looked toward her dark window and the fringed purple lampshade reflected in it and sighed. She couldn't imagine anything looking better in the morning. Not the way she felt.
What had begun as a volcanic eruption had dissipated, but the lava flow had coated every inch of her insides so that she felt numb and … well, just plain different. In the course of twelve hours she had gone from a giddy bride to a reluctant bride with a heap of doubts.
She reached for her cell phone on the bedside table. Still no call from Nick. A thousand calls from Kiki, who had joined the women outside the door at around nine, but nothing from the one person she needed to hear from most.
She clicked the phone closed and put it back down.
If her family was to be believed, tomorrow her entire life would change. Overnight she would go from a young woman with dreams of taking over her father's pasty shop and turning it into a sweet lover's dream, to a wife with nothing to look forward to but her husband's dirty socks and the children, being a drain on him as he worked for her and their family for the rest of his natural life. Not exactly how she had envisioned their life together.
And just how exactly had she envisioned it?
She realized with a start that she really hadn't given it much thought beyond the wedding, the honeymoon and their cozy little apartment.
She pushed from the bed and wandered to her wedding dress. Somehow it seemed sullied by the day's events, the ivory white dimmed by her thoughts and the ache in her heart. She fingered the delicate lace, then before she knew what she was doing, she stripped out of the dress she'd worn for dinner and shrugged into the yards of white fabric. She couldn't do all the back buttons on her own, but she could do enough of them to hold the dress in place. She opened her closet door to access the full-length mirror on the inside and stared at her reflection.
She'd seen herself in the dress no fewer than a dozen times while making up her mind to buy the expensive piece and during alterations. But where her mind had been clouded by visions of being a princess