Page 15 of A Wedding in a Week

It’s a wild and disconcerting feeling to know my feet are firmly planted and yet feel as if we’re in step and having a first dance of our own. I see it all so clearly with him here beside me when it wasn’t me I pictured tying the knot every other time I’d worked on these plans, or Marc. It was a pair of faceless strangers. Clients. People who’d pay to use this land to celebrate the happiest day of their lives, not mine.

Not ours.

It’s another wild flight of fancy, not reality, and yet it feels natural, easy to picture until Marc breaks a spell the view must have cast over me.

He’s almost wistful again. “Whoever has their wedding here would be lucky. On an evening like this…” The sun’s lower now, the sky taking on shades of gold and burnt orange. “It would be amazing.” He clears his throat, getting back to business. “But how do you see it actually working? I mean, what if it rains?”

“I’d have an all-weather dome marquee. Super strong and stormproof. I’ve seen them online, expensive but a good investment.” One that is currently outside my budget.

“What about lights, and water for the catering and toilets?” Just as fast, he answers his own question. “Ah, there’s a waterline already, for the livestock troughs.”

He should know. He sat up in the excavator cab with Dad just like we all did, taking a turn at digging the trench for that piping.

“Yeah, there’s already water, and power won’t be a problem because on the other side of the headland is—”

“The lambing shelter.”

I nod again. If anyone else knows this farm as well as my family and John, it’s him. Marc watched Dad warm plenty of lambs under heat lamps in that shelter back when there must have been trouble at home, his holiday visits including Easter, some years. “I thought that’s where the guests could sleep.”

“With the ewes?”

It’s a valid question. No reason for me to laugh, but something about his surprised tone tickles me and I chuckle, and once I start, stopping isn’t easy. It bubbles up and keeps coming, an untapped well finding an outlet, and when was the last time I did this? Laughed, and had Marc join in?

Too long ago.

“Okay, okay,” he grumbles while still smiling. “I get it. You weren’t actually planning on getting guests to pay to sleep in sheep shit. You’d hook up any power you need from the line leading to the shelter.” He nudges me to continue, so I tell him the rest.

“I meant they could stay in tents, only not in standard, everyday ones. It’s sheltered down there on the other side of the headland. Secluded, like it’s cut off from the rest of the world. You know where I mean?” He nods so I continue. “Picture a circle of luxury bell tents there, yeah?”

“Luxury?”

I nod. “With real beds under creamy canvas. Fairy lights and wood-fired hot tubs.”

“You mean glamping, not camping?”

He gets it. More than that. He gets it and he likes the idea. I can tell the same way I always knew he loved Mum’s pasties. Marc couldn’t ever hide his pleasure, his colour rising now is the same hot pink clue. He doesn’t hide his interest in my project this evening either, nudging me again to keep going.

I’m not laughing right now and yet that spring inside my chest still flows. It makes sharing what I’ve kept in so easy. “Yes, glamping. No need for wedding guests to rough it. I’d try to make it perfect for them. A five-star stay right in the heart of nature.”

“Sounds magic.” This talk and our walk must have settled those nerves he came home with. Marc sits to dig into the picnic I put together for our dinner. He opens the bag and sniffs deeply. “And these still smell magic too. What else have you got planned?”

I don’t answer, too caught up in him bypassing the perfectly shaped pasties Mum made to choose my misshapen version, and my mouth dries until he takes a bite. Then he lets out a sound so close to pornographic I can’t keep in more laughter, this time laced with relief, and with something else soul-deep.

He chose me.

Mine, I mean. He chose mine over Mum’s and I can’t deal with how much I like that. I finally find a question to break my grinning silence. “It’s good?”

“The best,” he mumbles with his mouth full. I sit down beside him to eat too, and I don’t know when I last felt this…

Happy.

Maybe realising that does something to my face as Marc finishes a mouthful. It must do because he watches me while taking a long, slow drink from a water bottle. The sun is even lower now, but he’s still gilded, still burnished, still everything I wanted but couldn’t risk losing for good.

Marc has to see that. He has to.

He goes still.

The whole world does.

---