What's the Hitch? - A Trinity Sitch Interlude
Chapter 4
Ron's feet were cold.
That thought alone was enough to send his sleep addled mind into a moment of absolute panic. This was the last day of his life that he ever wanted to consider having 'cold feet.' He had seen enough in his relatively short life to know better than to dismiss such an omen out of hand. He had gone to bed knowing there was nothing in the world that would cause him to have cold feet on this day!
Yet here it was, that morning and he had cold feet!
It certainly didn't help the butterflies in his stomach.
Slowly his eyes opened, then scrunched back shut. What time did I finally fall asleep? He wondered. And why are my feet cold! Not thinking about where he was, he did what he always did when he was chilly in bed. He rolled to the right, toward an expected pool of warmth…
…and promptly landed on the floor, tangled in his blankets.
The reason for his chilly tootsies and the absence of his usual bed mate rushed to him all at once. He wasn't in his apartment sleeping in a nice long, wide 'California queen' size bed. He was in his old room, sleeping in his tiny single bed. How did I ever sleep in this thing? Or course my feet are cold! They've been sticking out the end of the bed all night!
He looked at his watch (his clock was on his nightstand in their apartment.) It was just a bit shy of a quarter past seven. Let's see, got to be at the church about ten, maybe another thirty minutes of sleep if I pull my knees up to my chest!
The church!
It's that day!
He was in his parent's home, in his childhood room because it was the last night he would spend as just their child. By the time the sun had set on this day he would have started his own family and he would have a wife to keep him warm in bed at night!
Only a few blocks away he knew Kim was waking up to the morning of her wedding. Visions of his beautiful redhead filled his mind. He pictured her rushing downstairs into the arms of her parents and to the usual tortures of the Tweebs.
Bzzzzzzzzzt…
Kim's hand shot out from the covers, swatting for the snooze bar of her alarm clock. Where was the blasted thing?
Slowly she realized it had been moved to the old student desk where her computer used to sit. Who puts an alarm clock across the room? How can you hit the snooze button that way?
She was across the room, her hand over the clock when it occurred to her.
She was already up! Dirty, dirty trick, whoever had done it!
Even though the sun was us, she had to think really hard about crawling back into her warm, soft bed!
"Kiiiiiiiiiiiiim!" A voice with a generous helping of western twang managed to stretch her one syllable name into at least three. A young woman who looked like a carbon copy of her save for darker brown hair and nearly blue, turquoise eyes shot into the room, bouncing on the bed.
"Joss, please, no need to shout, I'm not hard of hearing." Kim moaned, holding her temples.
I am so going to KILL Sherry for getting me started on margaritas! Let's just have a few drinks while we're out, just us girls, he mother said after the rehearsal dinner. What was it about this tequila stuff?
"Joss, you're what, seventeen now?"
"Eighteen. 'Member? I'm a year older than Jim and Tim!"
"Right." She said, still rubbing her forehead, trying to block out her cousin's near-deafening voice. "Promise me when your girlfriends want to go out for drinks, you stick to cola or something."
"Daddy says when yer hung over ya gotta have some hair of the dog that bit ya!" Kim wasn't sure if she was happy that her younger cousin knew that little tidbit or that her father, Uncle Slim, had seen fit to confer it upon her.
"Gah! The last thing I want right now is more alcohol." She said, remembering the hangover she had two weeks before from Sherry's Bachelorette party.
Heedless of Kim's request for quiet, Joss ran to the loft hatch and yelled, "Aunt ANNNNNNNNE! She's UP!" Moments later the entire bridal party poured into the nearly empty room, Monique and Bonnie fighting for supremacy in the din.
Kim plopped down on the bed, her hands clamped over her ears as Joss, Monique, Bonnie and her mother all tried to talk to her at once. I can get through this! I can do anything, I can do anything!
I can take a ferociously big handful of ibuprofen!
Kim still could not believe her one-time rival was now one of her bridesmaids. Heck, she was surprised she had agreed to fill in as one at Sherry's wedding. Bonnie had only ever known of her as Shego and her new husband as Doctor Drakken, yet she jumped at the chance when, out of the blue Sherry asked her if she would stand in at the last moment.
Monique theorized that Bonnie's clique had finally evaporated in the waning days of college. Kim's mother even suggested it may be because she was now living on her own, away from the cruelties of her older sisters, Connie and Lonnie.
As far as Kim was concerned, though, she still only asked Bonnie because Ron had asked her to. Ron had warmed up to her considerably after the night of his 'private' proposal (as opposed to the later event where he asked her father for her hand) when she had taken unexplained pity on him and delivered him to her doorstep when his car broke down.
It had taken almost four years for Kim to get that far.
This may have been the first day of the rest of her life with Ron, but at the moment she had just gotten out of bed, she had the world's gorchiest case of cottonmouth, her head was splitting and to top it all off, she had to pee!
Suddenly it dawned on her that she was standing on her bed and had just shouted all of that at the top of her lungs at the four women. She turned a shade of red slightly darker than her hair.
Make that four women. Sticking her head up through the hatch as she came up the stairs was Nana! Kim dropped down on the bed and buried her face in her hands.
"Come on, girls." Anne guided the rest of the women toward the stairs. "This is her day, let's all go down and get ready for breakfast while she gets ready." She turned toward Kim and winked.
Kim mouthed the words "I love you, Mom."
Ron looked at himself in the mirror. Some time over the last year, after he moved out, his father had taken a scraper to his mirror. It was now clean of the assorted bumper stickers he had accumulated over the years. He wasn't sure, but it looked like the whole dresser had been refinished. It was kind of funny, he mused, that the only stickers he could really remember were the Fearless Ferret and another one that said "No on 65," in reference to the Mouse Ears Channel's now-broken policy that almost canceled his favorite show!
Still, despite the barren room, the lack of posters, the missing action figures and toys, the absence of the lava lamp (which adorned the nightstand on his side of the bed, much to Kim's chagrin!) he still had a strong feeling of déjà vu. Five years had passed since the first time he put on a tux and only the fact he was six inches taller and several inches wider across the chest kept him from putting his father's old baby-blue tux today. Instead he had a custom fit black tux with a white cummerbund and tie to match his yarmulke.
There was a momentary whooshing sound as a shadow passed over his house. Fortunately, he knew that would all soon stop. Global Justice was making certain there would be no surprises this day, but the patrols would soon stop as the FAA-declared no-fly zone went into effect. There were going to be no helicopters, be they villains or just nosey paparazzi, buzzing their wedding day!
One part of his clothing still confounded him. The folds of the bow-tie hung like limp pasta from his collar. This time there was not gripping angst about Kim and some other guy, no worry that their relationship might crash and burn, ruining seventeen years of friendship and love. Today was the ultimate culmination of all of that. No, the only one he could blame today for never learning to tie a bow-tie was himself.
"Rufus?" he pointed at his neck, the déjà vu taking hold once more. At least his little chum could fix him right up! Still, it would be a long time before he scoffed that a bow-tie was 'a skill that is never used in the real world!' (like math or the semi-colon!)
He turned and adopted a lop-sided grin as his father stood in the doorway in a light-colored suit. The camera went off, preserving the image of his only son, about to take the final step in becoming a man, a process that had begun at his Bar Mitzvah almost eight years earlier. (Too bad he'd have to wait a few days to see the picture, his father still thought digital cameras were just a fad!)
His father hugged him, holding him for quite a long time before stepping aside and letting his mother into the embrace.
"Time to go, Ronald. Two hours early for an inter-faith wedding!"
The wedding was held at the Possible family's church, though Rabbi Katz presided over the ceremony beside their pastor. There was a moment when Ron's mother had been upset they weren't holding it at their temple, but it was their Rabbi that suggested it would be more proper to hold it at the brides place of worship. Prayers where said both in English and in Hebrew. They stood under a white arch and the stomped on a glass wrapped in cloth.
Despite the evening being hot and quite humid for Colorado, the reception was held outside, under the stars. Ron held his new wife's hands, looking into her eyes.
"I wonder why you chose the fourth of July for our wedding day?" Kim said, smiling at him, knowing the answer.
"Because you once told me something, something that I believe now more than ever."
"What's that?" she asked, leaning closer to him as something streaked into the sky from a nearby hill.
"There's still fireworks." He said as the first rockets burst above them.
The missed most of them as they kissed.
Fin