Money For Something

2 - At Last

**Willow**

"Are you sure you've packed everything you need?" My best friend Maddy's voice echoed down what was a truly shitty phone connection.

For once envy over her spectacularly great job wasn't about to eat me alive. I too was off to do greater things, maybe not career wise but it was great things in terms of my life. I'd just quit my steady but not exciting job to fly out west to finally reconnect with Jack my boyfriend. Long distance relationships suck.

"Yes Mads, I have absolutely everything I need."

Everything including my wedding dress, not that she knew I needed to pack that. She didn't even know that I'd sewn it. Hell, she didn't even know that Jack had suggested that we get married, calling his offer a proposal would be overexaggerating his casually worded suggestion of, "Seeing as we're meeting in Vegas we may as well get married babe."

It was definitely not the memorable proposal event that Maddy had always said she wanted. Think flash mobs, fireworks, five carat diamond rings hidden in a cupcake, but it was my boyfriend asking me to marry him, so I wasn't complaining. However, her expectations for not just herself but for every friend of hers was probably the reason why I wasn't sharing my upcoming budget-Vegas-wedding news with her.

If you think her proposal expectations are ludicrous, you should take a look at the enormous wedding scrapbook she'd been curating since we were ten years old.

My dreams were nowhere near as elaborate as Maddy's. I was just sick of wishing that Jack wasn't so far away.

"Anything I can't take in my suitcase I can have sent out later. Aunt Deb said she'd arrange to have my other stuff sent out when I let her know my address in California."

I flopped onto the armchair in the corner of my now barren living room. Everything that had made the place feel like a home had been packed away into boxes. Not that there had been a whole lot, I'd never really gotten around to decorating once Jack had gone on tour with his band. I had been able to remove the band posters he'd insisted on using to decorate the walls, but other than that, nothing. I'd always intended to hang pictures and buy throw pillows, but I'd never seemed to have either the money or the time. Shift work on the reception desk of a hotel kept me busy. Sending Jack money to make life on the road easier for him while his band toured kept me broke.

Jack had always promised that my sacrifices would be worth it, and it looked like he was right. The band landed a record deal, started to see some chart success and managed to book the support slot for a big-name band, no more shows in sticky-floored bars. That tour was finishing up in a couple of days and Jack and I had decided that the time was right for me to finally join him. I was meeting him in Las Vegas for the second last show of the tour before travelling with him and the band on to Los Angeles.

And I'd be doing it as his wife!

So what if the wedding was going to be Jack, me and maybe Elvis? I'd never dreamed of a big wedding, I just wanted to be Jack's wife. Okay, I might have dreamed of something more than a quickie wedding in Vegas, but those dreams always included three things. My mom pining on my veil, Maddy as my maid of honour and my dad walking me down the aisle. The timing meant that those three things couldn't happen.

Maddy was in Europe ushering groups of tourists around on a coach and my parents were on a highway somewhere in their Kombi. Even with my other family and friends, without those three, the wedding I'd have loved couldn't happen. Jack and I would have some kind of celebration when finances permitted, maybe even a vow renewal, when my parents and best friend could be there.

"You'll call me when you get to Vegas right? None of that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas bullshit. I want all the joyful reunion details," Maddy said snapping my attention back to our call. She managed to hold back almost all her sarcasm.