A long lane at night

1.25. DETAILS

** ALLAN **

BRIAN TOOK ME TO SEE OUR WEDDING VENUE about ten days after showing me the pictures. It was a secluded area upstate about two kilometres away from the edge of the city. It was a windy morning and the Sun was shining bright on a cloudless sky, making the surface of the pond gleam like a thousand diamonds.

'It's perfect,' the word came from the three of our mouths almost in unison. Mine, Brian's and Mandy's. Mandy the wedding planner. I hired a wedding planner. I was going crazy with anxiety with so many details when I remembered that the beauty of capitalism is that you can always hire someone to worry about something for you whenever you can't cope. So, Mandy was here. Totally focused on listening to what I wanted and making it come true. I wanted to hug Mandy and give her chocolates at least five times a day.

Over the course of the next weeks, Mandy had us try a million different things. Music, decorations, outfits, sitting plans. One of the longest conversations we had was regarding the catering services.

'I'm sorry, but it all feels like a massive waste,' Brian said after perusing the options she had given us. It was the third or fourth time she was bringing food options and Brian never liked any of them. 'There will be barely twenty people there, and that's including both sides. All of these options are great for big weddings, but ours isn't one. These folks look ready to feed an army.'

'I know,' Mandy said, twisting her nose. 'I thought of that, too. Believe me, these are the options I found that offer the least amount.'

'Blimey, imagine the most ones.'

'Exactly.'

'I think I have an idea,' I said, not really paying attention to the brochures Mandy had brought. 'The whole point of the ceremony is to make it look like us, right?'

'That's my biggest concern, yes,' Mandy answered.

'So why don't we scrape these caterers and have something that really feels close to home?'

'Allan, my love,' Brian said, looking at me with amazed eyes. 'We can't have pizza served as our wedding dinner. I know I'd love to, but we just can't.'

'No,' I said, scratching my jawline. 'And yes. Hear me out. To begin with, we can see if the pizza parlour we love so much and is so special to us would be willing to prepare a big enough amount of smaller variations of pizzas and calzones to be served as appetisers during the party and we can hire the chef from that Italian restaurant where we dined on the day we shared our first kiss to cover the main courses. Considering it's a small party, I believe we can persuade her to accept it.

'Can we have little pizza cones?' Brian asked tentatively.

'At the reception or now?' I asked, raising my eyebrow.

'Why not both? I'll give them a call.'

'Apparently, we'll have pizza cones for dinner,' I said. turning to Mandy. 'Want to join us?'

'Actually, no thanks. I'll just go contact the chef from the Italian restaurant you want and see what offer we can make her. See her demands and all.'

It took Mandy a fortnight to finally close the deal with the restaurant people. They weren't at first willing to let go of their executive chef on a Saturday night, but I think Mandy pulled the 'famous YouTuber' card on them. On top of the considerable fare, I was strongly tipped by Mandy to throw them a few nods on some of my videos.

'Can we do it, though?' I asked Brian later that night when we were cuddling. 'Legally, I mean. Can I just insert their name in the video?'

'Well,' Brian said while caressing my hair, making it really hard to focus. 'It's basically free advertising, as far as the video goes. But why don't you forget about that for a while and focus on my fingers moving through your head?'