The Fall - Book 2

207. Ár Mac Tíre Beag.

APRIL 11, 2020 — AVENGERS COMPOUND — RÉA

I wake before the sun, too excited to sleep any longer.

'It's surprise Bucky day! Eeeeeee!' I internally squeal.

The past twenty two days since dress shopping—oh, who am I kidding, the past thirty three days since Bucky proposed—have been filled with anticipatory elation. It's been difficult to contain my excitement; as Nat would say, I've had 'zero chill'.

Bucky and I have made a lot of progress with wedding preparations; there are a few small odds-and-ends to take care of, but pretty much the only things left to do are just to show up and get married.

We had our cake tasting two weeks ago, and the baker, Susette, assured us that it would be no problem to decorate the cake with the constellations from that very first night in Wakanda. She even printed out a star map from an online planetarium—complete with lines illustrating the constellations—and had us show her exactly what we were able to see.

When we'd told her about how many guests would be at the reception, she suggested doing a two-tier cake for me and Bucky to cut, that would be served just to the wedding party—with the top tier frozen and saved for our first wedding anniversary—and then cupcakes for the other guests. We'd both agreed with her suggestion, and had firmed up colour choices: for the cake, a fondant background in dark blue with the stars in white, just like Bucky suggested; for the cupcakes, Susette said that, regardless of the frosting flavours, she could have them all be dark blue with single constellations piped in white, so we'd chosen that option.

After that, we'd moved on to picking out flavours. We'd tasted a lot of cake, and every single one was so delicious, it was hard to narrow it down. Eventually, we opted for four flavours of cupcakes: red velvet with cream cheese frosting, vanilla with vanilla buttercream frosting, chocolate with chocolate buttercream, and lemon with blueberry-lemon buttercream; for our cake, we went with Bucky's favourite: yellow cake with chocolate buttercream.

Bucky's alarm goes off, pulling me from my thoughts. He rolls over and picks up his phone, silencing the alarm, then sets it back on the nightstand and wraps his arms around me, laying his head on my chest.

"Mornin', doll," he says, his voice deep and gravelly with sleep.

"Good morning. You're up early...I didn't think there was training today."

"There's not. At least, not a scheduled team one. I told Steve I'd go running with him. He wants to go at sunrise."

"Ahh, gotcha. Well, you better get up and go meet him. I'll make you breakfast when you get back."

"I'd like that." He gives me a brief kiss, then slides out of bed. He dresses quickly, and returns to the bed, giving me one more kiss. "Be back soon."

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"Doll, are you alright? You seem...antsy," Bucky says as we eat.

"Yep! I'm good!" my tone is a tad overly-cheerful, earning me a quizzical look.

'Way to play it cool, Réa,' I tell myself. 'You're going to give away the surprise if you don't calm down.'

"It's just...I have a surprise for you."

"A surprise?"

"Mmhmm," I nod. "And I wasn't going to tell you; I was just going to ask you to run errands with me, but I'm too excited so...yes, I have a surprise for you. We need to leave within the next forty five minutes, though, because we have an appointment."