Paradise Child Book 3 (Imprisoned in my Heart trilogy...Larry)

The Wedding

Even though they’d been planning this wedding in intricate detail for years, offering up ideas both plausible and implausible, discarding suggestions and taking them on board and loving every second of it, Louis was still terrified that something was going to go wrong. They’d planned this out so scrupulously that it would take nothing short of a selection of natural disasters in rapid succession to throw things off today, but he still had a nagging sensation that something wasn’t going to go according to plan and one of the most important days of his life was going to go horribly, spectacularly wrong. They certainly had a track record for their lives loving to take an unexpected twist of fate, and the paranoia creeping up on him that whispered that it was going to happen again was trickling down his back like icy water, feeling like an annoying, unscratched itch that just wouldn’t go away. He fixed his gaze on some of the immaculate flower arrangements (pink roses, Harry’s favourite flower – not that he would ever openly admit to having something as embarrassing as a favourite flower, of course) and focused on breathing evenly in and out. Today was a big day that would most definitely not be enhanced by one of the bridegrooms having a hysterical breakdown at the altar.

He and Harry had had a lot of lengthy discussions about who would be walking down the aisle, and it had taken an awful lot of persuasion, bribery and what only could be described as flat-out begging on Louis’ part to persuade Harry to be the one who walked to Louis’ side rather than waiting for him at the altar, but Louis could be very convincing in his arguments when he wanted to be, and he was incredibly skilled in just the right kind of duress, if it could be described as such, especially when actively encouraged (“Please, Harry, for me! I just want to be stood there waiting for you, come on, I’m beggingyou, you have no idea how much it would mean to me!” “Hmm. Well. You are asking very nicely…tell you what, since you’re already on your knees, how about you make use of that pretty little mouth for something other than pleading, and then we’ll talk about this again, shall we?” with a wicked little grin) and in the end, after a lot of bargaining, here he was. Waiting for Harry to join him and then for the registrar to join them, so that they would legally belong to each other forever as well as in every other respect.

The butterflies in his stomach were more like a thousand centipedes on the rampage, swarming all the way through his body and roiling in a tense knot somewhere in his abdomen, their spindly legs crawling up the insides of his stomach and making him feel like he wanted to throw up. Anyone else might have mistaken them for pre-wedding jitters, but Louis knew himself better than that; this was what he wanted, this wasn’t what he was nervous for. It was the hundreds of pairs of eyes on his back, the conglomeration of friends and family, both his and Harry’s, all scrunched up in the pews, watching and waiting. Judging him. Nervously, Louis resisted the temptation to rake his hair into a new, messier arrangement (which he had been warned not to do on pain of death by his mother and sisters: “If your hair looks a state on the wedding photographs, Louis Tomlinson, your life won’t be worth living!”). Apparently Jay had warmed to Harry in the past couple of months; ever since he’d started regularly driving down to collect her from Doncaster and bring her to see her son and adopted grandchild, she’d gradually been thawing out in her attitude towards him, which had always been a little cool, slowly forgetting his past until she had finally accepted him into the family without question, like Louis had always hoped she would. Now, she was determined that the wedding would be perfect, almost more determined than Harry and Louis themselves.

Beside him, Liam cast him a supportive look and Louis forced a sickly smile, glad that the bugs inside his stomach were merely metaphorical and couldn’t come leaking out of the corners of his mouth. By asking Liam to be his best man, Louis had hoped to close the distance that had gradually opened up between them since Liam was relocated for his prison guard job and Louis quit working at prisons altogether, and it had worked beautifully; over the past few months, barely a day had gone by where they didn’t talk on the phone or meet up somewhere, or go out playing in the park with Alice. Harry saw Liam pretty regularly as well, since he spent a lot of free time touring round nearby prisons and talking to the inmates about reformation, but he too relished the prospect of being able to spend time with him outside of a work environment.