the kink club • luke hemmings ✔️

28. the one where he's a lucky boyfriend.

chapter twenty-eight:
the one where he's a lucky boyfriend.

Poppy is already starting to bombard me with wedding plans and I don't think I can take another second of it. Literally. Every little thing she says, every little thing she hints, makes me feel like deducting another imaginary second from the ticking time bomb in my head waiting to explode.

I would be fine if I had prepped myself a couple of months prior. But the wedding invite was late, my choice to come was even later, and now I'm stuck listening to her cry about how her dress doesn't fit.

I want to scream at her that it fits, of course it fits, she's just blind with the continuous urge to perfect every little thing in her life to notice. But I don't; I keep quiet, I help her zip up the lace, and I keep my harsh opinions to myself.

Even Luke's getting annoyed with the constant 'everything must be perfect' and 'smiles all around, please; I'm getting married!' scolding given to us by the woman, and I don't blame him. Nobody blames anybody for being stressed here. It's Poppy Hayes' wedding yet it feels like everyone elses at the same time; the respinsibility isn't exactly balanced on her side of the scale.

The wedding hall is massive and it isn't hard to tell that Poppy's new husband doesn't mind splurging on a few luxuries, not at all. I'd
met him a few hours before, a short while before I saw the extent of his metaphorical wallet and the ongoing shopping list in Poppy's head.

Matt is the definition of a big spender and I know this by how he's hired a limo to take my sisters from one side of the open plain to another, with a driver that no doubt costs more than the car. Even the rose petals laid out on every table have gold specks of dust painted on the stem; highlighting each and every green vein as if it'll make things the least bit better.

When I pointed this out to Bailey, she simply shrugged, took the flower from my hand, and shoved it into her back pocket. I was much too tired to argue.

"What?" she asked me, nonchalantly. "When we get back to New York, I can so sell this."

At least one of us was having fun. Granted, nobody's having as much of a good time as Poppy is, what with her unneccessary ordering of endless bouqets of pointless flowers- half of which she's allergic to- adding to the feeling of being a true, fairytale princess circulating in the air around her.

Nevertheless, I can't help but wish for my couch back home, for the apartment that never gets used right across the hall from us and the coffee shop in which I both earn and spend most of my money in.

"Hey, babe." Luke says, walking towards me and gently placing his hand on the small of my back.

He knows it soothes me, and at a time like this- when I'm forced to sort through hundreds of multicoloured flower corsages because my sister had fired the person she'd hired in the first place to do this- I give him a small smile, looking up from the corsage in my hand. "What have you got there?"

"Poppy wants all dates to have corsages," I inform him, holding the one habouring my name with a sigh. "What do you think?"

The flower is orange; a bright, unnatural, unusually tinted, neon orange. It doesn't go with my dress. It doesn't really go much with anything. But it costs a lot, it looks interesting from afar, and that's good enough for Poppy.

"It's..." Luke begins, taking it from me and raising a slight eyebrow. I groan, taking it back from him. "Different?"

"When you sound like you're asking me a question, that's usually a code for awful." I say, carelessly allowing the flower to fall onto the table.