I'm Not Your Toy

Whiplash

Lauren's POV

After what has felt like hundreds of hours spent preparing for this moment, wedding planning, practices, and anything between, now is the moment we've all been waiting for. Two of my best friends are getting married. We all attended Ally and Will's wedding reception, but Dinah made sure that her wedding was much more extravagant and unnecessarily over the top. I think it's finally setting in that I'm the only one in the group that isn't married yet, but Lucy and I are on our way to fixing that and we aren't in a hurry to do so.

I take my place at the front and look around at how beautiful the setup is. Dinah really has a knack for planning these types of things. I see a lot of the Hansen family in the crowd, it's kind of hard to miss them because I was practically raised as one of their own and there's so many of them. I also catch Normani's family nearby. We all knew her grandma would be the most excited person here to see her granddaughter growing up and getting married to the love of her life. She is already wiping her tears away while holding a big box of tissues on her lap.

Then I catch sight of the most important person here, to me that is. She notices the second I catch her eyes and gives me the smile. You know, the type of smile that makes her look like a cute teddy bear; her cheeks bunch up, she is showing off her teeth, and you can see how the smile reaches her eyes by the twinkle in them and the way her eyes kind of squint. It's the type of smile that makes me feel warm and at home, I only get to see it every so often when she is super happy.

I've been too busy analyzing my girlfriend- no- my fiance's happy face to realize that the music has begun and the talking has been silenced. Dinah's sister, Regina walks down the aisle slowly, throwing out flower petals. The door opens again, revealing Normani in her beautiful white dress. Her father escorts her to the altar before splitting off and going to take his spot next to his wife. The door opens a final time and my best friend begins walking down the aisle with her dad. I'm almost at the point of tears, watching my childhood best friend walking down the aisle at her wedding is definitely one of those things I will cherish forever.

The fact that we have remained so close after all of these years astonishes me. We've been through so much, I'm surprised she still puts up with me to this day. I have shut her out for months at a time, I guess that's how I deal with something major like that, I shut everybody out. Every single time, she has made it clear that she will be there for me forever, no matter how long it takes me to come back to her.

Once she reached Normani, her dad also went to find his place among the Hansen crowd. I watch her face light up as she walks up to her soon-to-be wife.

Their wedding commences without an issue. My lifelong best friend kept her vows a secret from me, so hearing them blew me away. I knew she has always hidden her inner-brainiac self  from the world since she was little and it has been a long time since she has impressed me to this extent with how elegant she can make herself sound. The words flow from her mouth with ease, she even manages to throw a few jokes in there, making the teary-eyed audience laugh. By the end of it, I'm not sure who else has a full stream of tears down their face, but I notice that Dinah, Normani, and myself have joined the club.

Normani's vows had the same effect on our emotions as Dinah's, despite how she said that she could never follow that up. I can't believe I am standing here watching my two friends getting married to each other. I can't believe I've been working on my own vows and planning my own wedding. I am so meticulous that I have been trying to perfect my vows and we are still months away from our wedding date. I can only imagine how hard it's going to be to focus on anything other than my wife-to-be on that day.