Chapter 18 #4
“I tried talking to her again and again to apologise.”
“I wasn’t about to let him off that easy. Not right then, anyway,” I admit.
“And because it was Len and Jim’s wedding, I didn’t wanna cause a scene,” Marley goes on.
“Oh, but you did.” Now it’s Jimmie to interrupt him.
“What the fuck? Did Cow Pie Dan leave me any choice? No, so you can all shut your cake holes!” Marley argues.
“Would that be wedding cake holes?” Cam asks, always ready with the dad jokes. This one’s greeted with a collective groan from everyone in the room.
“Yes, exactly,” Marls, also a connoisseur of the dad jokes these days, agrees.
“Anyway, I keep my distance and let everyone enjoy their night, until I’m standing at the bar with Maca, chatting shit while we watch the girls dance.
Then Dan appears from nowhere, grabs George by the arm, yanks her away from Ash, and slings her across the dance floor.
Then he grabs Ash by the arse cheeks and pulls her against him.
I don’t know who moves first, Mac or me, but by the time we reach the girls, G has him by the hair and is holding his head still while Ash clocks him one on the jaw. ”
“Nice, hey? A so-called celebrity wedding, with Hello magazine allowed in for a one-hour block of time to take photos, and this lot have to kick off,” Jim grumbles.
“The bloke had just grabbed my sister and my bird. What the fuck did you want me to do?” Marls asks, leaning around George and me.
“Not beat his face to a pulp?” Jim offers.
“Wouldn’t that be mincemeat?” Harry asks. “You know, cos he’s Cow Pie Man?”
“Your jokes are as bad as Dad’s,” Kiki tells him.
“Worse,” Lu adds.
“I’m not having that. Nothing’s as bad as Dad’s,” George declares.
“Fuck the lot of you,” Cam says.
The room falls silent, and we all look at each other. Me, Marley, Len, Jim, Georgia, Cam, Harry, George, Lu, and Kiks, and at the exact same time, we all burst out laughing.
Daniel and the crew remain silent, simply watching on, which makes us laugh even louder. We have no idea what’s funny. We just know that after the drama, the revelations, and the emotion of the past couple of days, this laughter feels cathartic.
When we finally compose ourselves, we each face forward again.
“We good?” Daniel asks.
I daren’t look at Marls or the girls, so I just nod.
“Yeah,” Marley starts, then stops to clear his throat—a clear indicator he’s fighting for his life not to laugh.
“I may have lashed out, Ash may have got upset with me and left, and I may have proceeded to drink excessively before deciding it might be a good idea to go to her place and press on the intercom until she answered.”
“Did you?” Daniel asks me. “Answer, I mean?”
“I opened the door and discovered he’d spewed everywhere.
He apologised for that and for running away.
He tried to sing me a number of different songs, but wasn’t capable of stringing even the simplest of sentences together.
I let him in, and he proceeded to pass out, fully clothed, on my bed,” I explain.
“I woke up the next morning and asked her to be my wife. We flew to Vegas, and without telling a soul, we got married,” Marley brags.
“I love that!” Lu calls out.
“Yeah and failed to tell any of us for twenty-five years. Twenty-five years! Who does that?” Georgia asks.
“We did,” Marley replies, raising my hand to his lips to kiss the back of it.
“Why?” Daniel asks. “Why’d you keep that from everyone?”
Marley looks down to where our hands are joined, then looks at me.
It’s the look I call his ‘at-home look’.
A look just for me and the kids. It’s the real Marley’s look, not the cheeky, bad-boy rock star look he wears for the cameras and the public.
It’s the look of an amazing dad, and an annoyingly funny, loving, attentive husband.
My husband.
“I was twenty-three. Since the age of eighteen, I’d been public property.
I knew that once the world knew about me and Ash, her life would change, and she’d become public property, too.
I didn’t want that for her. Once I’d sobered up enough to have a conversation with her the day after Len and Jim’s wedding, I explained to her how I felt, but I was also honest about how getting into something with me would change her life,” Marley tells the room.
“I had a pretty good idea. The press had been camped outside the shop once they got wind of Mac and G being back together, and Len wasn’t even in the band, but there was a massive amount of press outside the church when they got married.
None of that mattered to me, though. As long as I had him, I didn’t care about any of that,” I admit.
“And that’s when I asked her to be my wife,” Marley adds.
“And that’s when I suggested we run away, do it in secret, and not tell a soul,” I say.
“I just fucking loved that idea, to have something that was just ours. The press, the public, not even my family needed to know. It was ours—a piece of me, of us, that didn’t belong to anyone else, that I didn’t realise I needed, or that we’d want to protect so fiercely for so long.
” Marley gives my hand another squeeze, and I decide he’ll definitely be getting some tonight.
“How’d you all find out?” Daniel asks the room.
“Sean and Marley had invested in this huge resort hotel in Turks and Caicos. Jim and Len decided to renew their vows there, with all of us present. The day after, all sorts of other friends and family started to arrive, saying that Marley had invited them to a party the next night. We all thought they were finally going to get married. Then when we walked into the venue, it was all decorated in silver… with a little bit of purple.” Georgia tilts her head towards me as she speaks, knowing the purple, being my favourite colour, was on me.
“Young and Wild played a set. There were a couple of DJs. It was excellent, but none of us actually knew why we were there, then this pair got up on stage and thanked us all for celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary with them, explaining they’d married in Vegas, in secret, twenty-five years ago, and hadn’t told anyone until then. ”
“How’d that go down?” Daniel asks.
There’s a prolonged silence that just starts to turn uncomfortable when Len says, “We couldn’t have been happier for them. Mum was pissed off, but we all had such a great night, she soon let it go.”
I notice Daniel’s eyes have remained on Georgia, who has stayed quiet.
“The only one not happy was George,” Marley announces.
She shifts, then looks around me to Marley.
“It wasn’t that I wasn’t happy for you. It was just bittersweet that Sean had died not knowing.
It was a bittersweet night all around. The entire holiday, in fact.
I was there with Cam and my babies, and I just struggled with the guilt of having such an amazing time, being so happy, when Sean was dead and had died not knowing the truth. ”
I reach for her hand but don’t say anything. What can I say? Her feelings were and are perfectly valid.
“I do better with those kinds of thoughts and feelings now and know for a fact that, as long as you’re happy, Sean wouldn’t give a fuck that you kept your secret so long. But, yeah, I struggled a bit that night, and I’m really sorry if you two thought I wasn’t happy for you or the situation.”
The room remains quiet, and I know, because she’s my bestie and I know how her brain works, that Georgia will now be eaten alive by guilt because Cam and the kids just heard her confess to all of that.
And then he’s there, reaching over her shoulder to hand her a glass of Prosecco, which she takes, releases a long exhale, then swigs her drink. Looking up at Cam, she mouths a thank you.
“You doing all right?” he asks her.
She nods. “You?”
He shrugs. She stills.
“Just worried about you. We’re getting to the hardest part,” he warns her.
“I think we’ll probably break for today and continue Monday.”
“Good,” he says quietly with a nod before glancing my way. “Go you, you little star. You shine up there. I knew you’d do great.”
This man! Our TDH is one of the absolute best.
“Thanks, T,” I tell him as warmth fills my chest.
“Okay, we’ve got so much more than we planned to today, so I think we should call it and let you lovely people enjoy the rest of your weekend. We’ll see you back here Monday,” Daniel announces.
Everyone in the room shows their approval by giving a huge round of applause.
An hour later, Daniel and the crew have packed up and gone. Outside of the family, the only person left is Makenzie Wild, who’s out on the deck.
In an attempt to escape the noise and commotion that comes with being in the company of the Laytons and Kings, I open the timber door.
I don’t know why I come out here. I haven’t got a clue what I’m going to say to her, but I just have a gut feeling about the girl, and I’m undecided if it’s a good or bad one.
Kenzie has her phone in one hand, her camera in the other, with images pulled up on both. Unable to see what she’s looking at, I step closer. She’s so focused on the screens in front of her, she hasn’t noticed me.
The moment I take in the images is the same moment she realises I’m there. Before I get a chance to process, she tilts the screens towards her, blocking my view.
“We need to talk,” she says, raising her chin.