Baking and Babies (Chocoholics #3)(55)

“Maybe the zipper is broken. That’s probably what it is, just a broken zipper,” Charlotte mumbles.

“The zipper isn’t broken, tubby. How is this possible when you’re only like five minutes pregnant? How does this dress not fit when you’ve been puking every day since the stick turned pink?” I complain, immediately regretting my use of the puking word since it just makes me remember what I did the first time I had a penis in my mouth.

“Shut the f*ck up, dick-bag!” she yells through clenched teeth. “You call me tubby one more time and I will punch you in the throat!”

The curtain slides open and Ava sticks her head in the dressing room. “Everything okay in here? Why is it taking so long for you to put on a f*cking dress?”

I drop my hands from the zipper and back away from Charlotte. There is no way that zipper is going to budge.

“Fatty here doesn’t fit into her wedding dress anymore,” I tell Ava.

Charlotte’s arm flies back and her forearm smacks against my throat. I start choking and wrap my hands around my neck, giving Charlotte a dirty look.

“I warned you,” Charlotte growls, returning my dirty look as she stares at me over her shoulder.

“You told me not to call you tubby, you didn’t say anything about fatty, you fatty-fat-ass-dick-head,” I growl back in between coughs.

“You seriously can’t zip the dress?” Ava questions, stepping inside the small room and pulling the curtain closed behind her.

She steps forward and tries to zip it herself, giving up after a few hard tugs.

“Nope, not gonna happen. This size two no longer fits your size eight ass,” Ava informs our sister. “Maybe you should have eased up on that entire box of Twinkies you inhaled for breakfast this morning.”

Charlotte stomps her foot and whirls around, the dress billowing out around her as she turns. It really is a beautiful dress and she looks stunning. From the front.

“They’re the only things that I can keep down so shut the f*ck up!”

The curtain slides back again and this time, Aunt Claire pokes her head in. “They’re getting a little stingy with the free champagne out here, can we speed things along?”

Charlotte quickly moves in front of me so the huge gap in the back of her dress can’t be seen in the full-length mirror behind her.

“This isn’t a bar, Aunt Claire. I think five glasses is enough,” Charlotte tells her.

“I had cancer! Have you no shame?” she argues.

“There is a statute of limitations on how long you can keep using that to make us feel bad,” Ava says. “It’s not going to work because you want more booze.”

Aunt Claire gives her the finger. “You’re mean and I don’t like you very much right now.”

“Why am I the only adult in this room?” Ava complains with a roll of her eyes.

“I am acting like an adult, you’re just being a meanie doo-doo head,” Aunt Claire states, sticking out her tongue as she pulls her head back and yanks the curtain closed.

“We’ll just tell them you’ve been stress-eating,” Ava says with a shrug. “Weddings are stressful, it’s easily believable. It’s not like they didn’t witness you inhaling that box of snack cakes in the car. Oh, wait. They didn’t because you hunkered down in the back seat and made Molly hold the box and pretend like she was the one eating them.”

I nod in agreement. Not my finest hour pretending to chew every time our mother looked in the rearview mirror or Aunt Claire turned around to look at the three of us.

“Oh, just so you know, Marco hasn’t said a word to Tyler about the night of the great penis purge,” Ava tells me while Charlotte reaches behind her to try and zip up her dress on her own. “Don’t worry, I didn’t tell him, I just nonchalantly asked what they talked about when he got home from grabbing a beer with Marco last night. If Tyler knew, it would have been the first thing out of his mouth since that man cannot keep a secret. Not only can your man handle a little vomit on his junk, he doesn’t gossip about it. You’ve got yourself a keeper.”

I close my eyes in mortification as she laughs, refusing to give her a high-five when she holds her hand up in the air.

Even though I wanted to lock myself in my room and never face Marco again after the night in the hotel room, he made that impossible to do. He wouldn’t let one day go by without seeing me, and as much as I wanted to hide from him so I never had to think about what I did, I wanted to be around him even more. He came up to work every day and took me to lunch, he planned dates and things for us to do almost every night and he never let more than a few hours go by without calling to tell me he just wanted to hear the sound of my voice. My two year crush and only a handful of weeks with him has shot me right up the hill of falling in love with him to tumbling over the edge and head over heels, madly, passionately in love with him.

“What am I going to do if I can never give him another blowjob? What kind of a relationship can we possibly have if I can’t put his penis in my mouth without throwing up?” I ask, trying to keep my panic at a minimum before I curl up in the fetal position and cry.

“Stop being a drama queen, for f*ck’s sake. So you threw up on his dick? Come back to me when you’ve had accidental anal,” Ava says with a sigh. “At least you had the luxury of passing out after you threw up. I couldn’t sit down for a week and I was afraid to take a shit for four days.”