SERIES: Ordinary Things
AUTHOR: Missy
EMAIL: lasfic@yahoo.com
PART: 2 of 4
RATING: PG-13
(thematic material; possible eventual NC-17)
PAIRING(s): L/L
DISTRIBUTION: To Myself so far; any other archives are
welcome to ask, but disclaimers must be included, my email left intact. Send a
URL, and provide full disclaimers as well as credit me fully. Please inform me
if you are going to submit my work to any sort of search engine. Please do not submit my work to a search
engine that picks out random sets of words and uses them as key words, such as
"Google"
Please contact me in order for this story to be placed on an
archive, or if you want know of a friend who would enjoy my works, please email
me their address and I will mail them the stories, expressly for the purpose of
link trading. MiSTiers are welcomed! Please do inform me that you'd like to do
the MiSTing, however, and send me a copy of the finished product. I'd also love
to archive any MiSTings that are made of my work!
CATEGORY: Romance
FEEDBACK: PLEASE?!
SETTING IN TIMELINE:
SPOILLER/SUMMARY: Laverne takes Lenny's final proposal far
more seriously than he intended. When
Laverne's mock-wedding starts to take on way more meaning than she intended,
Shirley begins to question the validity of her rushed nuptials to Doctor Walter
Meaney.
NOTES: From something Kath told me about the proposal scene.
***
"Do you like the red one or the green one?"
Laverne pressed the red dress to her bosom, rolling down the
top and looking down. "There ain't
no room for my "L"."
Shirley surfaced, blowing out a breath of aggravated
air. "Do you have to besmirch
everything you own with a velveteen L?"
"I don't 'besmirch' things," Laverne paused,
folding the red dress over and over again. "I make 'em better."
With her hip, Shirley pushed the door of the Bardwells'
ladies section dressing room open.
"Yes. Now, what do you
think?"
Laverne looked her friend up and down and burst into
laughter.
"Honestly!"
"You look like a marshmallow!"
Shirley sat down on a small curved bench, crossing her
legs. "This is the only one that
didn't make my bosom disappear completely!"
"Never mind your 'bosom'." Laverne smirked. "It makes your fanny look like a
snowman's."
Shirley growled, gingerly crossing her legs together. "This is the last one on the rack in my
size."
Laverne reached for the navy blue frock, the second from the
bottom in her pile. "Maybe it's a
sign," she said, in a voice that was intended to be light, but came out
ominously.
"Now, now..."
"Relax, Shirl," Laverne quickly stripped to her
slip and put the dress on, "I'm only kidding." In reality, the last thing she wanted was to
suffer through yet another speech about how and why Walter Meaney was an
amazing, wonderful man. In reality, that
was all she knew about Walter - he was a good man, a dependable tipper, a nice
dancer, his kisses weren't too wet...
How he compared with Carmine, and why, she had no clue.
Carmine was the subject no one wanted to broach - and the
fact that the entirety of Shirley and Walter's relationship had taken place
during his two-week fishing trip said all she needed to know about Shirley's
intentions toward her boyfriend. She had
spent her conversations with Shirley dancing around the elephant in the room -
when she wasn't being dragged off by Lenny to make another arrangement for
their "wedding".
"Miss DeFazio!" a call came over the
loudspeaker. "Please report to
personnel. There is someone here to see
you."
Shirley smiled as Laverne grumbled, tossing off the dress
and putter her uniform back on.
"Leonard is certainly...persistent."
"Persistent, whatta nice way to say he's being a pain
in the butt. This is the third time he's
interrupted my lunch break!"
"Now, I'm sure it's not entirely his fault. Because you won't nip this in the bud. Again."
"Shirl, there ain't no buds to nip - and I ain't
interested in nipping Lenny's buds anyway - that sounds so wrong..."
"You know what else sounds wrong? Lenny.
Crying. Have you ever had to
wring out your blouse after he's had one of his little jags?"
"Too many times."
"Well, you don't want to give him yet another reason to
cry, do you?"
"All right, all right - I'll break off our 'engagement'
today." Laverne shouldered her
purse and marched out of the dressing room.
"Can you re-rack those for me, Shirl?"
"All right. I
need to be alone with myself and the mirror." Shirley spun around in her dress, trying to
find an angle that didn't make her look huge.
***
Lenny, his expression betraying exhaustion, managed a smile
when Laverne finally appeared in personnel.
He jumped up from the red leather cushions and pressed his lip to her
right hand. "Hello, my love,"
he said, with exaggerated passion.
"Hi," she grunted.
When he didn't let go, she yanked her hand free of his grip.
"You ready to go?
I got the truck all gassed up, and I fixed the turn signal so it don't
blink right when I wanna go left..."
"Where do you wanna take me?" Laverne
groaned. "We already decided on the
cake, the flowers, the reception hall..."
"I know, I know, I know, Laverne! All of that stuff is real important, but
there's one thing we forgot."
"What?"
"We don't got nowhere to spend our honeymoon!"
Laverne groaned.
"Lenny, I got something to tell you."
"Lemme show you this," he dug into his back pocket
and pulled out a brochure. Flipping it
open, Laverne saw a gorgeous-looking vinyard.
"It's over in
She stared at the brochure, her good intentions suddenly
dissolving. "Is that a whirlpool,
Len?"
"Yeah," he nuzzled the back of her neck, lips just
brushing the skin. "They got tubs
shaped like
She moaned before she could stop herself. The feeling of his breath on the back of her
neck and his low voice were doing strange things to her, things they'd never
done before...
"But," he stopped, voice suddenly normal again,
"we gotta go drive out there to make sure they're on the up-and-up! You wanna go for the ride?"
The spell broke slowly, and she came back to herself with a
quick shock of embarrassment.
"Okay, alright - I only got an hour for lunch, though."
"No need to worry, Laverne - I'll have you back here in
a jiffy!"
The hand yanking her out the door seemed to make that quite
a display of truthfulness.
***
An hour later, Shirley was home, alone. "No, yes, I'm actually planning on
it..." she nibbled her knuckle.
"Please don't tell Walter - no, I want to surprise him. He can't know what's going on before we get
married..." then, more urgently, she added. "I want to be the one to tell Walter I'm
pregnant."
***
The inn was everything the brochure had promised, Laverne
thought - gorgeous greenery for miles, the scent of country in the air tingling
her nose with its unfamiliarity. Definitely
worth the three-hour ride, she decided. The
owner was a short, bald-pated man who was very eager to gain their business,
judging from the amount of very good wine he'd given Laverne and Lenny to
sample.
"...These are the highest-quality accommodations for a
young couple desiring privacy on their honeymoon." He smiled, filling up the entryway arch of
the winery's inn by force of charisma.
"So - would you like to cut a deal?"
Lenny frowned, concentrating hard on the man's words - the
amount of wine he'd had making it difficult.
"How much for two days?"
"Our weekend packages run from one hundred to two
hundred dollars."
Laverne's eyes widened.
"Two hundred -” she grabbed Lenny by the lapels and whispered at
the top of her lungs, "Len, I ain't even seen two hundred dollars in my
whole life!"
Lenny smiled over her head.
"Book us for the weekend of the twenty-eighth."
"LENNY!"
"Excellent, sir - we'll take a money-order or a
personal check..."
"How about a COD?"
"CODs are fine."
After Lenny had made his deposit, Laverne dragged him away
from prying eyes, cornering him next to a large pool. "Len, how can you afford this
stuff? Are you and Squig into something
illegal?"
"Nah - remember how Mister Shotz was gonna give him and
me a promotion, and we was making really good money for about a
week?" Laverne nodded. "Me and Squig split the money
seventy-twenty, and I put my twenty into Shotz stock. I made about a thousand bucks when they sold
out to Pabst..."
"You're wasting a thousand dollars on this
wedding?" Laverne gaped. "You
could do so much with that money, and you're..."
"I know it's a lot of money, but you're worth it,
Laverne -" He took her hand between his.
"I'm only gonna get married once my whole life, and I want it to be
real special. Real special for
you..."
He leaned in for a kiss, a wine-soaked half-conscious
kiss. And Laverne realized she was going
to do it - going to let him taste her lips and memorize the flavor of his, only
because she wanted to remember what he felt like. The wine wasn't helping her sense of logic...
When his lips brushed hers, she saw a familiar shadow
whistling its way down to the pool - in a heavy white chenille robe, possibly
naked beneath it.
She dodged Lenny, resulting in him flopping into the pool,
and as he paddled they both glared at the intruder, who stood motionless and
white-faced in his fancy inn-bought robe.
"Having fun on your fishing trip, Carmine?"
Laverne accused.