Noah

This enormous cathedral isn't anybody's idea of a Vegas wedding. Fucking hell. I'm being tested here, aren't I?

A second date isn't the time or the place to be somebody's wedding guest.

Tested?

I'm being hazed. Fucking hazed.

And I deserve every minute of it.

The only saving grace is that billionaire Lane Darnelle's staff has banned cameras. Not just from the wedding, but from the reception too. There's a security team searching everybody before they enter the venue, even the bride's mother. A good thing, too. She turns out to have two cell phones and an old-fashioned point-and-shoot digital camera circa 2005.

Naughty, naughty, Mrs. C.

I mean, shit, sure, I'm wearing a disguise, but at the security gate, I have to check my hat and wraparound sunglasses, not just my cell phone. There goes the disguise.

I'm supposed to be back in Los Angeles. Barbie is too. We're both in Vegas, although I have no fucking clue where she is other than that. “Need to know,” she says on the phone. “And you don't need to know.”

The yellow press has been informed that our vacation on the private island is going so swimmingly we somehow couldn't crawl out of bed long enough to make our plane. Somebody's leaked blurred photos of a distant couple dancing on a moonlit beach. If you squint and use a lot of imagination, you can convince yourself it's a telephoto shot of #NoahStrange.

The gossip tabloids are going nuts. Social media is spreading rumors as fast as they can be cooked up.

“You better get your pretty ass home soon,” Lydia says on the phone. “You and Barbie both, if you even know where she is.”

“Don't get up my ass. This is a publicity triumph, and you know it,” I say.

“You've done well.” She actually sounds impressed. “I freely admit it. But, at some point, you guys are going to have to climb out of bed and get back and make this movie.”

Another worry for another day. Today's worry is Lane Darnelle and Brecka Cunningham's fucking big-deal fat-ass wedding in some secret billionaire bunker way out in the boonies.

I was always a serious artist and never a wedding singer, not even when Kendall and I were first starting out with the band. Fuck me if I can remember the last time I attended a wedding. Maybe my Mom's fourth. It's a blur. Nothing in my history makes me eager to attend weddings.

A lot in my history makes me eager to avoid them.

So, yeah, it's a fucking test.

When Madison sent me a text telling me where to go and when to be there, I'm faced with two choices. Fuck off or face off. Show up, or lose my chance forever.

So, really no choice at all. I shove the cap down low over my hair, slap on the wraparound sunnies, and head for the fucking ceremony.

There's security for miles. Nobody's supposed to know it's Lane Darnelle's wedding, but everybody knows something big is up. Somebody's been spreading rumors about Army exercises out in the Nevada desert. Somebody else has been talking about high-level meetings between the president and various foreign leaders. Anything to explain all the helicopters and tanks. Truth is the fucking Secret Service itself doesn't provide this much security to the fucking President of the fucking United States.

And yet it's all done so tastefully, so tactfully. There's a valet who takes the cars a quarter-mile from the cathedral. There's a fleet of golf carts, each one with its own armed marshal in addition to its driver. Someone scans our identification, issues our wristbands, packs away our cell phones.

Thank God for the guy who packs away our cell phones.

I can just imagine the questions if Noah Hammond is Instagrammed at a big deal billionaire's wedding outside Vegas instead of on that snuggly private island where he's supposed to be boinking the stuffing out of bitter and brooding Barbie Strange.

Despite the venue, it isn't millions of people. Isn't one of those weddings cram packed with celebrities. It's family and friends, not business partners, and it doesn't seem to be about impressing anybody except the bride. The helicopters and Humvees are about keeping away trouble, not about escorting high maintenance celebrities to the ceremony. Interesting friends and family, I'll say that much. The bride's mother is widely rumored to be some kind of hustler, but she looks like the reincarnation of Princess Grace in her blue mother-of-the-bride sheath. A simple design that probably cost a cool twenty or thirty thousand dollars.

There's even a strand of pearls around her neck. Won't try to guess what those cost, but I have to assume they're real.

A single man, alone and awkward, I sit in the last pew. Who builds cathedrals this far out in the nowhere? Privacy seekers, rich ones, and I'm fucking glad for the privacy. No one seems to look at me, much less notice they've got a rock star in their midst.

Even fancy weddings don't take long, and this one seems to go by in a blur. We rise, we sit, we rise again. Madison, playing bridesmaid with three other girls in identical candy-pink dresses, is the only girl I really see. Probably they're all pretty, but I can't stop looking at her.

The blue streak is gone from her hair, which makes her look softer. Younger. Those pink cheeks, those pink lips. The swell of her perfect breasts. I don't remember them being so big. I'm not a boob guy, so maybe I don't fixate on that stuff, but now I do. Something about the deep valley of her cleavage speaks to me.

Want to bury my nose there and breathe. What perfume is she wearing? Will it tickle the back of my nostrils?

I see the tiniest of jerks in her walk when she notices me, but she doesn't turn and look at me directly. She keeps her focus on the situation at hand.

“You may kiss the bride,” says the priest.

And then we're all pushing outside to toss breadcrumbs to sparrows, the latest answer to throwing rice. I suspect rice doesn't really explode any birds, or there would be a lot of messy farms all over Asia, but I'm happy to pay lip service to the superstitions of my day. A pigeon girl releases a flock of white doves and they tumble in the sky overhead in formation. Trained birds, I see. They'll home in later, after we've moved on to the reception.

Wait. Where did she go? Where's my Maddy?

How did she disappear so silently?

I was only distracted by the birds for the briefest of moments, but it was long enough.

Deep breaths. The reception. We'll talk there. We'll have to.

The fleet of golf carts returns to take us the reception hall. I get a whole cart to myself. There aren't any other single men at a wedding. Of course not. I feel like asking the guys to take me back to my rental car so I can run, run, run.

This is a trap. I can feel steel claws closing around my neck. These people are too rich for my blood. My currency isn't money, it's fame, and fame seems like a poor substitute in the face of all this extravagance. Lane Darnelle would spend everything I own and more to pay for one fucking diamond.

Madison seems like such a sweet girl. The kind of girl who waits her turn in line and has a bouncer for a big brother. Not a high-powered girl who's friends with billionaires. How did I misjudge her so badly? She's so far beyond me it isn't even funny. I need to leave. I don't fucking belong here. Even Barbie Strange, earning twenty-five or thirty million a movie, is poor next to Lane and Brecka Darnelle.

These people are too high-powered for me. They're too, too much.

The pigeons tumble and return to their portable cart. The pigeon girl has treats for them. I watch her feed them something, but it doesn't really register.

Everybody else is talking and laughing and happy.

Yeah, I need to run so far, far away from all this. I'm nothing compared to these people.

And yet I can't run. I can't.

This place isn't just a cathedral complex. It's an entire artificial town here in the desert. I barely focus on the view while the driver yaps about how eventually the whole place will be completely covered with a transparent dome. The cost of air-conditioning would be in the stratosphere, and he takes a guess at what the cooling budget will be, and I don't care, I don't listen.

Finally, I reach the reception hall with its bars and its band and its fifty-thousand-dollar cake. The price of said cake is widely discussed on Wonderwall and TMZ, which I unavoidably have to check out for news of my own adventures with Barbie Strange. Some people evidently think it's cheap, only fifty thousand for a cake. A billionaire, they say, should be splashing out a little more.

Inviting more celebs. Doing a few more glamour shots of Breck and her gown.

Fuck me, isn't a twelve point two million dollar diamond and a four million dollar “small” wedding for family and friends enough of a splash?

The band is bigger than The Night Bell. A lot bigger. If asked in public, they always say they don't do weddings or private parties. I'd love to know what they're getting paid, but it's probably more classified than today's nuclear codes.

Champagne and cake. The bride's so young standing next to the groom, but they're laughing and happy and...

Impossibly rich.

No, I don't fucking belong here. No fucking any kind of way.

You think you're the star, you think you're the center of the universe, you think you're a big fucking deal, and then you find out.

There's always a bigger deal.

How the hell am I supposed to live up to this?

And then she's running, and then she's flinging herself into my arms, and I'm catching her and I'm lifting her up and I'm spinning her around, and we're laughing, laughing, laughing.

Her warmth feels so good in my arms. I squeeze and squeeze like I'll never let go. How did I let them take her away from me? My contracts and obligations suddenly don't seem so important.

Right now, she's everything in a silly pink bridesmaid dress.

“Noah, you came!”

“Of course, I came. I never wanted to be away. My fucking people...”

She looks serious. “You've got a lot of explaining to do.”

“I know. I was wrong. I let myself get pushed around. You know, I'm the talent...” I gesture in the direction of Lane Darnelle. “I'm not a guy who owns people. I'm an artist. I make the songs, and they tell me how to get them out where people will hear them and, well, fuck it. I fucked up. Plain and simple. I fucked up. I'm gonna stop with the excuses because it's all down to me in the end. I had the tour, but I could have invited you. I could've done a lot of things different.”

A slow dance has come on, a goopy number this band wouldn't usually play, but it's appropriate for a  wedding reception.

Romantic instead of goopy. Sweet as the sugar in the cake.

We're dancing, and she's a good dancer, with a natural sense of rhythm. Nice moves.

Her head rests on my shoulder. We dip and we sway, and I'm aware of the other people doing the same around us, but they're like the crowd blur of people in a film.