The Bookish Bachelorette

This micro-fiction Copyright 2024, Brandi Kennedy, All Rights Reserved. For more about this piece, click here.

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Harper stood back, surveying the party setup with critically narrowed dark chocolate eyes. For the last six weeks of her life, she’d spent every spare moment crafting the décor now spread before her, from the book-page table runners, napkin rings, and centerpieces, to the book-cover placemats. Each place setting held a beautifully handmade bookmark, and each bookmark bore the name of a guest in shimmering, scripted print. Everything was perfect.

Except that it wasn’t.

Harper had never loved anything more than she loved books. Stories were the breath of her life, until the day she met the impossibly handsome, irrepressibly adventurous Jack Beckett. He was the only person she ever willingly skipped a good story for, the one thing that always drew a smile on her face when the long hours at the library ended and she clocked out for the day. She still loved books, still felt flooded with incredible peace as she sorted and shelved the volumes in the quiet of her work at the library—but now, her favorite story was the romance she was living day by day with Jack.

Her eyes filled with tears as she thought of him, and she blinked against the flood. “He said to have fun,” she murmured to herself. “Keep it together. You’ll see him later.”

She shook off her fears and went through the motions with her friends, trying to force herself through the party, but as she celebrated her upcoming marriage she wondered what other plot twists her love story would hold. She listened as her friends guessed the answers to trivia questions about her relationship and her future with Jack, giggled through a game of Bachelorette Bingo, and rolled her eyes as her friends offered a range of ridiculous honeymoon predictions.

“I think they’ll run with the bulls in Spain.”

“Nope. They’re swimming with sharks.”

“They’re taking a submarine to explore the Titanic.”

“I bet they go skydiving.”

By the time the party ended, Harper was exhausted, but she had to admit Jack was right; the party had temporarily taken her focus off the tragedy threatening the joy of their now-postponed wedding. Still, as she waved goodbye to the last of her friends, the lingering traces of her smile dissolved. She opened the closet door, sighed deeply as she slipped into her jacket, and snatched her overnight bag from the floor. Within moments, the house was dark, the doors were locked, and she was in the driver’s seat of her car, a book poking out of the overnight bag on the seat beside her.

She would need its solace; the characters living between its covers would keep her company as she waited for Jack’s shattered pelvis to heal from the fall that nearly ended everything. As she waited for him to walk again. Hopefully, those lives lived in beautiful prose and carefully crafted worlds would distract Harper from her own interrupted story—until the pages turned and Jack was ready to start a new chapter.