Free Dreaming in Technicolor by Laura Jensen Walker Page A

he’ll run when he sees me, and I’ll finally get my kiss . . .
    But the next minute my smile slipped a little.
    He forgot to say when he’s coming home.

    Two weeks later, Alex still hadn’t said.
    He e-mailed often, but mostly about work-related stuff, letting Gordon and me know he still needed to stay and help his Dad out with the business and entrusting us to keep the Bulletin running smoothly in his absence. Over time, his personal e-mails to me grew less and less personal and more and more brief. He was always having to rush off to a meeting or family event or something.
    But I understood. Or tried to. After all, Alex was a busy, important executive with a major newspaper empire to handle. He didn’t need selfish, neurotic me hanging on his every e-mail. Right?
    The trouble was, Lindsey was e-mailing me daily. Several times a day, in fact. And she was driving me crazy.
    To: Movielovr
From: LinsRog
    Hey maid of honor, what do you think would be better for the reception—a sit-down dinner or hors d’oeuvres?
    I’d give her my two cents:
    To: LinsRog
From: Movielovr
    Depends on how many people you’re planning to invite. Dinner can get pretty expensive per plate. So you’ve decided definitely on an evening wedding then?
    But by then she’d have moved on to something else.
    To: Movielovr
From: LinsRog
    I’m thinking of going with magnets with our name and wedding date on them and bubbles for the wedding favors. They have these cute little bubble containers in the shape of two hearts. What do you think?
    Before I’d even have a chance to respond to that, another e-mail would arrive:
    To: Movielovr
From: LinsRog
    Definitely going with the bubbles. But I saw the coolest favor on this celebrity wedding special recently—cookies with a picture of the bride and groom on the frosting for each guest! (That way you could bite Phil’s head off and not get in trouble.)
    I’d like to bite your head off.
    Bad maid of honor, bad, my best-friend self said.
    I can’t help it, my distressingly single, boyfriend-across-the-ocean self whined.
    If Lindsey didn’t e-mail, she’d call. About more wedding stuff. Often she’d call and e-mail the same day. Every conversation, every e-mail, every single word out of her mouth revolved around the wedding—which just served to highlight all the more dramatically how unengaged I was.
    But the day my best friend took the wedding cake was when she told me she’d be doing the traditional bouquet toss.
    I couldn’t believe it. Whenever we’d attended weddings together—and we’d attended a lot of them, usually of couples who’d met at Lone Rangers—she and I had always escaped to the ladies’ room when it came time for the ritual throwing of the bouquet. No way were we going to be a part of the pack of desperate, shoving single women all elbowing each other to participate in the passing of the floral bridal torch.
    Now Lindsey had bought into it! It made no sense. The only thing I could figure was that she’d had a wedding lobotomy. I’d done my best to share in all her bridal excitement, but after several weeks of nonstop wedding discussions, I was a little weddinged out.
    And tired of my job.
    And missing Alex.
    And envying Esther.
    And still not doing so great with quiet times . . . at any time of day.
    To be honest, January was not turning out to be my best month ever.
    But then something happened that drove even my own misery out of my mind.

[chapter five]
    Straight on ’til Morning
    i ’d stopped by Mom’s on my way home from work to show her a postcard Esther had sent me from Italy:
    Hey Phoebe,
    The Sistine Chapel is one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen. You can’t believe the colors! Glorious. Such reverence. Also saw the Pietà. Brought me to my arthritic knees. If man can create such glory, how can there not be a Creator who created man? I