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crossbowdaddy69 · 1 day ago

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I would love to see Cherry telling her parents about her and Joel getting married

pairing: joel miller x former f!sex worker!reader

wc: 2.4k.

part of the cherry verse - cherry masterlist

warnings: age gap (30s/60s), anxiety, bad relationship with a parent, disappointment, self deprecation

a/n: oh how I missed cherry. other (smuttier) cherry fics/drabbles are in the drafts but I hope you enjoy this for now <3

The ring feels heavy on your hand.

You twist the metal around your finger as you sit in your car in your parents’ driveway, the engine popping as it cools, heat blooming in poisonous flowers around you.

The stone winks in the sun, draws your eye down to the anxious thread of your hands. You wonder if you should take it off, if it might make things easier.

But you haven’t taken it off since Joel kneeled down and slid it into place on your hand. You don’t want to take it off, maybe ever.

And, it's the reason you’re here, sweating in your car in your parents’ driveway where you stopped on your way home from work. When you asked Joel how you should handle it, if you should bother to tell them at all, he’d suggested it might be a fruitless effort, but he’d never tell you not to.

You suck in a lungful of warm air and finally open the door. You can be brave; you can hope for better from the people who raised you, it’s not wrong, it’s not expecting too much.

Dry grass crunches beneath your feet as you cross the yard, wavering, simmering heat sitting thickly in the air. The porch steps creak and whine beneath your feet and your mother appears at the screen door before you’ve even made it to the top step, bright evening sun making her squint.

“Hey,” she greets. “What’re you doing all the way out here? Your dad isn’t here.”

She hugs you and it feels like a vice. “It’s on my way home from work,” you say, already feeling defensive and on edge.

She doesn’t invite you in but gestures to the familiar chairs of many summertime childhood evenings on the porch.

The cushions are weathered but clean, like the rest of the place. She sits next to you and lights a cigarette from the pack on the little side table between you.

“Sure.” She answers, blowing smoke toward the ceiling as she glances over at you. “But you never visit. Must be somethin’ you want or need.”

“Mama, I—”

The words jam in your throat. You haven’t called her that in years.

Why is it so hard to ask your mother to come to your wedding? Why is it so hard to just tell her Joel proposed? That the love of your life wants to marry you? It should be a terribly happy moment, but all you feel is dread in anticipation of her reaction.

“I’m getting married,” you say and smile, willing her face to mirror your own, for her to gasp and reach out to take your hand when you extend it.

But her eyes feather down to the ring and her expression doesn’t change. It’s beautiful and expensive and you in a way you never thought possible. You never thought that kind of money would exist in your life, even tangentially, though you have more than enough of your own now. Certainly you never thought anyone would ever know you well enough to pick out a perfect ring, to offer it to you.

You have hope, for one wonderful moment, that your mother is looking down at the engagement ring on your finger and seeing that too, that happiness for her daughter will manifest at any moment.

“To who?”

The hope flees, scattered like birds startled out of a tree. “Joel,” you answer and drop your hand to your lap, disappointed and then angry, a white hot flash that makes you sit up straighter. “You know to who. We’ve been together for—Who else would I be engaged to?”

She shrugs and eyes your hand but doesn’t hold out her own, doesn’t try to look closer, doesn’t say anything.

“I want you to come to the wedding.”

“Why?”

“Becuase you’re my mother,” you say, feeling childish and small. “You’re my mom.”

She sits forward then, and lies her hand on your knee. “Don’t go taking this the wrong way—”

“Mom—”

“But I don’t see any point in going to a wedding where the marriage ain’t gonna last.”

Your breath feels caught, a stumbling block in your throat. You feel like a child again, lost and reaching in the dark, seeking approval that you will never gain, no matter what you do.

Though you haven’t lived with her since you were eighteen, the weight of her dismissal crushes you.

“You need money? Is that why you’re going through with it?”

You blink. “What? No. I—”

“I’d at least make sure you get some money out of it,” she says over your protest.

“I don’t need his money,” you burst out. “I made something of myself. And I love him. That’s what—That’s why.”

She nods, placating. “Okay.”

“I’ve been with him for ten years,” you continue fruitlessly, searching for a reason that will be good enough for her. “If this doesn’t last, nothing will.”

She drops your hand and scoffs. “Took him ten years to propose, you mean,” she mutters. “You can do better. He’s older than I am. Besides, marriage changes men. He won’t want you anymore.”

It stings more than it should.

“No, mom, listen, he loves me.” You feel stupid saying it, like its a lie he spun and you’re desperately parroting. “He treats me well. He takes care of me. Shouldn’t that be all that matters?” The anger unspools in your voice, catches around your canines.

“It isn’t everything.”

“Then what is?” You press, like digging fingers into a bloody wound. Some part of you will always want approval from her that will never come. You feel like a child at the feet of an uncaring, perpetually unimpressed god. “What would be good enough? What more could I want? What more could you want for me?” You don’t just mean Joel, and you think she knows that, too.

Again, she shrugs. “Sounds like you’re convinced.”

Something inside you fractures just a little. “Is he not good enough, or is it me?”

She huffs. “Jesus, you’re dramatic.”

“What is it?” You push again, anger like red hot coals stinging in your lungs. It feels hard to breathe. “Your only child is getting married and you don’t want to—”

“I just thought you’d turn out different.” She says, casually, blowing smoke at the ceiling. “But you always had to do things the hard way.”

A once familiar ache slips into the back of your throat. “What is that supposed to mean?” Your voice is small and cracks.

She scoffs. “You always thought you was better than this,” she gestures broadly at the house and the yard that you still love, would visit, if not for the venom you know lurks beneath the surface, in your mother’s voice and eyes. “But don’t think I don’t know how you ended up with him. And you’ll always be that to him.”

That shocks you into silence. “That’s what I mean, sweetheart. It won’t last because it isn’t real. He gave you a ring to shut you up, but he’s never gonna see you as a wife.” Her eyes flick over you. “Not with the way you started up with him. You’ll see what I mean.”

She lifts her brows and settles back in her chair, taking another long drag from her cigarette, content in her surety, her survey, her sage reckoning. “It’s not that I don’t like him,” she says. “But he’s still a man.”

You let the words linger in the air, breathe in the soft scent of summer thick on the air, smoke and bluebells and old wood. Your heart feels tangled in your vocal chords, both aching and raw from strain. “Okay,” you say and stand, brushing the back of your legs. “I should go. I’ll call Dad later, since he’s not here.”

“Leavin’ already?”

You bite your lip to stop yourself from screaming, the pain anchors you inside your skin. “Yeah.”

“I have lemonade.”

“I have to get home. Joel’s probably worried.”

She stands and follows you to the edge of the porch. You’re halfway across the yard, taking deep, even breaths, touching the pads of your thumbs to each finger in a loop to keep yourself rooted inside your body when she calls out.

“It’s a pretty ring.”

You turn. She’s leaning against the railing, staring down into her azaleas that rim the porch. “It is.”

She nods and waves a hand at you. “Go on. I’ll tell your dad to call when he gets home.”

You yank open the door and slide into the driver’s seat. At first, you think you might be okay, that her last moment acknowledgement of your ring and the promise to tell your father might be enough, but then the disappointment that you will never be enough for the person who birthed you settles in your stomach like a lead weight and the tears churning behind your eyes make it impossible to see the road.

You pull over in a cloud of dust and spewed gravel on the side of a forgotten dirt lane, the front tires half landed in the thicket of weeds that fan between swaying oaks.

Joel answers your call on the first ring, his voice soft, your name like cotton candy on his tongue. You can tell he’s worried by the cut of his voice, because you aren’t home on time and you hadn’t told him you’d be late. “Hey, Cher. Stuck in traffic or somethin’?”

“No.” Your voice is fluttery and razed with long put away anxiety.

“You safe?”

“Yes.”

His tone evens. “What’s wrong, darlin’? Where are you?”

“It’s stupid.”

He grunts as he stands, and you hear the click of a cup being set down. “Well, I can guarantee it ain’t that.”

It gets you to laugh, just a little. “Joel.”

“Tell me, Cherry.”

“I told my mom,” you sniffle, picking at a loose thread on your seat. “About the engagement. She said there’s no point in her coming to the wedding.” You mean to leave it at that, but the rest spills out, too, unbidden, unwanted. “She said she knows how we got together and that you’ll leave me. She said she thought I would turn out better. But she said the ring is pretty. That’s enough, isn’t it?” You scoff, a sob caught in your throat. “Right?”

Keys jangle on the other end of the line. “Where are you?”

“Joel, don’t,” you murmur softly. “I’m okay—”

“You ain’t drivin’ home like that.”

“I’m not driving.”

“Funny. Where are you?”

“You don’t have to,” you say softly, despite wanting him to, despite feeling better already with the knowledge that he would always find you.

“Uh-huh,” he grunts as a car door slams shut and the engine turns over, “Where are you?”

“Just down the road from my parents’ place.”

“Stay put.”

“Don’t hang up.”

Twenty minutes later, you’re yanking the passenger side door open before his truck has even rolled to a stop. There are no words for a long moment, just the comforting push of his arms around your body when you scoot across the bench seat, the scent of wood shavings and leather and the ghost of your perfume on his collar from the kiss you’d pressed there that morning. The memory of his skin against yours in bed, the warmth of his arms around you, is enough to ground you, remind you of what the truth is.

Warm summer air drifts through the cracked windows, the cab relatively cool in the shade of the hulking oaks on the side of the deserted road. He doesn’t cut the engine and an old country song unspools slowly from the radio.

He strokes your spine slowly. “You okay?”

You pull back to meet his eyes, look into his familiar face, a little more lined, a little more gray, than when you first met, still Joel, with affection and love and the tracery of worry.

“Why do I still care? Why am I still waiting for her to be proud of me? Or happy for me? I’m in my fucking thirties and I’m still waiting like a kid.”

He shakes his head. “Just the way of things, I reckon. It never goes away.”

“Maybe I didn’t do everything right,” you say, hating doubt that creeps into your voice. “But I’m smart and capable, and I have a PhD and a good job and you. Why isn’t any of that good enough? Why can’t she be happy for me?”

Joel rubs the inside of your wrist, slides his palm from your hand to your elbow and back again, and shakes his head. “It ain’t you. It’s her. You did what you had to.”

The words are a balm, an ache dunked in ice. He reaches around you and holds out a bottle of coke. Not cherry, not this time, because the pair of you are behind on grocery shopping. You and your fiance, who knows you and loves you and is proud of you and doesn’t think the things your mother does. “I know. You didn’t have to come.”

“I’ll always come.” He stokes your cheek. “Didn’t answer me, Cher. You okay?”

“I’m okay. Are you going to divorce me?”

He chuckles, brows jumping up his forehead. “We ain’t married yet.”

“Are you?”

“No.” His thumb passes beneath your eye and you latch your fingers around his wrist. Joel shifts and twists his things through yours, palm to palm. “Not in this lifetime.”

“Maybe the next one, though?”

The corner of his mouth twitches. “Well, maybe just to shake things up.”

“Ugh,” you push his chest and are rewarded with deep laughter against your palm. “I’ll divorce you before you have the chance.”

He pulls you back into his chest, the bottle of coke wedged between you, digging into your ribs. “Don’t doubt it, Cher.”

“Will you be able to see me as a wife?”

His hand pauses midway down your back. “Think I got that covered already. How else am I supposed to see you?”

“I think my mom was on about a Madonna-whore complex.”

“Jesus,” he shakes his head. “Nothin’ is gonna change. I got you.”

But of course; it's as simple as that for him. You’re already everything you can be to him, better sometimes than you really are, in his eyes. “I love you,” you murmur against his throat. “Have I ever said?”

“Everyday.”

The radio’s staticked tune continues, the warmth of a fading sun wraps you up tightly, and Joel murmurs the words back to you, fingers fidgeting with the ring only he could slide into place. When you climb into his lap and kiss him, hand against the back of his neck, feathering through his hair, he laughs and tilts up to meet you, determined to show you as you are him.

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