Advertisement

From This Day: Life's an adventure for this couple

 
Denise “Dee” Rea and Justin Coté married Oct. 31 in a steampunk-themed wedding at the home of Coté’s parents in Lutz.
Denise “Dee” Rea and Justin Coté married Oct. 31 in a steampunk-themed wedding at the home of Coté’s parents in Lutz.
Published Dec. 5, 2014

PALM HARBOR — With only seven days to go before the wedding they'd been planning for two years, Denise "Dee" Rea and Justin Coté were both in a moment of crisis.

"My wedding dress arrived and it wasn't at all what I asked for," said Dee, 38, who is a post closing specialist at Nationwide Title Clearing. "The seams didn't match up and there was no gathering in the front. I just bawled my eyes out."

Similarly, Justin had spent years making glass chalices, table centerpieces and even helping his dad build a wooden structure in the Lutz back yard that would host the wedding, but he'd flubbed one little detail. "We were so focused on getting the wedding done that we didn't even think of a honeymoon until someone asked us," said Justin, 30, a document imaging manager at Nationwide Title Clearing. "We were flat broke after paying for everything else."

Fortunately, the couple hasn't met a problem they couldn't solve by throwing a little creativity and elbow grease at it.

Dee got out her scissors and got down on the floor of her Palm Harbor home, cutting and gathering with Justin's help and adding beaded lace until her wedding dress looked closer to what she'd dreamed.

Justin donned the Halloween costume he and a friend had conceived the year before — a giant, stilt-walking landstrider from the movie Dark Crystal — and went to the Freaker's Ball at Tampa's Skipper's Smokehouse, where he took the grand prize: a weekend stay at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, $200 to eat at Council Oak restaurant and $500.

"I was in Walmart buying more things for the dress when he called me and told me he'd won us a honeymoon," Dee said. "I was in the aisle celebrating, like, 'That's my baby.' "

With all that settled, Justin and Dee were married Halloween night in a steampunk-themed affair in his parents' back yard in Lutz in front of 75 guests.

"We never really had a date where we could say, 'This is when we started dating or went on our first date,' because we were friends first," Justin explained. "So we chose our anniversary: Halloween."

It was apropos, because Justin and Dee first met while working at Busch Gardens' Howl-O-Scream in 2005. Both were scare actors in the haunted houses; she played an insane attacking ghost called "the Driller" and he wore a bonnet and a diaper and jumped in a bounce house as a big baby. One day, while Dee was waiting to get on the tram from the employee lot to the park, Justin broke the ice with a joke, and she responded in kind.

Right away she noticed his tattoo of an angel and archangel dancing and asked him its meaning. "From that day forward, we were friends, and we even took our breaks at the same time."

It was friendship that would help them both through the most difficult time in their romantic lives. Justin and Dee were both married when they met, but Justin's marriage ended shortly afterward. Dee acted as a support even as her own marriage was crumbling. Nearly a year after becoming friends with Justin, Dee split from her husband, leaving her and her three children, Joshua Rea, now 22, Robert Rea, 18, and Nicole Williams, 14, living in a sketchy neighborhood on the outskirts of Ybor City.

"I didn't feel comfortable leaving them there by themselves, so I moved in to help pay rent," Justin said.

Still reeling from divorces, both were resolute about not wanting to be in relationships or marry again. Still, they found ways to creep into one another's lives. Dee, a history fan and horror buff, wrote a novel manuscript called Journey into the Night, but didn't have the courage to mail it off to a publisher.

"One day I came home and he said, 'You're going to be mad at me. I mailed off your book,' " Dee said. The publishing house gave her a seven-year contract and printed her novel.

Meanwhile, Dee and her children were endearing themselves to Justin's parents, George and Debbie Coté, becoming a part of the family even while they were just friends.

Then the light bulb went on for Justin on a trip to Daytona Beach, and he confessed even as Dee tried to dissuade him. "He said, 'I love you' and made a face like he was in pain," she said, giggling.

They were still firm on not getting married, even after they had their son, Aiden Coté, in 2008. Dee and Justin pressed on with their interesting lives, learning crafts and becoming fire spitters and veteran cast members in The Rocky Horror Picture Show live performances. Justin took up glassblowing, leatherwork, even metalwork.

In 2010, he decided he could be married again if it was Dee. So in 2012, after having her pick out a ring months earlier, Justin brought home a box of crepes as Dee worked on her homework for her degree from the University of South Florida. "He kept trying to get me to try crepes and I don't even like pancakes, so I took the crepe and went on this tirade about how they were just thin pancakes with stuff in them, and when I turned around he was down on one knee," she recalled.

The crepe fight was purposeful, Justin said, because he wanted another good story to go with their life full of good stories. How to afford a wedding with four children was a looming question, so they set the date two years out on their anniversary, Oct. 31, and committed to making all the decorations themselves. "We couldn't have done it without the kids' help," Dee said. They made centerpieces out of wine glasses and flowers, wall flower decorations out of faded paperbacks, antique steampunk guns out of painted water pistols and 100 handlebar moustaches for the guests out of construction paper and sticks.

On the big night, Joshua gave his mom away and the Cotés were married by their friend of five years, their company's chief information officer, Erika Lance.

"Because of this man, I have come out as more of myself. I was more reserved before," Dee said. "He's my rock and my hero."