The Wedding Night by Harriet Walker (story reading txt) 📕

She proposed the toast to herself and her future privately, silently, and drank deep, the warmth on her skin replicated in her throat, her stomach, her heart as the champagne worked its magic.

10. Lizzie

My friends never even knew anything was wrong.

That wasn’t exactly new. Effie and I had kept what happened at university from Anna for years—were still keeping it from her. Not because I thought she would have done any differently or told me and Effie not to do it, but because I couldn’t bear her judging me for it. The sense of fairness that runs through her like words in a stick of rock wouldn’t have been able to simply tell me that it was okay, that I’d only done what I’d needed to, and that Effie had, too. And unfortunately, that was all I was capable of hearing back then.

Anna had studied Law—a big, solid hulking course that spread across her daylight hours like the giant tomes she so often had cascading over the desk in her student room—while Effie and I had done English, an altogether more ethereal sort of studying that also involved lots of books but focused more on the abstract discussion of them. Over coffee, perhaps, or cake. Discussions we had in cafés, on the sofas in our shared set of rooms with cigarettes nipped between our fingers. On the green banks of the river where the columns of our college mirrored dapples of sunshine on the water. Discussions that often weren’t really about the books at all in the end but about music, clothes, films, boys.

To put it bluntly, Anna had to go to lectures, and we didn’t. She had to get up early every morning, and we didn’t.

By the time we met up with her again for dinner every night, Effie and I would have had a whole day together. Sometimes we’d go shopping, others we’d drink cocktails—lurid pink ones that were in fashion at the time because well-dressed New Yorkers ordered them on TV. That’s why Anna never knew about what happened: because it took root late at night and unfurled during the day. By the time it had run its course, we were all sitting our finals and there was no point dwelling on it anymore.

After the engagement party—oh God, the engagement party—I knew I must have been behaving strangely, because Effie—whose near-constant battle with hungover anxiety had become something of a joke since we’d all turned thirty—asked whether she’d said something that had hurt my feelings. I assured her: no, nothing to worry about. Even if she had, I wouldn’t have had the spare emotion to be upset by it.

Anna looked at me as though I was letting the side down, egging me on to bitch about a wedding I was organizing as if I wanted it, even though I knew life would never be the same if it went ahead. I couldn’t: if I started talking as though anything was less than perfect behind the facade, I didn’t know what else might come out.

I had originally thought the wedding would fix the problem, return him to the man he’d been before; but in the run-up the threats got worse. The cruelty, the panic, the mental torture. The constant worry on the horizon. It was with me always, even when he wasn’t. I realized that it always would be unless I did something about it.

That was when I stopped obeying him.

He didn’t like that, me being free, making my own decisions. What he had—those pictures—no longer had the heft they might once have done. They lost their value, some of it at least. They could still wound, but they weren’t terminal.

Until he told me what else he had done.

By that point I felt so dirty, so soiled by them and by him, that I didn’t have much left to lose. So I canceled the wedding.

I gave it all away. The love, the trappings of it. The Big Day and the lifelong company. In exchange for my freedom. The liberty to live again. An exoneration from the worry-load of guilt I felt at having let it all happen to me. To us.

It wasn’t until I saw that room, dressed and readied for the day I had convinced myself I no longer wanted, that I realized: I’d made yet another mistake.

Stupid Lizzie, caught off guard. Again. As if that wasn’t the reason it had all kicked off in the first place.

I’d been blind time and again. Of course he wasn’t going to let me go that easily.

The Morning After

11. Effie

A noise that might have come from her, but she wasn’t sure. Then consciousness. But no air.

Effie’s mind raced as she fought to catch her breath. Something clamped over her mouth let neither life in nor protest out, but allowed only an impotent sucking against the seal that was preventing her lungs from filling.

As her oxygen-starved semiconsciousness cast around in confusion, she dragged her eyelids open to a pure and bright white light so intense it was more feeling than sight.

I must be dead.

So why am I still in such pain?

Effie wiped her face with a heavy, sleep-numbed hand and peeled from her cheek warm flakes of skin that tore off in great layers and then clung to the ends of her fingers. One further clumsy swipe and cool air rushed into her open mouth and dry, desperate throat in a gasp that sounded like a horror movie corpse being reanimated. She was not dead; every fuzzy and frayed nerve ending spoke of how alive she was.

Alive—and in a state of terrible, terrible suffering.

There was more skin peeling from her bare arms and legs, flaking off and bubbling as if from giant sores.

What the—

Effie shook the bridal suite rose petals from her hands and brushed them off her chest, her cheeks. The one that had stoppered her mouth as