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

What—or who?

In the seat to Bertie’s left, Lizzie tried to conceal her hurt at that white, future-filled sanctum having been defiled. She gulped another mouthful of wine, and when she eventually spoke, her voice was low and sad. “Fuck’s sake, Eff. Did you have to?”

Effie glanced up from her shame just in time to see Ben’s eyes shift to her face from Lizzie’s.

“Okay, never mind!” Bertie cut in, and Effie was grateful to him for at least the third time that day. “The rings will definitely be around here somewhere, like Anna says.”

At the foot of the table, Charlie raised his eyes slowly and meaningfully, in that way that he had. The way that Lizzie, Anna, and Effie all remembered admiring during the brief window in which they had fancied him when their paths first crossed his at university. That window had closed after a matter of weeks—first when he had taken up with Effie—and then been sealed afterward, by which time they were more like sisters, and he had proceeded to parade a steady stream of more attractive women back and forth along the corridor they all shared.

The look had always suggested that he had something much more important to be getting on with. Charlie had done it over bars and books at them, across board games and birthday cakes, for as long as they had known him. In the olden days, it had been accompanied by a smoke ring, perhaps, or a wink, but this time it seemed uncharacteristically serious. One second passed, then two—then finally the right-hand corner of Charlie’s mouth ticked up as though attached to a puppeteer’s string.

He gave a wry half-laugh. “Well, I woke up in one of the back bedrooms all by myself. No memory of even going upstairs. Christ, I was obliterated.”

He returned his gaze to his plate, mopping at it with a hunk of baguette. Iso continued to look at him long after he had finished speaking.

“Just to say,” she began quietly, then cleared her throat. “Just to say, my clothes weren’t actually in the room with me and Steve.” The rest of the table looked at her, a perfectly symmetrical face floating in the dark among the glasses on the table, the flickering night-lights reflected in the dark pools of her eyes.

She’s so beautiful. Effie’s heart pinched for Anna, and she felt a dim nausea that was unconnected to the hangover she had gradually shrugged off over the course of the day.

“My stuff was all out here, on the table near the pool,” Iso continued. “I went for a swim—I know that was stupid of me, late at night and under the influence…”

Here she held both palms up. “I’d forgotten about it, but once I charged my phone this morning, I saw on the camera that I got Steve and Ben to take some pictures for me.”

Effie’s stomach slid to her feet. Of course Ben had been enlisted to take those photos: with his looks, he was far better suited to Iso than to Effie. She tried to smile brightly as he awkwardly attempted a neutral expression, but the home truth sank into her skin like butter on hot toast—even as his hand continued to lie warmly on her leg. Under the table, he began to trace circles on her thigh; despite herself, Effie felt the hairs on her neck stand on end in response.

“Pictures?” Anna squawked. “Of you naked?”

“No!” Iso replied quickly. “Well, yes, but not so you can see. Just me in the pool, nothing that would break the rules on Instagram, you know.”

“You can’t show nipples,” Charlie offered darkly.

“But they’re all really blurry because they were both so drunk. So I got out and Steve and I fell asleep on the sofas. Separate sofas. Nothing more.”

Steve looked hopefully at his wife, and she offered in return a cold contempt that was even more unsettling than her earlier anger.

“Well,” Bertie said, and then: “Well. You’re all still recovering. Not feeling quite—”

“Average to low, is what I’m feeling,” Lizzie interrupted him. “So, on that note, I’m going up to bed.”

As she pushed back her chair and carried her plate inside, Effie wondered whether she should go after her friend, to apologize for sleeping in that misused, petal-strewn four-poster. But what would she say to Lizzie’s inevitable line of questioning? She still didn’t know the answers herself.

Effie also considered chasing after her to apologize for bringing her ex-fiancé’s best friend on a holiday that was supposed to be about moving on. She had noticed the two of them, Lizzie and Ben, orbiting each other as though they were repellent ends of magnets: never quite coming together, politely avoiding any interactions beyond the most phatic, staying carefully out of the way or folding themselves closed should they have to pass one another. Effie felt suddenly slightly ashamed at the prospect of sharing her room with Ben that night.

Later, with the dishes washed and the kitchen wiped down, the group began to disperse for the night as the moon rose, large, white, and looming over the ancient building and the valley below. The terrace looked as cold and hard in silver by night as it did warm and golden under daytime’s touch.

As Effie crossed the Hall and climbed the stairs to bed, she was overwhelmed by the weariness she had thus far staved off. This natural tiredness had eluded her for as long as she had been determined to turn in to bed half-cut and booze-wired, and she reveled in the warm heaviness that had been earned as surely as the hangover it was replacing, rather than induced by a gulp of pills.

Earlier in the day, Effie had selected a more suitable room for the rest of her stay, one toward the back of the house that was furnished with two twin beds, given that the double rooms were all taken. The one Charlie must have slept in last night. She hoped furiously that he had been telling the truth, but the