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

expected, given the strange atmosphere at the house, the fact that he didn’t really know anyone other than Lizzie. The fact that he and Effie had only really been together for, what was it, a month? She didn’t think of herself as schoolmarmish, but she was certainly not the type of person to go on holiday with someone after only four weeks. Then again, did this rather fraught trip still count as a holiday?

Gradually they’d been joined around the water by some of the others: Charlie, who had left Iso sleeping; Steve, recruiting for a game of cards that Bertie and Ben signed up for; Anna too, eventually, blinking the guilty day-sleep of a child-free woman out of her eyes with a self-conscious grin. Spirits, it seemed, had improved—although Lizzie remained behind her closed door.

On her way along the corridor to the bathroom, Effie had tapped on Lizzie’s door—once, then twice—and tried the handle. Still locked, but with sleep-heavy breathing audible behind it. She’d left her friend to nap unmolested. Effie would question her later about Bertie’s theory.

Dan. Quiet, unassuming Dan, with his gentle face and his gentle ways. Was he really the sort of man to turn up, uninvited, on a quest to get the girl? It all seemed so Byronesque, and Dan was…well, Dan was an accountant.

Then again, he hadn’t seemed the sort of guy to let the girl slip through his fingers either. He had been a devoted boyfriend, excelling at everything Guy had failed at: good at remembering birthdays, making himself useful, simply being present. Effie had been thinking that he and Lizzie should get back together—the relationship had been a great fit for them both. But Dan was only making himself look scary with all these grand—or were they angry?—gestures.

Effie shifted her weight in the milky water and bent her bony knees up, so that their knobbles pointed to the ceiling of the steamy room. Built to keep the sun out, the ancient building retained its cool from thick walls and small windows. However, the very same principles conspired to make a small Mediterranean bathroom in which someone had run an out-of-context British bath—deep and unflinchingly hot—a swirling steamy box of condensation. The thick, damp air rolled above her, and Effie let her sweat mingle with the water.

She rested her head against the edge of the bathtub, scrolling internally through the ever-lengthening list of self-improvements she would make as soon as she got home again.

No drinking, no carbs, no more drunk-smoking (not much), some yoga, less TV.

She remembered how she had sometimes felt trapped in someone else’s lifestyle when she was with James—not unpleasantly so, but with the inevitable decreasing of space one took up when there was always somebody to tell when you were going to be late, always somebody whose dinner might be delayed, who might wait up, who had asked you to pick up some milk on your way home.

Effie had tried to enjoy expanding again in the wake of his departure, but she’d all too quickly felt remote, like a helium balloon that slips a babyish hand and bobs farther and farther away into infinity. Sometimes she wondered when and how she would stop bobbing, saw her old life in retreat as though she were an astronaut blasting clear of Earth. All she was looking for—in those strangers’ arms, those backs she hadn’t recognized—was an anchor, although she knew enough about life and truisms and motivational quotes from the self-help books she couldn’t quite bring herself to make a start on to realize that she had to be her own. But then there was Ben.

He had proved a grounding force already; still, there was something she couldn’t quite put her finger on about him. Handsome, attentive, charming…but somehow not quite on her wavelength. Their humor clashed at times, or missed the mark entirely. The references she had shared with James had ranged vastly from politics to pop music; Ben, it seemed, didn’t have much to offer in the way of culture beyond the pop-economics books he liked. My God, she thought, listen to me reasoning myself out of a perfectly good relationship with a gorgeous man who genuinely seems to enjoy my company.

And yet, in the dripping tap, she heard: Don’t settle, don’t settle. She had gone along with so many of James’s whims; perhaps some time alone would show her that life was more comfortable when she wasn’t bending to fit someone else’s tastes.

Effie closed her eyes and listened beyond the tap, to the cicadas outside and the fitful hum of the bathroom fan above her head. She saw in her mind a bedroom and shivered away a memory of retrieving her belongings while a man whose face she didn’t recognize pretended to sleep on until she left. She had drifted too far that time.

And what of this time? What of two nights ago?

I’ve never felt like this about anybody before.

There had been a moment at the market that morning, while Iso was taking pictures of glistening seafood laid out on ice and buxom tomatoes cascading from wooden crates, when Effie had stolen silently up to Charlie’s side as he perused a trestle table full of cheeses. She wanted to ask him what was going on, but her voice failed her. “Are we okay?” sounded too much like they were a couple; “Are we good?” was something two passive-aggressive colleagues might exchange. Before she had been able to formulate anything satisfactory, Charlie had noticed her hovering.

“That one’s got his eye on you, Eff,” he’d drawled, pointing at a particularly baleful-looking fish, its sharp teeth bared in a downward grimace, before winking at her and strolling away toward Iso.

Since their strange, whispered interaction on the landing, Effie felt she and Charlie had orbited each other like vague acquaintances at a cocktail party, neither of whom could remember the other’s name. Embarrassed at each other’s existence because it served only to highlight their own failings, their own unreliable memories.

Effie took a deep,