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

routine of mundane domesticity so quickly it had scared her. Effie had ended it before Christmas that term, determined to see something more of university life, and Charlie had become a friend instead.

In fact, Charlie had become a rogue—our rogue, the three women who knew him best called him, to differentiate him from other, less special lotharios and exonerate his comically clichéd treatment of the women he lured into his orbit, kept around for just long enough that they fell head over heels for him, then quickly tired of.

Anna and Lizzie had joked for a decade now that Effie had broken Charlie and turned him promiscuous with that early rejection, but Effie knew that he too had felt a jolt of unease at how immediately the two of them had become so middle-aged together. Then, that sort of banal intimacy had upset the natural order of things; now it was all Effie craved.

“I wonder what’s so special about this one,” Anna continued.

“The hotness, I imagine,” said Effie sarcastically.

“No wonder he was so keen to go on this holiday,” Steve said from the driver’s seat, glancing up at the mirror as he signaled. “He probably can’t wait to show her off to us.”

Anna laughed—once, and tersely, because she couldn’t remember Steve ever having shown her off to anybody. “Makes a change—he usually keeps them hidden, in case they get the wrong idea: meeting the friends means it’s serious, after all.”

“That’s true—Dan didn’t even introduce us to Ben until the engagement party,” Effie piped up from the backseat, her voice light but loaded. She met Anna’s brown eyes in the passenger seat’s visor mirror. Steve changed lanes, apparently unaware.

Ben was Dan’s best friend and erstwhile best man. He and the groom had been to some godforsaken authoritarian boarding school together, where they had formed the sort of brotherly bond that had been strengthened by cold showers and early morning army drills on frozen rugby pitches. Charlie had taken him off the email chain earlier that week: they hardly expected the best man to join them—Lizzie’s mates—on a holiday that had once been his best friend’s wedding.

And hadn’t he been worth the wait? Effie turned back to the window and warmed herself with a smile that she knew Anna couldn’t see in the mirror.

Effie had only met Ben a couple of times in the months after the engagement party, and had tried to be friendly—he’d be escorting her back down the lavender-bordered aisle after the ceremony, after all. They had gotten along fine at the party: the two of them had spent much of it with their heads either bent together or thrown back in laughter, chatting by the bar, while James had looked on sourly from the sidelines. But in the weeks afterward—after James had finished with her—Ben had been aloof, occasionally acerbic, and—frustratingly at the time, although Effie was prepared now to admit she had been at one of her many low ebbs—entirely uninterested in the face of her slightly desperate attempts to flirt with him.

It was several months later that Effie found herself sitting opposite the best man in a busy pub not far from the school she worked at—which, happily, took up most of her time these days. Ben had met her at the gates long after Effie’s beloved girls had filed out, ducklings in boater hats, and gone home. He was all plans and secret projects for a video he wanted to make and show during the speeches on the couple’s big day.

It was to tell the story of Lizzie and Dan’s relationship, a montage of their moments together, starting with how they’d met on a dating app and ending with messages from those who hadn’t been able to make it over to the Oratoire—once a medieval convent, now a lavish, Instagram-friendly rental property—for the ceremony. As he explained it to Effie, asking for her opinions, her ideas, how she might be able to quietly corral Lizzie’s network while he contacted Dan’s, she had seen the rather brusque man she’d come to expect thaw before her eyes, watched all his stuffy reserve evaporate under the heat of his boyish enthusiasm. They ended up having a rather lovely night in the pub, as they planned and plotted, drank pints, and swapped stories.

It had turned into a rather lovely morning as well.

Since then, Effie and Ben had seen a lot more of each other. The gaping wounds that her ex, James, had left—in her life, her future—were beginning to heal. She still felt sad, still caught herself staring for minutes at a time into the past as though it was a view from a window. But for the first time in months, Effie also felt optimistic. Loved, even. Though that word had not been uttered yet—it had only been a month.

But Ben was so open, so genuine, so keen to make plans and put things in the diary with her—plans she was only too glad to accept, after realizing those pages had gradually emptied without her noticing toward the end with James—that Effie wondered whether it might not be long before it was said.

It was in this spirit that they had decided to keep their relationship—or whatever it was; Effie felt superstitious about labeling it—under wraps until the wedding. Let’s not distract from Lizzie and Dan’s day, Effie and Ben had reasoned to each other one morning as the sun crept onto the pillow they shared, like a hand reaching in through the curtains. They would tell the others after the ceremony.

In the week since Lizzie’s email, Effie had seen less of Ben. They had both been busy mopping up their friends’ tears but, even in this, they had been thrown together.

Ben had offered to help cancel various deliveries; refund wedding favors and gift-list items; send back chairs, tables, and the like; have floral displays taken down and trellises dismantled; return the unlucky rings so they could be cast into Mount Doom and smelted down for the next unwitting fingers.