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

They were good at being codependent, she and Steve; neither of them was too needy. Not like some couples, where the wife was always hectoring, the husband a frustrated sex pest.

No, their lives intertwined nicely, like two climbing plants growing around each other. Steve was the fragrant perennial, dependable and nice-looking. She was the one with thorns. And quite a thick trunk. Why was she so cross with him all the time when actually the person she was most angry with was herself?

Angry with her own anger, her own short fuse, her quick-to-temper lack of resilience at home with a toddler who didn’t want the food she had cooked, told her he loved Daddy the most, put his shoes on the wrong feet first to make her laugh but then to make her cry. Anna spent her days at work dry-eyed being bellowed at by some of the worst people in London; by night, she fought back tears and scraped mashed potato off an expensive polished concrete floor she had insisted on and then realized was utterly impractical in a home that also contained a child.

Anna had reached, on the landing, a large, deep-set window ledge that looked out over where the cars were parked outside. She jumped up onto the ledge and sat, her feet dangling in the dark. As she settled into the nook, she heard a crisp metallic scratching noise, felt something move on the stone beneath her right hand. A ring. Golden, like hers, but shinier and newer. Less tarnished.

Anna thought cringingly of the tone of voice she had used with Steve when they’d discovered the wedding all laid out. She remembered how she had instructed him to pack Sonny’s suitcase, as though he were a certified cretin, when actually he had a first-class degree in philosophy, just not from the university she, Effie, and Charlie had gone to. A cooler one, she grudgingly admitted.

She remembered trying to look through his phone in the dark for evidence that Celia had gone further than simply offering Sonny a lift to nursery school and that Steve had accepted. She laid her cheek against the cool stone wall of the window seat’s nook and cringed again.

That tone, the exasperation and suspicion, the latent scorn—these were the things that had made their own wedding rings sparkle a little less surely, taken the dazzle off how they saw each other now, snuffed out the mystique.

It wasn’t all her fault, though. He had nose hair now—soon there would be more there than on his head—and she could tell he quite often thought that she was silly and shrill, when really she was just worried about their son. The streetwise, jivey music journo words she’d thrilled to hear on his lips when they were young now had the ring of someone’s dad still trying to keep up. But Steve actually was someone’s dad! And he was by far the best-looking of the ones who also suffered to push the little waterproof bundles on the swings in the park near their home on Sunday mornings.

She thought of the way he had looked at her when he thought she’d tell them to put the wine and antipasti back where they’d found it, and the love that had then suffused onto his features when she hadn’t. This was the expression she wanted to recapture: adoration pure and simple. The thrill of surprising each other, as well as the delight in what they both already knew.

Anna twisted her own ring off her fourth finger, whimpering in pain as it seemed to pare skin and bone from around the knuckle. Anna had lost a lot of weight ahead of her and Steve’s wedding and then proceeded to pile it all back on—and more!—afterward. The ring Steve had shakily pushed onto her hand still correlated to those girlish fingers, and the throbbing, naked chipolata in front of her had a dent where it had sat and the flesh had started growing around the metal.

In its place, Anna pushed the new ring on—quite tight—and pocketed the old. She vowed to be kinder to Steve in the morning, when she was less thirsty.

Oh yes! Water!

Anna jumped back down from the ledge and continued along the landing, down the first set of stairs toward the kitchen.

If she hadn’t been quite so drunk, there was every chance she might have taken those steps and the next segment where the staircase crooked a turn two at a time to speed up what had now become an intolerably inefficient journey to refill her very small glass.

As it was, however, she was so aware of where she was putting her feet, of how cold and hard the stone stairs looked and how much she didn’t want any of them to collide with her head, that she took the descent gingerly and cautiously. Slowly.

Because of this, she edged her creaking joints timidly down the stairs and into the Hall. Anna’s eyes were now showing her a few shots of the scene all at once, as though she were trapped in the end of a kaleidoscope, but they caught a flicker of movement at the end of the terrace.

The outside was dark but illuminated by both the lightening sky and the several stocky candles they had lit in glass lanterns as they’d sat by the pool earlier, working their way through bottle after bottle.

Two figures were talking earnestly, his head bowed over hers, their bodies in a proximity only lovers would allow. Anna was struck dumb with surprise.

What was Ben doing over there with Lizzie?

All this time she had been worrying about an infidelity inside her head—Celia and her bloody messages—but the actual betrayal had been happening out here all along. In real life. In front of her own eyes, except she had been too dim to notice it.

She was suddenly filled with silent fury. Anna winced with a preemptive hurt for everyone involved; the fallout from this would not be pretty at all.

She went to dash her