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

41. Lizzie

I knew as soon as they’d heard the word what they were thinking. The one-night stand in Bangkok had become the stuff of folklore between the three of us—a puerile joke involving the city’s name meant the details had lodged in the memory well enough to raise red flags in both of their heads as soon as Ben answered the question.

I never told them the name of the man I had spent my layover with in Thailand. In fact, I actually quite regretted even furnishing my best friends with the scantest details when their first reaction had been to list the many safety precautions I’d thrown out of the window by climbing straight into bed with him.

He could have been a murderer!

He could have been a rapist!

He could have been…your future husband’s oldest friend?

Just kidding. Nobody saw that coming.

When I’d caught my plane home from Bangkok eighteen months ago, lovestruck after that night in Ben’s company, I’d felt more desolate over the loss of him than of the boyfriend of four years I’d left behind on the yacht.

I’d felt like mine and Ben’s future was waiting to start, for us to press Play. Instead, I’d clicked Stop and left. Waved goodbye to it as I had to him where he stood in the doorway of the hotel room we’d shared for a few hours only. He leaned on its frame, wrapped in a sheet, as I walked away down the corridor as slowly as I possibly could, turning every so often to get one last look at him. He’d stayed there smiling back until I was finally out of sight.

After I picked up my suitcase from that wretched hostel—resenting every minute of the journey there as ones I might have spent still entwined with him—I sobbed all the way to the airport as though I were bereaved.

My dreams on the plane were of him sailing along the sullen brown water of the Thames in Guy’s boat, straining from its prow as he tried to find me.

As the wheels touched down on the damp tarmac in London and the familiar gray rain began to spatter on the porthole windows, I switched my phone back on and it lit up immediately with a message. Messages. Ignoring the ones from my mum, I went straight to those from the newest number in my phone, the one I’d typed in there as he’d dictated it over cocktails in the sky. Had it really only been yesterday? Did we kiss goodbye only that morning? I didn’t even know his surname.

The flight had muddled me and shaken up my emotions like snow in a paperweight, but the sight of his name on the screen pulled me right back down to earth. I was several thousand miles away, but he was still thinking of me.

“Missing you already,” the first one said. “Are you home yet?”

We messaged each other for as long as it took me to collect my suitcase and get a cab home. By the time I unlocked the door to my shared house, I was even more besotted than I had been when the plane took off.

I booked a flight back to Bangkok in three months’ time to go and visit him again.

For three weeks afterward, Ben and I called each other, and we texted like gossipy schoolgirls—on and off but regularly. I gamified the time between each communication so as to draw out the exquisite rush of having replied or having received a reply, before the lull as I waited for the next. He told me he was coming home at the end of the year. I would simply wait; I had met my man.

I told Effie and Anna about him in abridged form. I didn’t want their cynicism to take the shine off the diamond that was mine only, to polish up with hope and longing. I knew that if I told the full story, the happy ending I was superstitiously hoping for would become make-believe.

Both of them—Anna an anxious new mother, Effie with her school rules, rape alarms, and Take Back the Night marches—high-fived me initially but then told me how dangerous it had been to go on a date with a man I’d never met in a city I didn’t know without telling anyone where I was—even though that is precisely what those apps have been designed to facilitate. “Promise us you won’t do it again,” they said over cocktails that night.

How right they were.

They tried to jolly me along and on to the next, set me up on blind dates with single men they knew peripherally. These were no longer the friends of friends they had been in our twenties but now, in our thirties, the friends of friends of friends, the relatives of colleagues, the in-laws of someone they had once worked with but hadn’t spoken to for a while. Such were the tenuous tangles I found myself sitting opposite and, let me tell you, those men weren’t rendered any more interesting or attractive by the contortions people I didn’t even know had gone through to get them in front of me.

It had been a long week at work and an even longer Friday night with some of the girls from the office when they encouraged me to set up a profile on another app. One less frisky that promised Sunday afternoons as well as Saturday nights. I gave in, I did it, figuring it couldn’t hurt just to have a look after all. Ben and I were still texting, still chatting at least once a week, but the frequency of contact—the urgency—had slowed.

Four days later, I met Dan in a bare-bricked, bare-bulbed wine bar of the sort people less jaded than me enjoy going to and taking selfies in, and I loved him right from the off.

He made the familiar seem cozy rather than mundane, showed me in his own quiet way that there didn’t need to be some breathtakingly dramatic backdrop, some out-of-the-ordinary