Page 126 of Husband Material
“Then everything is going to be fine.” Bridge put a comforting hand on my arm. “Love means never having to say ‘Oh my god, I’ve made a terrible mistake.’”
“Except that’s not true, is it? You can love someone and still royally fuck up.”
“Yes, but because you love each other, you come through it. And that’s what marriage is.”
I buried my face even farther into the crook of my elbow and made an embarrassing half-sobby noise. “Is it? Is it really?”
“Yes,” said Bridge with utter confidence.
“But how do youknow?” I asked. “What if it’s not? What if it’s, like, fighting all the time, or one of you walking out in three years, or something you can’t do at all because the law says your relationship doesn’t count, or constantly trying to keep up with your ex and his twink husband who is going to be way less cute when he gets older and then he’ll find out what a prick he’s married or—”
Bridge made a confused but gamely sympathetic noise. “Aren’t you overcomplicating this just a little?”
“Am I? How can I tell? I’ve never had to think about marriage before. When was Imeantto think about it? In the incredibly narrow window between it becoming a legal option and my boyfriend selling me out to a newspaper with a red top?”
“I supposeideally…” Bridge was shuffling uncomfortably, her coat drawn tight around her even though it was quite a mild spring evening. “Absolutelyideally, you’d have thought about it at least a little bit before you, you know, proposed?”
I looked up from where I’d been making an unconvincing go of pretending not to cry. “In case you haven’t noticed, Bridge, I’m not anideallysort of person. And now I’m stuck because I’m getting married tomorrow, and I don’t think I actually want to get married tomorrow. But if I don’t, then I’ve destroyed the only good relationship I’ve ever had and probably ever will have.”
“You must have wanted to get married, though?” Bridge had that hopeful-but-disoriented tone she always got when she butted up against ideas that didn’t quite fit her view of the world. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have asked him at all. This is just cold feet.”
“My feet aren’t the problem,” I told her. “The rest of me is. And I guess at the time I wasn’t thinking about the future. I just knew I wanted to be with Oliver and I wanted to show him that and I didn’t know how.”
Bridge was staring at me in a way I never wanted my best friend to stare at me. “What do you mean, you didn’t know how?” she asked. “You could have said, ‘I love you and want to be with you.’ Or…” Inspiration struck her. “Blow jobs. Men like blow jobs.”
“Sorry, are you saying my options were propose marriage or suck him off?”
“No,” said Bridge firmly. “The first thing I said you should do was tell him how you felt. And I think the fact that you blanked that option might mean something.”
“Oh God.” I grabbed at my hair. “I…I’m just not very good at expressing myself emotionally. It was right after Miles’s wedding and I was in a weird place and it’s really hard when you’ve been with someone a long time and it’s working really well but you’ve got no, like, way of showing or proving or—” I broke off. “And, anyway, he said yes. What kind of arsehole says yes to a proposal from a famously self-destructive person a couple of days after his ex-boyfriend’s wedding?”
“I don’t know,” said Bridge. “I suppose someone who loves you and supports you and wants to be with you no matter what.”
I gave another groan. The only thing that was stopping me from crying more was that I’d been sick enough that I was out of fluids. “I know. What a bastard.”
She was giving me strong stop-messing-about face. “This is serious, Luc. You’re talking about potentially blowing up a wonderful relationship with a wonderful man. Are you sure you don’t want to get married and aren’t just being, y’know,you?”
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.“I’m…I think I’m sure, Bridge. Like, we had this really nice evening at Quo Vadis—”
“Oh, your first-date restaurant,” cried Bridge, clasping her hands. “That’s so romantic.”
“Yes.” I found I was gripping the rail far too tightly, either for emphasis or security. “That was the problem. Itwasromantic. Itwas…” Well, actually it had been fraught at the beginning. But then it had been kind of perfect. “It was great. It was the best evening we’d had for ages. And I kept wishing we could just go back to that. Except that’s not how relationships work.”
There was an expression of deep sorrow in Bridge’s eyes, like I was falling into a sad cloud. It was the expression she’d always go to when she was trying not to let me know how badly I’d let her down. “No, Luc. It’s not.”
“I’ve fucked everything all the way up, haven’t I?”
Bridge was uncharacteristically silent.
“Bridge?” I asked.
“I’m thinking.”
“And?”
“I think,” she said slowly, “you might have fucked everything all the way up.”
If there was ever a time you didn’t want someone to agree with you, this had been it. “What do I do?”
