How to Ruin a Wedding(8)
“At work, aside from one other woman, I was surrounded by men. I’d never be invited to the weekly team dinners, instead tasked with projects that ran well into the nights my coworkers drank through. I studied my lovers like exams and picked up their hobbies and passions like my own, so we’d have more to discuss. I’d cook their favorite meals, remember their coffee orders, listen to their burdens, and try to ease them or resolve them, and they still left.”
A touch of embarrassment and a shred of worry lodges itself in my throat. It’s too much to admit to a perfect stranger, but it’s because he’s a stranger that this feels like getting the poison out of my body to allow it to heal.
“It’s hard to explain. It feels like I had this deposit of gold within me once, treasured and sought after, but someone has been in there carving out every remnant of it. Only flecks of it remain, it’s not even worth mining. Not so valuable anymore.”
At that, he reaches over and squeezes my hand, and it somehow feels like a hug around my heart.
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“Want to know the most humiliating thing I’m doing now to get by?” I ask.
“Tell me.”
I chew on my lip, just a brief moment of sense, trying to keep my mouth shut before the confession slips out. “Wedding wrecking.”
He frowns, scratches his ear before saying, “Sorry, I think I misheard.”
“I’m sure you didn’t.” I tap his arm. And when his eyes grow wide, I hold out my hand. “I’m not here to wreck Anna’s wedding!”
I can see the emotions ranging over his face as he tries to process what I said until he ultimately stalls at a mix of confusion and sympathy. “Okay,” he says, “how does someone even get into that . . . field?”
I snort at his attempt at being polite instead of questioning my sanity. “Accidentally?” I answer. “I mean, the entire job is made up. There is no frame of reference for me to follow. The idea was this cumulation of an alcohol-induced night, the luck of a loud, even drunker, groom-to-be begging his groomsmen to stop his impending wedding, and a projection of my own misery wishing someone had saved me from a doomed marriage, twice. And, of course, the cherry on top of the dirt-cake, it was the night I was fired from my job.”
“All right,” he interrupts me, curiosity currently winning his carousel of emotions, “you have to give more details than that. There’s a big jump from overhearing a groom having cold feet to straight-up wedding wrecking.”
I shove a couple of fries in my mouth before continuing. “The groom-to-be was begging for sympathy. His friends knew he liked men, knew the marriage was set up by his parents in denial, yet his buddies were encouraging him to go through with it. They said it was better to play into the facade than risk his parents disowning him—”
“Assholes.”
“I know, right? They kept saying he could date anyone he wanted, secretly. The groom-to-be—and me, when I stumbled physically and metaphorically into their conversation—thought it was unfair to the bride-to-be and whoever would have to live in secret with him.”
“He must have been happy for someone to take his side.”
“He was.” I go on, “Walter was his name, begged me to help him do something about it. Something that became more intriguing when he offered me all the money his parents sent him for a wedding present. I hadn’t seen that many zeros since one of my late-night, wine-fueled Zillow binges, where I scroll through houses I’ll never be able to afford.”
Anders’s chuckle brings a warmth to my chest that interrupts my train of thought before I continue.
“It was a sloppy mess. Crashing the rehearsal dinner, claiming I was in love with Walter and that we were running away together after a one-night stand. But at the end of the night, Walter said this way his family wouldn’t come after him for his sexuality, not for a while, and he planned to travel the world until he was ready to face everyone again.”
“Hearing it like this,” Anders says, downing one of the shots I didn’t even notice him order, “it makes you sound less like wrecking, more like helping.”
I’ve always viewed wedding wrecking as helping, as saving people. Either from an incompatible marriage or a pairing like Eliza’s, where cheating is involved. Preventing them from feeling this ache of loving someone who betrayed you in this final, unforgivable way. Where you recall all the small injustices over the course of your relationship, rereading every chapter between you, searching every transgression, trying to pinpoint exactly where it all went wrong. The swift fear of having all this love but losing the vessel to hold it, wondering where you’ll put it now—if you have the ability to do that at all.
Still, I point out, “I can’t help but notice a hidden but there.”
“But,” he goes on, “how do you decide to wreck a wedding? What if someone requests it, but they don’t have good intentions? And where do you even find them?”
I shake my head. “I only agree to help with wrecking the wedding when the pairing would be genuinely harmful to either party.” It was chaotic at first, but I had poured more and more energy into the idea until it ballooned into something that could stay up on its own.
“And my sister helps with the rest, making everything more streamlined,” I explain, ignoring the gnawing embarrassment of having to rely on someone whom I spent a year trying to teach to tie her own shoes. “She used to code for work and fun. So, when I came to her with the idea, she built me a website offering wedding-wrecking services. A portal for people to reach me, explain their situation, vet them, and even run marketing to anyone searching key terms like How to get someone to call off a wedding? Wedding ruining. Wedding Crasher. How can I leave my partner before my wedding? My son is marrying a gold digger; how do I convince him against it? And so on.