For fuck’s sake, I was getting married. I was getting married to an amazing man I was in love with. As was my hard-won legal right.
And, yes, Mum had tried to do that thing that mums do when you’re picked last in sports where they tell you not everyone has to be good at everything. But this was my relationship, not a game of rounders. I couldn’t just shrug and say, “Well, when am I ever going to need that in real life anyway.”
No. This was fucking my wedding. I’d planned it, I deserved it, and I was damn well going to have it.
PICKING A BEST MAN WAS a complicated business. Because you didn’t want to be gender normative, but if you got too role-reversey you ended up with something that was gender normative in the other direction. For Oliver, it had been simple. Well, simple-ish because he’d asked Christopher. Which had been obvious in one way （because apparently asking your brother was traditional） but really difficult in another （because post-funeral Oliver and Christopher had only just settled into a place where it was even a reasonable thing to ask）。 But they’d pushed through it and were now slowly building the kind of relationship where they could actually like each other.
I didn’t have the same options. I just had a bunch of friends, all of whom were, in their own special ways, utterly unsuitable. Tom was an ex and technically Bridge’s friend rather than mine, both of which made it weird. The James Royce-Royces came as a unit, and it would have felt unfair to ask one but not the other. I refused to ask any of my coworkers, so that left Bridge and Priya. And Bridge should have been my go-to choice because she’d made me her maid of honour and I was owed some freaking payback. Only something about Bridge didn’t scream best man to me.
She was my best friend, but when I thought of a best man, I thought of someone who I’d gone on the pull with in a disastrous attempt to get over a failed relationship. Or drunk absinthe with at three in the morning. Or ranted to about how awful it was that all our friends were pairing off like a bunch of squares while we were young, free, single, and totally miserable. And that…that was definitely Priya.
Besides, when I called Bridge to break the good or bad news, she’d been in the middle of a major work crisis because the acclaimed author of I’m Out of the Office at the Moment. Please Forward Any Translation Work to My Personal Email Address had vanished overnight somewhere in the vicinity of the ?ngelholm UFO-Memorial, leaving only thirty-eight manuscript pages, a cassette recording of Philip Glass’s Akhenaten, and a note saying To the Fairest.
So, yeah, Priya had stepped up. Or at least not told me to fuck off. And was doing a really good job. For a start, she’d totally ignored me when I said I wanted a small, low-key non-gender-specific animal party and instead threw me a massive rager at a friend’s gallery.
She’d even got me a rainbow balloon arch, although she did tell me we were going to shoot it with BB guns at the end of the evening because—and I quote—“I love you and respect your choices, but balloon arches are twee as fuck.”
Whatever. It was my twee-as-fuck balloon arch, and I was going to stand under it for as long as possible. Or at least for a couple of minutes because, it turned out, standing under a balloon arch by yourself wasn’t as much fun as I thought it was going to be.
Everything else, however, was kind of amazing. Which shouldn’t have been surprising on account of how Priya was also kind of amazing—not that I’d ever tell her to her face, in case she thought I liked her or something. The gallery was one of those old Victorian warehouses that had been repurposed just enough to be usable but not so much that it didn’t feel like the owner was elbowing you in the ribs every five minutes, saying Hey, look at that exposed brickwork and those authentic window fittings. Aren’t they funky and incongruous. It was currently exhibiting a bunch of queer artists who did the type of work that I really liked knowing existed, because it made me feel part of an important cultural thing, but didn’t particularly understand because, at the end of the day, queer art was still art. And I was still a total pleb.
Along with the art, there were also drinks, music, lights, and a whole lot of people, approximately half of whom I knew, and the other half Priya knew and had brought along to make me feel cooler than I was. And actually, it was working. I was incredibly cool. I was the sort of person who got to have a super-queer, super-modern non-gender-specific animal party full of exciting people in an exciting venue organised by my exciting lesbian best man. This was, without a doubt, the best part of getting married so far. And the man I was getting married to would have hated it. Well, to be fair, he might have liked the art bit.