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. It was romantic. It was…” 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?”
She was silent again. And then, “I suppose you’ve got three options.”
“Okay?”
“Get married anyway?” she suggested.
My stomach sloshed in time with the waters below. And my hands got insta-sweaty. “Not wild about that. Next?”
“Leave Oliver at the altar.”
“Also not great.” My stomach continued to slosh and my hands continued to sweat. “Three had better be a doozy.”
“Um…hope really hard that the last few months have all been a dream.”
“I’m hoping,” I said. “Is it working?”
“I don’t know.” Bridge’s eyes got wide and confused. “I don’t feel like I’m in someone else’s dream. But how would I tell?”
“Is there a fourth option?” I asked desperately.
“I could try to think of one,” offered Bridge, ever supportive. “But since the dream plan was the best I could come up with, it might take a while and be worse.”
Oh God. I’d had something wonderful, and I’d ruined it like I always I did. “What if I just ran away?”
“That’s still leaving Oliver at the altar, only without having the guts to do it to his face.”
“Cool,” I said. “Let’s do that one.”
Bridge subjected me to her sternest stare. “I know you don’t mean that, Luc.”
“You’re right, you’re right.” I paused. “What if I fake my death?”
“Four months after his father’s funeral? Oliver might take that quite badly too.”
I turned my back to the river and sat on the ground, head tucked against my knees. “Fuck, the hope-it-was-all-a-dream plan is looking really shiny right now.”
Quietly, Bridge lowered herself down beside me. “Well, I could slap you if you like, but I think you might have to accept that this actually is reality.”
She was right. It sucked, but she was right. “So it’s be married when I don’t want to be married or tell the man I love, on our wedding day, that I don’t want to marry him.”
“Yes.”
“Fuck.”
“Yes.”
I looked up, and she looked back. Sometimes I thought Bridge’s capacity for compassion was endless, but maybe it just happened to be about the same as my capacity for bullshit. I suppose in many ways that was the same thing. “Leaving somebody at the altar is a pretty shitty thing to do, isn’t it?”
Bridge nodded.
“And probably…probably he’ll dump me?” That made my stomach move in a whole new and interesting way that I wished I hadn’t learned it could move.
“I don’t know. I–I think I would.” Her nose wrinkled. “I mean, if I was standing there with Tom in front of all our friends and the vicar said, ‘Do you take this woman? and Tom said, ‘No, but I’d still like to hang out,’ I might not respond well.”
I sighed. “Guess I really should have taken the blow-job option instead?”
“That would have been simpler.” She put an arm around me. “If this doesn’t seem like a silly question, why don’t you want to be married to Oliver?”
“I guess,” I began, although I wasn’t sure how I was going to continue. “I guess because…me and Oliver… It’s always been… We shouldn’t work.”