Bridget’s friends were relying on me for a cosmo top-up, but right then my maid-of-honour duties seemed less important than my get-
the-hell-out-of-there duties. The bar was too loud and too hot, and I needed some air. So I tucked my phone into my jeans and slunk off to sit outside and do some good old-fashioned feeling sorry for myself.
Except, as it turned out, even that was easier said than done because we were in fucking London, so sitting outside would have meant plonking my arse down on a pavement that approximately twenty-seven million people were trying to walk along at the same time, all desperately hurrying from wherever they had been to wherever they were going and not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to someone getting in their way.
Not being quite self-loathing enough to let a whole city trample over me, I went to look for somewhere I could sit down and, because of the previously mentioned London issue, failed to find anywhere that wasn’t already occupied and wound up wandering into a badly lit park that, in a better state of mind, I’d have avoided for fear of being murdered and/or arrested.
And that was the point when I realised that my best friend had made me maid of honour for the wedding she’d been dreaming about since she was five, and I’d just bailed on her non-gender-specific bird do.
Fuck.
Fuckity, fuckity, fuck.
In a way it was comforting. People always worry that being in a relationship will change them, so it was good to know that being with Oliver hadn’t completely destroyed my ability to be a shitty friend.
And a shitty boyfriend. And an all-around shitty person.
Fuck.
At last I found an empty bench and collapsed onto it like a sack of deeply shitty potatoes—the kind that have been left in the kitchen too long and are getting weird knobbly things growing out of them.
Because that was me, wasn’t it? I was a knobbly-sprouting potato of a person. I’d been given the perfectly simple job of getting a bunch of people who liked each other to have a nice time in a bar full of fruity drinks and penis nibbles, and I’d managed to fuck even that up.
I checked my phone again.
Where are you?
Fuck. I’d fucked that up too.
WHERE RU ??!!?? RUOK???!
That wasn’t Oliver, that was Bridge. Which meant she’d noticed I was gone. Which meant I was making her special night—well, I suppose her actual special night was the wedding night, but her slightly less special night—all about me.
I pulled off my crocheted vulva hat and stared at it, and it stared back accusingly like a sexual Eye of Sauron.
Fuck.
I was the worst maid of honour ever.
Fuck.
I was a bad friend and a bad boyfriend, and the reason people kept screwing me over and abandoning me was because I sucked and deserved it.
Fuck.
“Is this seat taken?”
Turning around, I saw Oliver standing behind me. He looked a funny mix of composed and dishevelled, his tie loose around his neck and his formal shirt unbuttoned to reveal his Bridge’s Bitches No Oliver I Think It’s Fine We’re Using It in the Reclaimed Sense and Anyway It’s Too Late to Change T-shirt beneath. He looked more worried than angry.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“Bridget said that you’d disappeared, so I asked around to see if anybody had seen a tall man with a vagina on his head running away from a cocktail bar.”
“Vulva,” I said.
“Pardon?”
“The vagina is internal—the external part is the vulva.”
Oliver gave me his warmest, reassuringest smile. “Either way it was a distinctive enough look that you weren’t hard to find.” He came around the bench, sat down next to me, and put his arm around my shoulders. I leaned in to him without even thinking about it. “Bridget told me she saw Miles. She thought that might have been why you left.”
I nodded. “They were playing my dad’s song too.”
Oliver gave me a little squeeze. “That sounds like quite the perfect storm. I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
“So was I. Fuck, sorry, I mean… I mean it would have been great if you were there. I don’t mean… I know you had to work.”
“I know what you mean.”
“It just would have been great to be able to say ‘Hi, Miles, fuck you, my life is great.’”
Oliver gave a sort of half laugh. “You could still have said it.”
“Yeah, but I’d have had no proof.”
“You’re proof.”
One of these days I was going to stop being surprised when Oliver said exactly the right thing. But this wasn’t the day. “For fuck’s sake, Oliver. Stop being so…so…completely great.”