Husband Material (London Calling #2)(36)

She paused for about half a second. “Now. Vows.”

They’d written their own, of course, and they were terribly sweet and terribly sincere and—this probably makes me a horrible human being—I forgot them the moment I heard them. Then again, they weren’t supposed to be meaningful to me; they were supposed to be meaningful to Tom and Bridge. Oliver arrived about halfway through, got stuck in the entrance with the bridal party because of the mega-train and, being a far better person than me, took the whole situation impeccably and even seemed to find the vows genuinely moving.

After the vows came the rings, ably presented by Tom’s best-man-slash-brother Mike who, unlike the rest of the male guests, had chosen to rock a rose-gold suit and was kind of putting the rest of us to shame.

“And so,” concluded Judy, “by the power vested in me by absolutely no bugger, I declare you a legally nonbinding man and wife. You may kiss the bride if you want to be disgustingly American about the whole thing.”

To nobody’s surprise they did, in fact, want to be disgustingly American about the whole thing. I glanced sideways and saw Oliver wiping a tear from his eye, which was unfair because he wasn’t as close to Bridge as I was and had never slept with Tom. At least I assumed he hadn’t. And to my shock and happiness, my brain didn’t vanish down a rabbit hole of wondering who Oliver had slept with before we’d started dating, and instead agreed to carry on being genuinely happy for Tom and Bridge in a really straightforward way.

It was almost disorienting to have a positive feeling that didn’t dredge up a single insecurity or neurosis, but I suppose all the Tom-vanishing, church-burning, dress-losing chaos had worn that part of my psyche down. Which just left the part that liked Bridge and Tom and was glad they were married now.

The happy couple turned to face their guests and were about to make a joyful procession out of the walled garden when they ran into the train issue. It was taking up the entire aisle, had already made a good attempt at wrapping itself around Bridge’s legs as she turned, and was currently dragging through the crowd in quite an ominous way.

“If everyone could stand back,” I tried, “I think we’re going to have to…gather and swing. Bride’s family, please keep your heads down.”

It wasn’t the most dignified exit in the history of matrimony, especially because a small swarm of overenthusiastic page boys and flower girls insisted on showering us all with confetti while we tried to do the sartorial equivalent of turning an eighteen-wheel van in a residential street.

Everything that followed next was a bit of a blur. I remember Oliver’s palm at the small of my back steering me from handshake to handshake and photograph to photograph, where I’m sure my fears of looking like Bridge’s stoner cousin were starkly realised. Then he guided me to Judy’s surprisingly fancy sixteenth-century tithe barn for the wedding breakfast. And there Oliver sat beside me and did the heavy lifting in six identical conversations with other top-table guests that I hardly knew.

I even managed to start enjoying the food before I remembered that I was soon going to have to make a speech. And actually, I was okay with speeches. I made them fairly often as part of my job.

Except this was different because it was Bridge, it was Bridge’s special day, and she’d remember what I said to her on it for the rest of her life. So I’d worked hard. I’d worked really hard. Almost embarrassingly hard, in fact, because there was still a part of me that defaulted to the it’s-okay-I-got-a-D-because-didn’t-study excuse.

And, eventually, I’d got the speech to a state where I liked it.

Where it was all written out neatly on paper and everything because I thought scrolling through my phone at my best friend’s wedding would look bad, and now it was tucked away safely in my breast pocket.

In the breast pocket of the shirt I had spent the last seven hours sweating through. A fact that I only noticed when Tom got to the end of his own speech and said, “The maid of honour.”

I stood. The paper was…fine? A little bit wrinkly. Although I was regretting having made my notes with one of Oliver’s fancy fountain pens. It had felt very grown-up at the time, but biro would have stood up to the elements—well, the elements of my stressed-out body— way better. The speech was now mostly little rivulets of blue within which I could just about make out fragments of what I remembered as moving-slash-hilarious testimonies to my long friendship with Bridget. Except now they’d been reduced to “—nce we met at uni— ity” and “—vered in s—wbe—y b—mange.”

Bugger.

Taking a deep breath, I briefly flirted with the strategy of continuing to inhale until I had composed a new, even brillianter maid-of-honour speech from scratch, but my lungs gave out far too quickly.

“What…can I say about Bridget?” I asked a room full of glazed-faced guests, and then paused slightly too long in the vain hope one of them would tell me. “What…indeed,” I continued. For some reason, nobody was coming forward to help me out.

I felt a light pat on my arm and looked down to see Oliver looking up at me with an expression that, to my surprise, was far closer to saying You can do this than Why are you making a fool of me in public.

“I suppose…I can say…that she’s my best friend.” Brilliant start, Luc. Just keep doing facts, and you’ll be done before you know it.