Page 20 of June Bride
Sunny, guzzling more beer like it was going out of style, foolishly said, “Truth!”
Everyone leaned in to listen to Anita’s question. “You ever have a bit of roleplay with everyone’s favorite town doctor? Come on. Her patients are dying to know.”
For every person wrinkling their nose in disdain, there was another waggling her eyebrows as if this were the question they had been waiting for all night. Sunny pulled herself back up into the chair in the center of the stage, the one bedecked in pink streamers and purple glitter. Anita had really dug into her old school supplies for this party.How much did the owner of this joint threaten her when she brought out the glitter, though?
“All I’ll say,” Sunny interspersed her sentence with a ladylike burp, “is that she really knows how to snap those latex gloves onto her hand.”
Sunny couldn’t tell if the crowd’s reaction was from how funny they found that… or… well, she didn’t want to know.The most roleplaying Brandy and I ever do is when she gets on top for two seconds.One would think Brandelyn was allergic to riding the waves, so to speak.Every time she ends up on top of me, you’d think it was an accident. “Whoops! How did I get up here?”Sunny could practically hear that in Brandy’s voice.“I don’t belong up here! I wear dresses!”
The usual assortment of bachelorette party games appeared.Pin the Nipples on the Playboy Bunnywas a staple in Paradise Lost, even without a good reason to play. A wedding bell-shaped pinata full of red jellybeans spilled on top of Sunny’s head when Aunt Jill gave it a mighty whack with an old baseball bat. The drunker people became, the more they uproariously laughed at the off-colored jokes and gifts popping out of boxes left and right. Everything happened as sober Sunny would have wanted. People split off into groups, laughing over the old times, their own relationships, and who they wanted to bone. Drunk and hurt Sunny, however, wasn’t satisfied. She demanded a sacrifice, and it had to come at her own expense.
Because it wasn’t fair. How could these people prance around the bar, cheering her relationship toDr. Brandelyn Meyer,and make it sound like a good thing? Didn’t they know the real Brandy? What? Did they think that because they went home going,“That doctor sure is a good doctor. I wonder if she acts that uptight all the time…”they were somehow wrong? Did they want to believe that people were that much different than from who they were at their jobs? Was Lorri Abrams gonna sit there at the bar and pretend that she wasn’t Little Miss Black Humor at the hardware storeandat home with her partner? Or was Mikaiya Marcott, who famously made her living with a Bluetooth in her ear and a MacBook in front of her, bound to declare that she wasn’t the prissiest person to ever leave Paradise Valley? Sunny was the first to admit she was exactly the same here in this bar as she was at Waterlily House.I’m a fucking ray of sunshine, after all! Ask my mother over there!Her mother, who was only there out of support for her daughter, would rather not talk about gender and sexuality. She was content to sit with some older friends and nurse their gin and tonics.
She should probably clamp her hands over her ears for this.
“Do you guys wanna know what it’sreallylike being with big ol’ Doctor Meyer?” Sunny went to finish her fifth beer, only to realizesomeonehad drunk it for her.Whoever the bitch is, I’ma cut her.The irony? She scraped her arm against her chair two seconds later. “Because I can give you the freakin’ tell-all right here.”
She stumbled from her chair to the edge of the stage. It was only a foot and a half off the ground, which was mediocre for a live stage in a crowded bar, but a lifesaver for a drunk woman named Sunny Croker. Anita and her partner, Bonnie, both leaped forward to catch Sunny in case she fell.Look at them. They’ve got panic on their faces. They think I’m gonna splat!Sunny had perfect control of her motor skills, thank you very much. She only had two beers! (It was two, right? Because she only remembered two.) If anyone should be worried about falling over, it should be Aunt Jill. There were three of her. Any one of them could collapse at any moment!
“I’ll tell you,” Sunny reiterated, already forgetting that she said the same thing a few seconds earlier.I’ve only had seven beers tonight. One is hardly anything! I’ve only had four beers tonight. It’s my bachelorette party! I’ll have five beers if I want five beers.Ah, there it was. The correct number. “If you’ve ever,everhad her reach up your blouse with her stethoscope, then you know what it’s like.” She paused for effect. “Cold, hard, and it’s over in five seconds.”
The awkward sputtering and chuckles around them had Anita gritting her teeth in disbelief. “Sunny!” she hissed from the front of the stage. “What are you doing?”
“You ever dated a wet fish?” Sunny had to laugh at her choice of words. Wet! Fish! One would think she said that on purpose. “Because I’m gonna marry one. A wet fish who thinks the whole world revolves around her aaaaand she’s gonna tell me what to do for the rest of our lives.”
The crowd wasn’t laughing anymore. Anita, however, was climbing back onto the stage to grab Sunny and go.
“When you come to my wedding next week,” Sunny crowed, “I hope you enjoy the surprise of what’s going on as much as I do! I don’t know what I’m wearing yet! Still waiting for Brandy to get back to me on that!”
Sunny was so plastered that it only took Anita four attempts to drag her into the women’s restroom, where she shooed away two loiterers and splashed some cold water onto the bride’s face.
“Hey!” Sunny spat the water all over herself. “Whatchu doing that for?”
“I’m trying to get some sense into you, idiot.” When Sunny’s eyes focused again, she beheld a woman with her arms akimbo and a Serious Teacher Face looking back at her. “You’re out there shitting on your fiancée in front of everyone! At your bachelorette party!”
“Huh? I didn’t say anything.” Sunny rocked back and forth on her feet. Eventually, she braced herself against the chipped bathroom sink. “What are you talking about? I said what everyone is already thinking aboutBrandy.” She spat her fiancée’s name as if it were verboten. “She’s a controlling butthead who has to have everything her way. All the way down to how we have sex. Do you know what happened the last time we had some time to ourselves?” Sunny could clearly remember it, with or without inebriation.That beautiful, sunshine-filled day in my little cottage at Waterlily House. I threw down my laundry, guided her into my room, annnnnndddd did the same thing we always freakin’ do.“I didn’t even come, but she got to like three times before taking a shower.”
Eyes rolling and hands turning on the sink, Anita was now compelled to splash some water onto herownface. “Thanks for that lovely image, Sun. You know how much I love fantasizing about the same mediocre sex you and the rest of us are having.”
“She’s gotta feel like a princess at all times, and I’ve gotta be her princecharming.Which means she’s a pillow-biting princess who can’t get enough of ignoring whatIwant.”
“Look, Sun, I know this is really about the wedding.” Oh, Anita knew all about what happened in Brandy’s office. She was the first person Sunny told after it happened. “I’m sorry things are going rough with her right now, but airing out your dirty laundry at yourbachelorette partyis really not the way to handle it. This is going to bite you in the ass.”
“What do you know? You’re not the one who is sitting off to the side like a piece of discarded chicken.” Sunny spat that, not knowing what the hellshewas talking about. “I don’t want a big ol’ wedding, you know? Three hundred people! Who around here has three hundred people to invite to their wedding? The mayor? I don’t… I don’tknowthree hundred people. Who’s coming to my wedding? What are we eating? Who’s carrying the rings? I don’t know anymore! I feel like I’m going to someone else’s wedding!”
“To be fair, Sun, you washed your hands of most of it.”
The tears Sunny had been holding back poured from the corners of her eyes. “I wish I haaaaadn’t!”
Anita lightly patted her friend’s shoulder as Sunny ugly-drunken-cried into a large mass of paper towels.Why do I have to be such a pushover? Why do I always have to be the one to compromise?That point was only further exacerbated when Brandelyn pointed out the church thing. So what! She still got everything else! She got a lemon cake when Sunny vastly preferred chocolate, to the point she joked about having her own cake at the wedding. Brandy picked a photographer who had albums full of highly Photoshopped images of other people’s weddings, and Sunny worried she wouldn’t recognize herself in her own wedding photos.Don’t get me started on the flowers!She knew Brandy wouldn’t rest unless there was an orchid garden at the wedding, but did it have to happen at the expense of the flowers Sunny and her aunt had planted over the decades? Some of those bushes had been around since Carter was in office. The wedding planner asked if they could be “relocated” to make room for more seating, and Sunny had to inform both the plannerandBrandy that there would be no disturbance of the flowers.
And if Brandelyn thought her Pomeranian would be carrying the rings…
If there was one thing Brandy excelled at, it was seducing women and then getting thehellunder their skin.
“Come here.” Anita drew Sunny into an embrace. There they stood, swaying back and forth in a dive bar restroom while Sunny sobbed and Anita adopted her everyday schoolteacher’s voice. “I know it’s been really stressful and hard. Brandy’s been a bit of a… yeah… but you know she loves you, right? I can’t imagine there’s anyone in this world who can love her like you do, either. This wedding is merely one day in your whole life together. I hate to say it, but most people won’t remember it a year from now, but they might remember what you were saying about your love life.”
Sunny was still too drunk to feel proper shame for what she had said a few minutes ago. Did she have regrets, though? A few. In the heat of her frustrations, she had implied that Brandelyn was an awful lover. If that wasn’t bad enough, she had done it to a number of her fiancée’spatients.People who would soon go to see her for their ailments and not be able to think of anything beyond,“Dr. Wet Fish.”
