Page 128 of Dirty Ink

My voice drifted off as my gaze went to the dark sidewalk outside the parlour.

“You…want to see what she was lying about?” Rian asked.

I shook my head. The whiskey was hot against the back of my throat. The burn felt good. I took another drink. Rian, like any good boyo, was already reaching to refill my glass.

“No, no,” I explained. “It’s not that. The version of our wedding that Rachel told me…this sounds stupid, but I’m going to hold onto it.”

“Even though it’s not real?” Rian said.

My eyes trailed over to the half-finished painting on Rian’s easel.

He growled, “She’s real.”

I held up my hands in surrender and said with a sad laugh, “Well, in some pathetic way that made-up wedding that Rachel told me about is real for me, too. I mean, I know it’s not. But it is.”

Rian told me he understood. I told him he did too many shrooms. He said I did too few.

“So why?” Rian asked after we clinked glasses across the coffee table and drank in quiet contemplation for a few moments. “Why dig up the past? Why now?”

I set my glass of whiskey down and leaned back on the couch. I stared up at the ceiling for a moment, got lost in its pink haze, got taken back to another time, another neon glow.

To the ceiling I finally answered, “I’m trying to find closure, I guess.”

“Closure? Between you and Rachel?”

I didn’t want to tell him between me and myself, though if anyone would understand of the friends I had it was Rian, so I just nodded vaguely.

“I mean, it was kind of a long time ago,” Rian began. “But it was enough of a shite show that I do remember some things. Or maybe the better way to put it is that I can’t—no matter how hard I fucking try, and believe me I have tried—forget some things.”

I laughed despite myself. Laughed because I knew Rachel would have loved to be here. Loved to hear the shite we really got into that night. Loved to laugh with me as we shared a drink with a good friend.

Rian scrubbed at his eyes.

With his knuckles pressed into the sockets, he continued, saying, “I know for sure that Rachel wore a white ‘I Heart Vegas’ shirt that she cut the ‘I’ and the ‘Vegas’ out of.”

“Oh,” I said, imagining what little that left for the imagination.

“A pair of what I could only figure were your white boxers,” Rian added. “And…and, oh yeah, these sparkly like go-go boots. They went up past her knee. The heel must have been a mile high.”

Those boots winked at me from my past like a star on the horizon. I found myself smiling. Laughing when I remembered vaguely struggling to get them off of her, the only thing between her and complete nakedness, thong trapped round her kicking ankles as she laughed.

“I’m pretty sure she stole her veil from a tourist,” Rian was saying as I drew my focus back to him. His hands circled his head as he explained, “It was one of those like hats with the net over the face. Like you wear on a safari or some shite. Or for beekeeping. Yeah, I’m pretty sure you two stole it somewhere. There was a lot of talk about something called Denny’s.”

I nodded.

“And me?” I asked.

Something told me I hadn’t worn a fine tuxedo with my hair styled (or cleaned, for that matter). But even I was surprised when Rian hid his face and grumbled, almost incoherently, “Powder-blue cowboy boots, assless chaps, and, well, and that’s it.”

I shook my head as I laughed.

“And you didn’t think for a second that I might not be in my soundest of minds?” I asked my friend. “I mean, you didn’t stop even once to say, ‘Hey, maybe we should save the “till death do we part” till we’ve all had some water and a good night’s kip’?”

Rian stared at me like I’d asked him some complicated math equation. Who was I kidding? This was Rian. I’m surprised he stuck around for the ceremony and didn’t wander off after some sparkling thing. Or some smoking thing more likely.

“You guys said you were in love,” Rian said with a sureness that stirred my heart. “You said it and I believed you and that was that. I mean, what more is there than that? Nothing and no one should get in the way of love.”

I glanced down at my fingers. That’s all I did. All I’d ever learned to do: get in the way of love. I thought it had been to protect myself. But had I been hurting myself all these years? Hurting myself because the one person I’d never thought to forgive was the one person who needed forgiveness?

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