Page 46 of Always the Bridesmaid

‘Well, I’m thinking about it as a side hustle and I’m wondering if you’d let me trial it on you?’

‘Trial hug—’

I lean in, tugging her to me and holding her tightly in my arms. I brace myself for a beating or at the very least a sarcastic comment.

Instead, I feel the smallest of movements as she adjusts her chin on my shoulder. I feel her lean into me, ever so slightly.

She doesn’t hug me back – her arms stay rigid at her sides – but she doesn’t push me away either.

‘What do you think?’ I ask after long seconds. ‘Can I make it?’

Then I feel the best response I could have hoped for. She chuckles against my chest. ‘Charlie, you’re off-the-charts strange.’

I smile to myself, then sit back from her, straight faced, and say, ‘That’ll be fifty quid.’

‘Are you joking?’

‘The big guys are charging seventy-five greenbacks in the States.’

Pinching the corner of the frame in her fingers, she lowers her shades and looks over the top of them. ‘Charlie, no one says greenbacks.’

‘That’s not cool?’

‘In no walk of life.’

‘Damn it.’

I catch her brief and tiny grin before she turns back to the view, exhales, and stands up, gracefully hitching up her dress as she lifts her legs across the bench and starts walking back to the wedding reception.

‘You still don’t exist to me,’ she calls back.

My laughter dances in my chest. Sure I don’t.

I can put some food away but after the five-course wedding breakfast, even I am fazed by the wedding cake being handed around with glasses of champagne to toast through the wedding speeches. It doesn’t help that, along with the meat sweats, the extra layer of clothes I changed into between main course and dessert has me roasting like a Christmas potato.

The Top Table comprises the bride and groom, the groom’s parents and the bride’s aunt and uncle, and Millie, Eddie and their kids, who look edible in their page boy and flower girl outfits. I am sitting on Table One, with the other groomsmen – Brooks, Cash and Will – the bridesmaids – Sarah, Izzy and Becky – Edmond and Amy, and Brooks’s daughter. There are two perks to this. First, we are numero uno to be served both food and drinks, after the Top Table. Secondly, Sarah is sitting directly across the table from me.

It is a large round table, which means Sarah is ideally situated – too far away for me to antagonize but perfectly placed for me to watch her smile and laugh with her friends. Not even the Mona Lisa could rival the sight. It isn’t that I want to indulge my crush; more that I am pleased to see her looking genuinely happy.

If I ever do go into professional hugging as a business, I ought to charge a damn sight more than fifty quid. Evidentially, I have a magic touch.

Once everyone has a piece of spice cake from the bottom of the three-tiered creation – eight hundred quid now cut into tiny pieces – and a full glass of fizz, I, as designated MC, ting a fork against my glass and stand up from my seat.

‘Ladies, gents, and everybody else in the room who identifies as neither a lady nor a gentleman, for whatever reason, it’s that time at a wedding where we all have to listen to the groom and be well-mannered and gracious as an audience, whether or not he’s sweet and funny or just a bloody twat.

‘I’m just joking around, Jakey boy, you know you’re perfect. Tall. Dark. Those washboard abs, all eight packs of them. The way you hold yourself, conduct yourself, dress yourself. Your unarguable charisma.’

I look to the sky wistfully as I speak, then act as if I have been startled out of a daydream about my friend.

‘Sorry, where was I? Oh, that’s right, Jake is a pin-up. More than that, he has sexual energy. And, believe it or not, he’s not just a pretty face; he’s intelligent, too.’

My sarcasm hits the spot. The wedding guests express their amusement.

I wait for the room to fall silent again, then hold up one finger, pointing to the ceiling and say, ‘Except!’ I labor the word. ‘Jake obviously made one of the biggest mistakes of his life when he failed to ask me to be best man today.’

One wedding guest gives an ‘aww’.

‘Thank you, I appreciate that, man in the window over there. I won’t lie, it hurt. It’s like being in love with someone who just doesn’t love you back, you know? He’s my best mate, I’m just not his.’ I wipe a fake tear from my cheek. ‘In all honesty, if I thought I could have been her maid of honor, I probably would’ve told Jess that she was my best mate. Anyway, enough about me, it’s time for the big man himself to make his speech. So, without further ado… Hang on a minute, where is he?’

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