Shorts

Riptide

In response to a prompt - sorry it wasn't exactly what you asked for, but I hope you still like it anyway.

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“Love is not a fire: desire is a flame, and affection is its warm embers. Love is not a flood, nor is it a drought. Love is not a mountain, impossible to conquer, but neither is love a level field, free from obstacles.” I pick up the glass of champagne on the table in front of me, drag it to my mouth through the sudden heaviness of the air. Continue. “Love is not the riptide, threatening to drag you under.” Here my eyes look up of their own accord, scan my audience, scan the vague white brideness to my right. “Love is the current, pulling you gently home.”

Here I pause. Someone’s aunt, a sea of tables away, sighs damply into a handkerchief. Another aunt snores. There’s a settling mundaneness to it all, now we’re away from the stifling eternity of the church and its vows. This is real life, the room seems to say, the stained napkins and restless children, and life carries on.

The pause lasts a few heartbeats too long, and I can feel my blush rising from my collarbones to my cheeks in seconds, heating my already-prickled skin. This is the moment, I know, where I sigh, congratulate, and begin down my long list of embarrassing stories. I’ve prepared for this for months, but now – I can’t. There’s a thick weight lodged somewhere along my oesophagus. A twinge in my heart I thought I’d lost long ago.

“To the happy couple,” I force out, and my voice sounds perfectly normal. The napkins laugh at me, conspiratorially. “Congratulations.”

The rest of the hall murmurs with me, and I finally turn my eyes to the groom. He has acne on the line of his jaw, tomato flecked over the white of his cuffs. I focus on these details, these and the snoring aunt: these are how I will survive. How I have survived so long.

And then he smiles.

I sit down, hastily, nearly knocking over my glass. The lump in my throat is easing, but my eyes can’t stay still, flitting about the room like a skittish colt. Curtains, snoring aunt, bride, plate, light. Groom.

He leans over, hair brushing the line of my cheek.

“Shorter than I’d expected,” he says, and there’s warmth in his voice, a laugh and his rounded vowels. “But sweet.”

I smile. “I live to please.” My voice breaks.

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I’d had dreams for three weeks prior to the wedding of being left at the altar.

It was nonsense, of course – for one, I was the best man. But that didn’t stop the sharp twist of nerves in my gut as we had waited for the bride’s entrance.

Love is war – they left that out of the poem. Between head and heart, yes. Between wanting what’s right and good and kind, and wanting. Between causing a scene or taking a hint. Moving away. Breaking your own heart, so that you can say that no one else did it for you.

She came, of course, and was beautiful. Radiant as the sun, he’d whispered to me as she began to walk up the aisle. For that moment, with the late spring light filtering in through stained glass and the careful hush of people craning their necks and holding their breath, I could see it. It was not a cliché: she was the sun. There in the gentle warmth of my best friend’s wedding day, I felt at one with him. Of course, my whole being seemed to shout. Of course this woman for this man.

Then she arrived and I stood back and the day was just a day again, but Elena was still beautiful. It is near impossible to hate a beautiful young woman who is so awash with love.