2 #2
I just learned his name minutes ago, but I feel such a magnetic pull toward him.
I need to, at this very moment, smooth out the wrinkle between his brows.
It doesn’t seem like he wants to try to uncomplicate his situation for me, and I can’t really blame him.
He’s already extended himself to be here, attending a wedding he doesn’t seem to want to go to, confiding in an almost-complete stranger.
He’s done two solids for me already and has this disarming charm that’s effectively removed the pit of anxiety I can’t ever snuff out when left alone with a man I don’t know. Maybe it’s the liquor stealing that security measure from me, but I felt fine with him when we were alone before.
Maybe the universe decided to place two miserable souls together, however briefly, to give them some respite from all the damage done to them.
“Okay, Anders, let’s be sad together.”
His smile returns and warmth sparks in my chest, like a reward for bringing it back out of him, though something tells me nobody has to work too hard to do so. “Do you think a pity party will help?”
“Yeah,” I say, still holding his face. “Party is right there in the phrase. Let’s suck out the sadness like venom from a snake bite.
Once it’s gone, we’ll feel better.” I use my chin to gesture to the other side of the room.
“And then, we’ll drink some more, play some darts, and make bad decisions. ”
He shows a set of perfect white teeth, his canines a little sharper and longer than the rest, which widens his smile. “Okay. Let’s.”
I pull away to think, but his hand reaches around my stool and pulls the chair closer to him, so my thighs are between his. I shake off the attraction that runs through me. I have to remind myself as I think of what to say: I’m going to comfort him, not sleep with him.
“Okay,” I begin, “I have a really sad life, so mine might be long.”
He slides a finger over my cheek and pulls a stray hair behind my ear. “I’m here however long you need.”
Lucy, do not fall in love with a man who shows you a simple act of kindness.
“Okay, so from the beginning. I have never had anything that has been only mine,” I tell him. “My parents died when I was a teenager, and I spent most of my life trying to take care of my little sister.”
His gaze travels around my face, then focuses on my eyes, like a camera lens finding its subject.
“Growing up, I spent recesses in a corner alone, studying to get perfect grades to make my parents proud, so friends were nonexistent for a while. My parents died in a car crash on the way to the hospital because my mom was sick, cancer, and as much as I love an ironic twist, that messed me up for a bit. After that, raising Taina on my own was a whole other kind of hard—balancing grief and responsibility was confusing for a girl who didn’t even know how taxes worked.
“At work, aside from one other woman, I was surrounded by men. I’d never be invited to the weekly team dinners, instead tasked with projects that ran well into the nights my coworkers drank through.
I studied my lovers like exams and picked up their hobbies and passions like my own, so we’d have more to discuss.
I’d cook their favorite meals, remember their coffee orders, listen to their burdens, and try to ease them or resolve them, and they still left. ”
A touch of embarrassment and a shred of worry lodges itself in my throat. It’s too much to admit to a perfect stranger, but it’s because he’s a stranger that this feels like getting the poison out of my body to allow it to heal.
“It’s hard to explain. It feels like I had this deposit of gold within me once, treasured and sought after, but someone has been in there carving out every remnant of it. Only flecks of it remain, it’s not even worth mining. Not so valuable anymore.”
At that, he reaches over and squeezes my hand, and it somehow feels like a hug around my heart.
“Want to know the most humiliating thing I’m doing now to get by?” I ask.
“Tell me.”
I chew on my lip, just a brief moment of sense, trying to keep my mouth shut before the confession slips out. “Wedding wrecking.”
He frowns, scratches his ear before saying, “Sorry, I think I misheard.”
“I’m sure you didn’t.” I tap his arm. And when his eyes grow wide, I hold out my hand. “I’m not here to wreck Anna’s wedding!”
I can see the emotions ranging over his face as he tries to process what I said until he ultimately stalls at a mix of confusion and sympathy. “Okay,” he says, “how does someone even get into that . . . field?”
I snort at his attempt at being polite instead of questioning my sanity.
“Accidentally?” I answer. “I mean, the entire job is made up. There is no frame of reference for me to follow. The idea was this cumulation of an alcohol-induced night, the luck of a loud, even drunker, groom-to-be begging his groomsmen to stop his impending wedding, and a projection of my own misery wishing someone had saved me from a doomed marriage, twice. And, of course, the cherry on top of the dirt-cake, it was the night I was fired from my job.”
“All right,” he interrupts me, curiosity currently winning his carousel of emotions, “you have to give more details than that. There’s a big jump from overhearing a groom having cold feet to straight-up wedding wrecking.”
I shove a couple of fries in my mouth before continuing.
“The groom-to-be was begging for sympathy. His friends knew he liked men, knew the marriage was set up by his parents in denial, yet his buddies were encouraging him to go through with it. They said it was better to play into the facade than risk his parents disowning him—”
“Assholes.”
“I know, right? They kept saying he could date anyone he wanted, secretly. The groom-to-be—and me, when I stumbled physically and metaphorically into their conversation—thought it was unfair to the bride-to-be and whoever would have to live in secret with him.”
“He must have been happy for someone to take his side.”
“He was.” I go on, “Walter was his name, begged me to help him do something about it. Something that became more intriguing when he offered me all the money his parents sent him for a wedding present. I hadn’t seen that many zeros since one of my late-night, wine-fueled Zillow binges, where I scroll through houses I’ll never be able to afford. ”
Anders’s chuckle brings a warmth to my chest that interrupts my train of thought before I continue.
“It was a sloppy mess. Crashing the rehearsal dinner, claiming I was in love with Walter and that we were running away together after a one-night stand. But at the end of the night, Walter said this way his family wouldn’t come after him for his sexuality, not for a while, and he planned to travel the world until he was ready to face everyone again. ”
“Hearing it like this,” Anders says, downing one of the shots I didn’t even notice him order, “it makes you sound less like wrecking, more like helping.”
I’ve always viewed wedding wrecking as helping, as saving people.
Either from an incompatible marriage or a pairing like Eliza’s, where cheating is involved.
Preventing them from feeling this ache of loving someone who betrayed you in this final, unforgivable way.
Where you recall all the small injustices over the course of your relationship, rereading every chapter between you, searching every transgression, trying to pinpoint exactly where it all went wrong.
The swift fear of having all this love but losing the vessel to hold it, wondering where you’ll put it now—if you have the ability to do that at all.
Still, I point out, “I can’t help but notice a hidden but there.”
“But,” he goes on, “how do you decide to wreck a wedding? What if someone requests it, but they don’t have good intentions? And where do you even find them?”
I shake my head. “I only agree to help with wrecking the wedding when the pairing would be genuinely harmful to either party.” It was chaotic at first, but I had poured more and more energy into the idea until it ballooned into something that could stay up on its own.
“And my sister helps with the rest, making everything more streamlined,” I explain, ignoring the gnawing embarrassment of having to rely on someone whom I spent a year trying to teach to tie her own shoes.
“She used to code for work and fun. So, when I came to her with the idea, she built me a website offering wedding-wrecking services.
A portal for people to reach me, explain their situation, vet them, and even run marketing to anyone searching key terms like How to get someone to call off a wedding?
Wedding ruining. Wedding Crasher. How can I leave my partner before my wedding?
My son is marrying a gold digger; how do I convince him against it? And so on.
“My clients can run through my application and choose a variety of methods. I’m here to make one of the most difficult decisions of their lives as easy as possible. I shoulder as much blame as I can, so that both parties can be left unscathed enough to move on.”
Anders looks at me with surprise, but do I see a hint of admiration as well? “This is all more elaborate than I’d think such a niche job would be.”
I smile. “Do you picture me with fake pregnancy bumps and shouting ‘I object!’ at weddings?”
His returning smile lets me know I’m not too far off. “I’ve been proven wrong. Still, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around all these people hiring you.”
“Turns out normal people turn to the internet for help instead of downing cheap wine and watching reruns of New Girl to fix their life problems. Go figure.”
Each time he laughs, a tiny ding rings in my head like I got the answer to a trivia question correct.
“Still, pretty impressive you can make a living with this. Turn an idea into a business.”