by Lia Louis
* * *
The ceremony is being held in a classically beautiful room on the first floor of the hotel, with high ceilings and large windows. It is simple and elegant: everything Marie set out to do. Hydrangeas and sprigs of baby’s breath are wrapped in cream ribbon and pinned to the end of each line of chairs, and there is a play list of modern love songs playing quietly as we wait for the bride. Lucas and I stand beside each other at the front of the room as guests file in.
So nervous, he mouths, and I shake my head.
“No need,” I tell him. “It’s going to be amazing,” and he looks at me and smiles.
I thought I would feel devastation in this moment. The Emmie Blue on the veranda of Le Rivage would have sworn that right now, I would be swamped with crippling heartbreak. But I’m not. The only sort of negative emotion I feel is slightly sad, but it isn’t a jealous sort of sad, it’s that end of an era feeling; the sort of feeling you have when you’re leaving a job and you know so much that it’s for the best, but you’ll miss it. The familiarity. The routine of it.
I glance over my shoulder again. The room is filling up now, almost every seat full, a sea of hats and stiff, pressed suits. And that’s when I see him. Eliot, walking in beside Jean, who popped out for a cigarette some moments ago. Somersault. Somersault. My stomach reacts before my brain has fully acknowledged that he’s here. He walks slowly, nodding as Jean talks, and the sight of him, so tall, a smattering of dark stubble on his face, the sharp, dark gray suit he’s wearing, makes my chest ache. I look away, and even when he approaches the chairs reserved for Lucas’s family, in the rows behind me, I pretend I haven’t seen him; but from the corner of my eye, I can see he is staring at me. When I turn, he smiles gently, then looks away, striking up a conversation with his mum, beside him.
The ceremony is being translated from French into English, and although it is being done tastefully, it is taking twice as long. But now, the registrar, the British one who has a head like an egg, turns to us, and asks us if we know of any reason why Marie and Lucas shouldn’t marry.
I remember a conversation Fox and Rosie and I had once, when Fox jokingly said I should stand up in the ceremony and tell Lucas that I love him; that it should be me, and be carted off, like a classic Peggy Mitchell. My mouth lifts at the corner, just slightly, at the memory, but I say nothing now, of course. Lucas looks at me fleetingly, and smiles as nervous laughter echoes down the pews.
Moments later, Lucas says “I do” in French.
“I do,” says Marie in English.
And that, is that.
* * *
I’m not sure who taps the wineglass to get everyone’s attention, but all I know is that it is mere seconds before the entire room has turned to face me, standing at the top table beside Amanda.
The box is in front of me, on the table, and I am passed a microphone, and it is only now that my hands begin to shake. I swallow, clear my throat, bringing the mic to my lips. The speech I have written, and learned by heart, is on the table in front of me, in case I fluff my lines or forget what I’m going to say.
“Hello, everyone,” I say. “I hope you’ll forgive me for speaking entirely in English, selfishly, but also selflessly, because I speak French so horribly that I’m actually doing you all a favor.”
Laughter. A titter. Nothing like Rosie’s hysterical laughter when I practiced it on her last week. She acted like I was Lee Evans, live in her living room.
I take a big deep breath. Here goes nothing.
“My name is Emmie, and I am Lucas’s best woman. Yes, very twenty-first century, very millennial, so I am told, but something I am honored to be today, for one of my oldest friends.
“Lucas, I struggle to remember my life without you in it. We were sixteen when we met, and we met in a way people hardly believe when I tell them how. I let go of a balloon on my school field, and Lucas found it, miles away on a beach in Boulogne. He emailed me, and a friendship was born from that one singular hello across the ocean, of even more emails, letters, parcels, and eventually, real-life meetings. I also once sent him my French exam tape, which I am not entirely sure helped, considering the last time I asked for directions, I asked if the man I’d stopped had a complicated horse I could borrow.”
More laughter. Good. I look up to my audience and I see Eliot, on the table opposite. He’s sitting back on his chair, arms crossed at his chest, finger and thumb holding his chin. He watches me, a small, encouraging smile on his lips.
“If you get nervous,” Fox had said last week, “pretend you’re saying it in front of just Eliot. It’ll help.”
“Just don’t imagine him naked,” said Rosie. “Unless you want your vagina all aflame at the top table, because I’d bet my dad’s car on it that he’s hung. What? Don’t look at me like that, Fox, I don’t make the rules.”
“Some of you may know,” I continue now, to the sea of watchful faces, “but Lucas and I share a birthday, and through that, have shared every year, on our birthdays, together. Lucas is a bad and sickly drunk. Sorry, Jean, but your lost silk tie, the purple one, with the diamonds on it, is buried deep in a pot in your beautiful garden somewhere. I buried it. It was me. Sorry, Luke. Marriage voids the nondisclosure agreement.”
Jean bursts out laughing and points at Lucas, and Lucas hides his face as laughter fills the room.
“So, Marie, I guess you should take this as a warning to never lend clothing to your husband on a night out.” I look at Lucas. “I won’t be there to bury it next time.”
Lucas smiles up at me.
“Not to sound like I am reciting Lucas’s CV, here, but truly, really, Lucas, for all his faults, is a spontaneous, passionate, and driven man, the type that throws their heart out in front of them and runs after it. I stole that, by the way, I am definitely not that poetic.”
Amanda, beside me, pulls tissue from her clutch bag. “And Marie. If he keeps his marriage the way he keeps his friendships, protecting them with care, and loyalty, and love, and the guts to hold his hands up when he is wrong…” I look at Tom now, who is very drunk already, and crying like a baby, his arm stretched out patting Lucas’s back. “Then, I am positive you are in the safest of hands.”
I bend and pick up the box. I lean over and hand it to Lucas. I see, when he smiles, a glimmer of that sixteen-year-old boy who’d flicker onto the library computer screen from his Webcam, raise a hand in a wave. The sixteen-year-old boy who’d text me until I fell asleep, who’d steal his dad’s mobile to call me when he knew I was alone on a Saturday night, because he would be too.
“In this box is the very first email Lucas sent to me,” I say, “and I cannot tell you how much I needed that email on that day during that particular time of my life. It was a life jacket more than an email. A lifeline.” I swallow, tears filling my eyes. “Then there is the card that was attached to the balloon that he found, and even a jar of Marmite. The first gift I ever sent Lucas. I also sent him a DVD of Footballers’ Wives, for those that remember, and I can’t put that in the box because I know that still lives in his bedroom now, fourteen years on. He still watches it too. Pauses too much on the sex scenes. The one on the snooker table even jumps, it’s been watched that many times.”
Laughter again, Marie all grins, her hands to her chest, wedding band glinting.
“You’ll also find in the box the eight CDs that Lucas sent me when we were kids. He said I had terrible taste in music, but it wasn’t until I saw his own CD collection one day that I realized that was just another thing we had in common. I don’t know how he pulled eight decent CDs out of the bag, but he did. Also, Luke, I sent you some Branston pickle twelve years ago. Where’s my ninth tape?”
A titter of laughter, and Lucas looks to the table now, and won’t meet my eye. And I’m glad this is coming to an end, because any longer and I would cry, I think. In front of this room of people.
“And Marie. Beautiful, kind Marie.” Marie dabs the corners of her eyes and reaches her slender hand to me. I hold
it, and bend to my feet, pulling from under the table, a white heart-shaped balloon. “I know it’s super crap for the environment.” I sniff. “But there’s a card attached to this and you can write your wish on it. A wish for you. For your marriage. For your future. For avocados.” Marie and I giggle through our tears. “Because last time I let go of a balloon, I wished for a friend. And I got just that. So I reckon this’ll be good luck.”
Lucas is looking down at the tablecloth. He brings a knuckle to his cheek, and when he looks up, the light reflects in his eyes.
“To Lucas. My best friend,” I say, tears freefalling now. “To Marie. To Mr. and Mrs. Moreau. To your future together.”
The room erupts into applause.
And just like that, I let him go.
* * *
It isn’t until an hour later, the dance floor beginning to fill out, that Eliot and I speak for the very first time since we spoke on the doorstep, and I left him to go to France. Half an hour ago the evening guests arrived, of which one is Ana. I watched her, a knot in my stomach, as she walked straight up to Eliot, all glittering eyes and shining smile. They’d spoken, very briefly, and she had walked off, face like thunder.
Now I sit at the top table, nursing a large glass of red wine, listening to Amanda tell me, tearfully, how much my speech was her favorite part of the evening. (For the seventh time in an hour. She went a bit mad on the champagne, and started, as Amanda always does when drunk, oversharing about Jean’s physique—“shockingly supple for a sixty-four-year-old.”)
“That box shocked me,” she says again, her hand on mine. “I mean, my boy and music. I thought he had the most dreadful taste, but eight CDs. I wouldn’t have thought he knew enough for such a thing, let alone, eight.”
I look at Lucas now, arms around Marie, both of them singing into each other’s faces, eyes locked, smiles taut, and I know that he is exactly where he is meant to be in this moment. That kiss on that balcony was a mistake. A blip. Life isn’t black and white, is it, sometimes? Sometimes what something should be—a friendship—has areas that blur into the edges. We have loved each other for so many years, and come close so many times to that kiss, in the past, that it was something that came too late, or shouldn’t have come at all. And I knew that the second his lips touched mine.
“Gosh, I need the loo again,” says Amanda, breathing tearful, wine-drenched breath over me as she stands.
My phone vibrates on the table.
* * *
Eliot: Dance with me?
* * *
I look up. Eliot is standing just a few feet away, hands in pockets, a small smile on his face. I get up, cross the floor to meet him. I don’t put up a fight, or search for excuses. I want to dance. I want to dance with him.
“You look…”
“Don’t say bangin’.”
He raises an eyebrow. “I don’t ever say bangin’.”
“You did,” I say. “About the cheesecake.”
Eliot laughs, and shakes his head. “Well, that’s cheesecake, and this is you,” he says. Then, “I was going to say beautiful.”
“Thank you.” I put my arms around his neck. “And you—you look bangin’.”
“God, yeah, I do,” he says with a smile, slipping his arms around my back and pulling me toward him. And we dance, bodies closer than they’ve ever been, butterflies breaking free in my stomach.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me? About that night?”
Eliot shakes his head, talks into my ear. Goose bumps pepper my arms.
“He was all you had, Em. The only person you depended on, and I knew how lonely you were, how much you relied on him and… I just thought, I have to take it on the chin. For you. Because you needed your friend. You didn’t need to be let down anymore.”
I swallow. “But why would you do that? For me?”
Eliot leans back to take a look at me, and smiles down at me. “Well, I reckon that’s pretty obvious,” he says. Then he leans in, brown eyes glinting, and kisses me. Slowly. Carefully. Hand holding the side of my face, his fingertips in my hair. I close my eyes, melt into his warm lips, the press of his body. And I forget Lucas. I forget Ana. I forget that night. I forget it all. And just feel this: safe. Happy.
* * *
The next morning I am woken by a knock at my hotel room door. Eliot had walked me to my room last night and it had taken so much, between us both, to not give in to him stepping over the threshold. We kissed, all over the dance floor, all over the corridors, and even the elevator, but it stopped outside my door, lips parting, bodies pressed together, the longing so strong, it felt physical, like a magnet, like electricity. Lucas, I think, saw us, and Amanda definitely did. She froze on her way to being carted off by Jean to their room, his arm around her, and I think he’d have put it down to drunken drivel if he hadn’t seen us for himself.
“It’s like foreplay, that,” Rosie had said once, about a guy she dated for a while. Someone she fancied but often said she “didn’t actually like,” which of course baffled Fox to the brink.
“You went to Pizza Express,” Fox had said. “How is Pizza Express foreplay?”
“When you fancy someone, Fox, I mean really fancy,” Rosie had explained, “then anything is foreplay. The way they lick their lips, drink their drink, the way they smile at you over their glass or the way your fingers brush theirs when you’re passing them something, God, it’s enough to kill you. The anticipation of it all.”
And I get it. Now, I get it. That’s how last night was between us—electricity every time his hand brushed my back, or took my hand, and every smile between us, secret. But I can hardly believe a smile like that on his face even exists, this morning. This Eliot in front of me on the other side of my door is pale. His eyes are narrow, his shoulders tense.
“Eliot,” I say. “It—what time is it?” I laugh, looking down at my makeup-stained pajamas. “God, what must I look like? Am I full-blown Ozzy Osbourne?”
He doesn’t move, and I feel my heart race with anxiety. “What? What is it, what’s happened?”
He presses his lips together and looks at me. “Emmie, can I come in?”
“Of course,” I say. “Of course, are you all right?”
He steps over into the dark, carpeted hallway of my room, but doesn’t go any further. I close the door softly behind him.
He looks up at me. “Did you go to the house, in Honfleur?”
“House? Which house?”
“The one my brother’s firm worked on.” I go to answer, then stop when he says, “For Ana.”
“Yes,” I say. “But I didn’t know it was hers. Not right away. Luke took me to see it. Wanted to show me his latest project and—” His face is completely unreadable. “I’m sorry, I had no idea it was hers. I wouldn’t just go snooping round other people’s properties.” I laugh nervously. Eliot doesn’t.
“So you did go there.”
“Yes, I just said we went there, a couple of weeks back, you know, the day of Rosie’s thing.” I’m starting to panic and I don’t know why. Eliot’s face. The muscle pulsing in his neck, his tight jaw. He’s angry. I know he is, and my bowels churn. “Lucas took me there, to show me the house, that’s all. And—”
“Did something happen?”
“What?” My heart thumps now, in my chest, in my throat, and I can’t breathe. Heat creeps up my body, to my neck, to my face.
“Did something happen?” Eliot asks again. “Between you both?”
I look at him, mouth open, no words obeying and coming forward, and he watches me. “Eliot, could you just… come inside, sit down, y-you’re just standing by the door—”
“It’s a simple question, Emmie. Is Ana telling me the truth when she says she saw you and Lucas kissing on the balcony.”
I stare at him, breath trapped in my throat, my heart hammering like a trapped butterfly in my chest. “Eliot…”
He looks at me intently now, eyes pleading for me to say no. And for me to tell the truth. After all these
years, we don’t need another lie between us.
“A kiss,” I say in a tiny voice. “We argued. About you and that night and… we were both upset and he—he kissed me and I for one second forgot what I was doing, and where I was… but it was not what we wanted—at all. Eliot, please…”
He closes his eyes, his face tipped to the ceiling. His chest rises and falls. He doesn’t move.
“Eliot? Honestly, it was nothing.”
Eliot’s hand is on the door handle now, and he’s biting his lip, shaking his head.
“So, let me get this straight. You missed Rosie’s talk, her conference, you missed our day out together, so you could what, go to my ex-girlfriend’s house and… what? Be together where nobody would find you?”
“No,” I say desperately. “No, don’t be silly. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. We were mortified, disgusted, because it was such a stupid thing to do and… I went straight home and…”
“Ana was there. She pulled up, with her parents, and there you were, on the balcony. She said you were both all over each other. They could see you, from the bedroom.”
“No.” I shake my head. “No, that is not the truth. It was a second and if she was telling the truth, she would tell you how much we were arguing, how angry, how upset I was…”
“But you were there. With him. And you did kiss.”
I say nothing, because I was. And I don’t know what to say. I am telling the truth. And perhaps I should have told him sooner, but what would it have done? It wasn’t even a real kiss. It was nothing. Nothing.
“I was going to turn down Canada for you. The work, for Mark. To help my friend.”
I stare at him, and he pulls open the door. “Eliot, please, don’t walk out.”
“I need some time,” he says. “This whole thing. You, Luke, this wedding, me, you… I need some time. You do too.”