This is the sequel to my story "Always a Bridesmaid." This story is meant to stand on its own, but I invite you to read "Bridesmaid" as well.
*****
I ended the call and let out a deep sigh. Hannah, my roommate, chuckled at me.
"Oh my god, Kiki, you're actually gonna do it," she said. "I thought you swore you'd never be a bridesmaid again after the Fiasco in Phoenix.'
"I pretty much have to do it," I said. "Samantha's my cousin. The whole family's gonna be mad at me if I say no."
"Is Bridezilla Kimberly gonna be there?" Hannah asked.
"She's the maid of honor," I said. Hannah laughed hard at that one.
"Oh dear god," she said. "This just keeps getting better. You poor thing."
*****
Kimberly, aka Bridezilla, had become sort of my nemesis. My cousin Samantha, maid of honor at Kimberly's wedding four months earlier, had convinced me to be a last-minute stand-in as a bridesmaid, but Kimberly had taken an immediate dislike to me. She had berated and humiliated me, not once but twice, during the events leading up to the wedding.
Hannah knew that part of the wedding story, as well as the part about my self-humiliation in throwing myself at a handsome stranger who turned out to be gay, and the two horny businessmen who'd hit me up in the hotel bar about letting them try double penetration on me. Hence the name "Fiasco in Phoenix" that I had bestowed upon that dreadful weekend.
What Hannah didn't know about that weekend, what I hadn't told her or anyone else, was the most important part: that I'd slept with Marcus, Kimberly's groom-to-be, less than 12 hours before the wedding.
That, more than anything else, was the real reason for my initial hesitation to join my cousin Samantha's wedding. I knew Marcus would be there, and I really didn't know how I was going to handle it when I saw him again. But I had just told Samantha I'd be there for her, so I would have to find a way.
*****
Hannah had gone into our apartment's kitchen for a moment, but now she was back. She was carrying two shot glasses and a half-full bottle of expensive whiskey left behind by one of her ex-boyfriends.
"Oh god, no," I groaned.
"C'mon girl, it's tradition," she said. "We have to."
Hannah, like me, was an independent mid-twentysomething girl who was in no hurry to get tied down by marriage. But also like me, she had a lot of mid-twentysomething friends who were in a hurry to get hitched.
As a result, we were both in danger of becoming professional bridesmaids. During our two years as roomies, she'd been in two weddings, as had I, and now I had just signed up for my third. So yeah, that was enough times for us to develop a tradition around it. Hannah poured the dark, evil-looking liquid.
"Always a bridesmaid," she said, raising her glass.
"And never a bride," I answered, and our glasses clinked.
The powerful whiskey burned all the way down. My eyes watered, I coughed and I almost gagged. For at least a moment, the pain almost drowned out my anxiety over the upcoming wedding.
*****
Marcus was my kryptonite, and as far as I could tell, I was his. He was an absolutely beautiful man: tall, dark, handsome, muscled, athletic, charming...yet apparently humble even to the point of being a bit shy. No woman could be blamed for feeling that love-at-first-sight spark when meeting Marcus. And, putting false modesty aside, Marcus wasn't the first man to feel that sort of spark for me.
Still, we all know that you can't always get what you want, and sometimes that means you can't act on those instant fiery passions when they arise. For instance, it's particularly frowned upon when there's a marriage involved. But when Marcus knocked on my hotel room door on the way home from his bachelor party...at 2:30 am, just eleven and a half hours before his wedding...and I answered the door in a shameless state of undress...
...well...
...the spark between us erupted in blazing glory and within minutes we were engaged in activity that wasn't technically adulterous (he wasn't actually married yet) but was way down at the wrong end of the adultery spectrum.
Okay, fine, so we had our secret fun, got it out of our system, nobody knew, I kissed him goodnight, and the next day the wedding happened as planned, and everyone lived happily ever after. Except...
Flash forward four months, and even though I hadn't seen Marcus since then, I still couldn't get him out of my head. I thought about him every day. And I knew he felt the same way, because...
"I think about you every day, Kiki," he told me when he had called me a few weeks earlier, and he said the same thing during the other four post-wedding calls he made to me.
In each of those calls, I told him he shouldn't be calling. Reminded him he was married. Told him it was a one-shot deal and he needed to let it go. Told him it was over. But I knew that even over the phone, he could feel my yearning, just as I could feel his.
There was a part of me that believed, or at least hoped, that seeing him in person at the wedding might give us some sort of closure that we couldn't get from talking over the phone. That part of me hoped that this was what I needed to get him out of my head and let me get on with my life.
There was another part of me that hoped for something very different.
*****
"Kiki, don't worry about Kimberly," Samantha had told me. "She's forgiven you."
Samantha didn't mean Kimberly had forgiven me for fucking Marcus, because she didn't know about that, and neither did anyone else besides Marcus and me, and she certainly wouldn't have forgiven me if she did know.
What Samantha meant was that Kimberly had forgiven me for the imaginary reason she'd yelled at me before her wedding. My bridesmaid's dress hadn't fit properly, and after it was altered, Bridezilla thought I looked too "slutty." Excuse me for having big tits, long legs, and a tight body.
Facing Kimberly again gave me less anxiety than seeing Marcus, but it was still going to be a challenge. I managed to swallow my anger before Kimberly's wedding, because I hadn't wanted to ruin her special day, even though I couldn't stand her. But I had already decided I wasn't going to take her shit this time.
Once we started closing in on Samantha's wedding day, my first encounter with Kimberly was, of course, the final fitting for the bridesmaids' dresses - the same event where everything had gone off the rails at Kimberly's wedding.
The bridesmaids all showed up on time, and we were working efficiently with the bridal shop employees to get fitted. Kimberly showed up half an hour late and started barking out orders to show that she, as maid of honor, was in charge. She was largely ignored because the process was going fine without her. And of course that made her frustrated and edgy.
She approached me and stood close by as a seamstress measured me. I didn't bother turning but met her eyes in the mirror.
"Hello, Kiki," she said. Her artificially sweet tone matched her fake smile.
"Kimberly," I replied without warmth.
"Hmmm...looks like your dress fits...this time," she said.
"Apparently."
Our eyes remained locked in the mirror. Her mouth opened slightly, like she was going to say something more. This would have been a perfect time for her to at least acknowledge what happened between us before, if not apologize.
It was also an opportunity for her to make another snide remark and renew the hostilities. Most of the bridesmaids in this wedding had also been at Kimberly's, so they'd seen us clash before. The room went quiet as the moment stretched.
I didn't like how close she was standing, so I flipped my long dark hair. She flinched as it passed within a couple inches of her face.
"Well," she said at last. "Well. Great." If picking another fight with me was on her agenda, she must have thought better of it.
"Oh, Allison," she called out to another girl as she turned away. "Dear, that's too tight in the waist, that won't do..."
*****
After the fitting, there was an informal buffet brunch. Members of the wedding party wandered in and out over an extended period of a couple hours, munching free food and catching up with old and new friends. Some had clearly just gotten out of bed. Some seemed to be arriving from or heading to various wedding-related events and activities. Most seemed to be in no particular hurry. Later, the day would get more hectic: we would have the rehearsal, the rehearsal dinner, and the bachelor and bachelorette parties. But this relaxed, unscripted, loosely organized brunch seemed like the best opportunity to catch a private word with Marcus.
He was serving as a groomsman in the wedding, and he was sitting at a table shooting the shit with the groom and a few others guys the same age, presumably the remainder of the groom's party. There were various other conversations going on at the other tables, and Kimberly was nowhere to be seen.
His eyes picked me up almost immediately. I felt a hot flush in my face, my body...my pussy. He was relatively subtle about it, he was still laughing and carrying on his conversation and sipping his coffee, but his eyes never left me. I did a quick tour of the buffet, grabbed a tiny pastry, and strolled casually through the dining area, exchanging smiles and brief greetings with a few people I knew.
I made eye contact with Marcus again, then wandered toward a doorway at the back of the dining room. It led onto an outdoor terrace, and at the end of the terrace there was a stairway that led down to the hotel grounds. A path led me into a small courtyard with a softly gurgling fountain.
A moment later, Marcus appeared. He stopped for a second in the courtyard entrance and his face broke into a huge smile. I wanted to be stern and serious, but my cheeks ached, I was smiling so hard. He resumed his progress toward me.
