The Gift of Cold Feet

A quick, steamy little interlude between a jilted bride and a maid of honor who had never dared to hope for a chance with her. Expect f/f oral and fingering. Enjoy!

***

I want to say I had a feeling this would happen. I

did

have that feeling, but not in some kind of useful, psychic way. It felt just like any other intrusive thought.

I told myself it was normal. Jitters. Like everyone must have on their wedding day.

I breathed my way through hair and makeup and final fit check, and tried to smile and laugh along with my bridesmaids at the right intervals, as they tended to the details on my behalf. I hoped they'd forgive any odd moments when I reacted wrong. I could barely hear the conversation at all over the steady ringing in my ears.

They could have been discussing politics, TV dramas, or the arrival of a space alien envoy, and I wouldn't have been the wiser.

But when Taylor, my maid of honor, checked her phone, stepped out of the room, and came back ten minutes later with the gravest of looks on her face, I knew.

I knew what that look was for, and it wasn't a broken sound system or spoiled catering.

"He's not coming," I said out loud, before Taylor had to get the words out herself.

Her tears spilled over, hot and bright on her face, while mine were still frozen behind my eyes.

"My idiot brother...." She shook her head furiously, and wiped her face quickly with the back of her wrist. "He says he made a mistake, that he realized he's too young--"

"He's thirty-one," the first spark of my own anger snapped out of my mouth, but with the rest of my body still numb, it almost felt as if it were coming from somewhere outside myself.

"I did say he was an idiot," said Taylor. "I'm so sorry, Shannon."

I nodded.

"Excuse me," I said, and pushed past Taylor to the door, without meeting the eyes of any of my friends. Their shocked silence felt like a vacuum, a force trying to suck me back into the room, where I would suffocate. I pulled away and walked down the hall, focusing on the strange realness of my heels striking the wooden floor.

It didn't seem like solid objects and flat, level surfaces should still exist in the world, and yet here they were, functioning just the way they were supposed to. It was perverse.

I walked down the beautiful, stubbornly solid spiral staircase of the reception hall, and wove my way between the empty tables, with their perfect rose and lily centerpieces.

"Can I get a cabernet?" I asked the man who was setting up the bar.

He looked up at me, arms full of bottles, and glanced around like he was checking for someone else's permission. We were currently the only two people in this hall set for a hundred.

He set the bottles down, hurried through uncorking one, and shook a few clinging flakes of packing material off the first pretty little stem glass out of the box.

"Congratulations," he said, pouring me a couple inches of the rich, red liquid.

"More." I gestured urgently, keeping him pouring until the glass was mostly full.

By the time I let him go back to setting up, he was looking concerned enough that I doubted he'd congratulate me again.

I'd made it halfway through the glass by the time more footsteps echoed into the hall, but I still wasn't ready for them. I drank my way to the bottom and pushed the glass back toward the bartender for more, right as Taylor leaned against the bar next to me.

At least there wasn't a train of other people filing in behind her.

She waved and nodded to the bartender, who poured her a modest glass and then refilled mine, eyes flicking back and forth between us.

Taylor sipped beside me, a silent shadow.

Finally, she said, "I'll take care of the crowd. What would you like me to say?"

I shrugged.

Our friends and families were gathered in chairs out in the rose garden not fifty feet away. If I listened hard, I could hear the dull roar of a restless crowd. I couldn't make out words, but I could make some guesses.

These things always start late

.

Last minute primping time

.

Right about now, one or another of the aging uncles who fancied themselves comedians was probably making a joke about how someone must be taking too long chasing down the groom.

I drank.

"So, I'll tell them the truth?" Taylor suggested. "I'd rather not cover for him in any way."

I shrugged again. "Okay."

Taylor sighed. "Seriously, this is so fucked."

"No arguments," I said.

"He's going to regret this for the rest of his life."

"Maybe."

Taylor snorted. "No, not maybe. He's going to come crying back sooner or later, I'm calling it now."

I knew she meant this to be comforting, but I couldn't muster a corresponding reaction. It didn't do me any good for my fiancé -- my

ex

, I thought for the first time -- to be miserable. Even if he crawled into the hall on his knees right now to tell me that he'd made a horrible mistake, it wouldn't undo the hurt of knowing that he hadn't wanted to be here with all his heart.

And aside from that, though I wouldn't say so to Taylor while she was all up in arms for me... I couldn't just switch off caring about him. The thought of him in pain still hurt.

"Don't take this wrong," said Taylor. "But getting with you so early on was the worst thing that could have happened to him."

I waited patiently for the punchline. It wasn't like I had an aisle to walk down or anything.

"That fucking ruined him," said Taylor. "Just gave him this

way

inflated view of the kind of person who'd give him the time of day, let alone how much of his shit they'd put up with. If he wants time to 'play the field' or whatever, he's in for a rude awakening."

I drank.

"If his life had happened in a different order, maybe he would have been different," she sighed. "Maybe he'd get what it meant to have

you

waiting for him in a white dress. I mean, I'll tell you, if it had been

me

--" Taylor broke off and looked away, but even unfinished, her sentence stayed in the air.

I looked at her. She was staring down into her glass now, her dark hair hanging loose over her shoulder between us. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen her in a dress. The sage green chiffon and satin I'd chosen for my bridesmaids almost made her look like a different person from the leather and denim punk I'd known since high school. She wore both looks with equal ease. I had always been more than a little jealous of the fact that no one had yet found a

bad

look for Taylor.

I guess the consistency of her usual fashion sense had helped me tune out the static her beauty produced in my head, because the novelty of seeing her dolled up had brought it back with a vengeance.

I touched my fist casually to her shoulder to get her attention back.

Sparkling false eyelashes amplified every movement of her eyes as they settled cautiously on mine.

"You're doing what anyone would do for a friend left at the altar right now," I said softly, deliberately. "Telling me that it's his problem. His loss. That I'm good enough to be wanted. A catch. You'd do the same for anyone in my position that you even halfway cared about. Wouldn't you?"

I watched the details of her face, the faint lines of her forehead, expecting to see some sign of relief, and then maybe a laugh at the very idea that what she'd said could have come across any other way.

I couldn't find either.

She rested her forearm along the bar, with her hand brushing my glass, and leaned her face a little closer.

"Sure," she said, straight-faced and utterly unconvincing. "I'd say the same to anyone, in exactly the same way."

I was not sane in that moment. I knew I might not see my right mind again for a good long while, and I couldn't trust the input of my senses, not even when what they were telling me seemed this obvious. The last thing I needed right now was to push away the one person I knew whose presence was currently not unbearable, by lurching and pawing at her like a life preserver.

So, I held back, pretended I was not drowning, and placed my hand as gently as I could on top of hers.

She placed her other hand more firmly on top of mine, and leaned closer, closer, until it was fully impossible to mistake her intent. She made me cross only the last millimeter myself.

As soon as our lips actually touched, something shifted in Taylor, and her movements became quicker, less controlled. Her free arm wrapped around my waist and pulled me firmly against her, and she shuffled her feet a couple steps out toward the dance floor, so that she could push my back against the standing bar.

Her teeth nipped at my lips, not painfully, but hungrily.

At the first moment when she pulled her mouth away from mine, to kiss and nip her way down my neck instead, I murmured, "What the fuck are we doing?"

"I don't know," Taylor breathed against my collarbone, her teeth grazing the skin there.

"What is this

day?

"

"Ridiculous, right?"

"Are you going to regret this, the next time you have to talk to your brother?" I ask.

"No," she said, with the confidence of deep consideration long finished.

"...Am I?" I asked.

"God, I hope not." Taylor pulled back a matter of an inch to look at me. "What do you think?"

I couldn't think. I just kissed her again, tangling my fingers in the whisp of chiffon that cascaded down her back.

The glasses moved behind me on the bar, and I jumped and twisted around to apologize, thinking I'd knocked them over.

The bartender froze at my sudden movement, glasses in his hands, awkwardness and sadness mingled together on his face. He set them down a little farther away from us.

"I'm... so sorry," he said, haltingly. "There's... there's a coatroom." He nodded across the ballroom, behind us. "In case you want to... hang up some coats."

I laughed for the first time since the news came down. It felt so much better than I thought it should. My whole body shook, and I leaned into Taylor's bare shoulder to keep my balance. We could not have had less to hang up between us, without being completely naked.

I took her hand, and stepped unsteadily toward the unassuming door the bartender had pointed out.

"Thanks," I said over my shoulder.

He nodded, and then must have had another thought after I turned away.

"Should I keep setting up?" he called out.

Taylor put a hand out behind her in some kind of signal, telling him to wait, I guess. I couldn't look back again. The door was almost in reach. The knob was under my hand. It was open, and Taylor and I were stumbling together into the dark.

"Help me with this," she said, gathering up the cascading layers of tulle and lace that made up my skirt. I grabbed what she handed me and held it up, so that she could reach for the next layer, and then the next.

It seemed to take forever before her hands finally brushed my bare thighs.

She sank down to her knees in front of me, and I don't think I could have accepted feeling her face getting farther from mine, if I hadn't understood what she was about to do.

Her fingers played with the edges of my thong. It was light blue -- my lucky something blue -- with the words "Just Married" crammed onto the tiny triangle of fabric. She tried to push it to one side, but was a tight, inflexible, altogether uncomfortable piece.

"Just rip it," I whispered to her.

"Whatever you say." She dug her fingers under the waistband and jerked it in two directions. The tight intrusion of the lace along my ass got briefly, painfully tighter, and then there was a loud snap of stitches, and it was gone.

Taylor's breath rustled what little remained of my pubic hair, after the brutal waxing I'd volunteered for at our bachelorette spa trip. Her lips touched the lips of my pussy, with the same forced caution she had used to touch them to my mouth. I braced my shoulders against the wall and pressed my hips out toward her, and just like that first kiss, the closeness broke her reserve.

She pressed her tongue firmly to my clit, and I let out a moan, not really caring if that poor, kind bartender could hear us through the coatroom window. I was already shivering, shuddering, vibrating all over with the energy of her touch. She was barely even moving, just slowly sliding the flat of her tongue a few millimeters from side to side, but even that steady pressure was an overwhelming pleasure of its own. Taylor's tongue was the first solid thing that felt good, the first thing I was glad was still here, no matter how completely the rug had been pulled out from under me today.

"Oh god." I could feel myself wrinkling my skirt, wringing it in my hands, but I didn't care. "This... how did we get here?"

She swirled her tongue in a slow circle, then hardened it and probed it inside me.

I twisted my fingers into her hair, wanting to feel more of her, to connect more of me with the rhythm of her movement.

"Fuck, I wish you could kiss me everywhere at once," I said. "I wish I could kiss

you

."

Her tongue retracted from inside me, leaving a horrible emptiness, but only for a moment. Two fingertips probed my opening and then pushed in, stretching and curling, even more solid than her tongue.

She pressed her other hand to the wall behind me for balance as she stood up, to bring her face back to mine.

"Better?" she asked, kissing me in quick, short bursts, pulling back far enough to focus on my eyes in between each one. The dim light caught the glitter in her makeup, making her look like something otherworldly.

"Much," I said, and caught her lower lip between my teeth, sucking the heady tang of myself off of her.

She flicked her thumb back and forth over my clit, squeezing her fingertips toward that pressure, working my nerves from both sides at once. It was getting difficult just to stay standing, even with the steadiness of the wall behind me.

Taylor's movement, as delicious as it was, felt dizzying, like leaning back on two legs of a chair, and I was afraid we might both topple. I dropped my skirts, letting them rest on her wrist, and wrapped my arms around her. I cupped her ass in my hands, trying to gather our gyrating gravity toward a tighter, more stable center.

Our legs interlaced slightly, but the narrower skirt of her dress stopped my knee dead after just a few inches. I had to get it out of the way.

I gathered the satin up to her hips, one handful at a time, until her naked thighs were on mine. She was grinding on me roughly through her panties, at the same pace that she was hooking her fingers into me, hammering against a spot that sent hot and cold tingles radiating out through all my limbs.

"God, you feel even better than I imagined," Taylor whispered against my lips.

"You too," I said, reaching down to press my palm against her, through the thin satin of her underwear.

"So you

have

thought about me that way before," Taylor said, lifting one eyebrow, while the rest of her face bloomed into an expression of pure, uncontrolled joy.

"I didn't mean to," I said.

"Oh, you think I meant to?" asked Taylor. "You were my brother's girlfriend!"

"You were my boyfriend's sister."

"What naughty thoughts did you have about me anyway?" she asked, and gently bit my ear.

"I don't even know," I said.

"Sure you do."

Her thumb switched from a back and forth flick to a slow, firm, unending circle, right on my clit. I took in a rough breath. Speaking was suddenly ten time harder, but Taylor's eyes still demanded a response.

"I don't... I worked so hard not to look at them, those thoughts," I tried to explain. "I wrestled them out of sight. I dressed them up as other things. I imagined taking your clothes off, and told myself it was because I wanted to try them on myself."

"What's the biggest stretch you ever made to explain me out of your head?" she asked, spreading her fingers apart inside me, like the karma of those stretches coming back to me.

I slipped my own fingers under her panties and found my way inside her, searching for the slightest upper hand in the conversation. She sighed and ground her clit into my palm, but she didn't miss a beat in her work on me.

"I..." I was gasping between words. "I had a dream about you, a couple years ago," I admitted. "We were at your old house, lying on the floor in the basement like we used to. And you rolled on top of me. We started grinding on each other's thighs, like it was a joke at first, and then it wasn't. I realized that your brother was going to be home soon, and I said it, but I couldn't make myself stop. And you said it was okay, that he'd understand it didn't count because our clothes were still on."

Taylor laughed and reached her free hand down the bodice of my wedding dress to pinch and roll one of my nipples.

"Like they are right now?" she asked.

"Well, we were in jeans in the dream," I said. "But yeah."

"I guess that's a pretty big stretch," Taylor said, drumming her fingers hard against the inside of me. "Thinking

this

doesn't count."

"I never thought that, even in the dream," I said, matching the beat of her fingers with mine. "The stretch was waking up and telling myself that dreams don't mean anything."

She laughed again, and quickened the circles of her thumb.

"That one was almost prophetic," she whispered.

"Mmm," was all the response I could give. It was a miracle I'd stayed coherent for as long as I had.

"I'm going to cum on your hand, now," she whispered in my ear, breathless but superhumanly focused, pressing her clit harder into my palm, fucking my fingers at a pace all her own.

"Do it," I gasped. "While I can still stand."

I gave up on trying to control any part of this. I closed my eyes and floated in the sensation of her riding my thigh and hand, fucking me with hers, sending matching pulses of tingling intensity through me with steady little pinches of my nipple.

Suddenly, she bit my shoulder, and cried out into it, practically holding herself up her teeth.

The flash of pain set me off like firework, and my knees went weak with the explosion of pleasure. I heard myself, louder than Taylor, and searched for some part of her to muffle myself with. I ended up with my face pressed between her breasts. Somehow, even still in the grips of what looked like a crushing orgasm, Taylor managed to support me from the inside, cradling my pelvis in her hand.

We stayed upright until the waves passed, and we could safely disentangle ourselves and sink down to the floor in each other's arms.

We breathed together wordlessly for I couldn't tell how long. Questions from outside this coatroom seeped uninvited back into my head.

"How are we going to tell people about this?" I asked.

"You want me to go out there and describe it to them?" Taylor joked. "I was kinda thinking all that was just for us, but if you want me to--"

I punched her shoulder lightly.

"I

meant

... things are going to be different after this, aren't they? This wasn't some kind of one-time comfort fuck."

"Not if you don't want it to be," she said, suddenly serious. "I swear, I never expected this. I never planned it. But I wanted it, and I could never stop wanting it."

I wrapped my arm tighter around her, first to let her know that I wasn't going anywhere, and then because I hated the thought of letting any space between us.

"Fuck, is it tacky to announce, 'here's my new girlfriend' at your own wedding?" I sighed. "Do we have to hide this for a week or a month or something? I'm not sure I can."

Taylor shrugged. "You're the one who got stood up for no reason. I'm not sure anything you could do right now counts as tacky."

I shifted onto my side and brushed her hair behind her ear.

"I want to hold your hand in public," I said. "I want to tell everyone, this is her. She's the reason I'm anything close to okay. I want to dance with you in a crowded room."