BRIDE-TO-BE, TOASTED
PART ONE
The night before Meredith's wedding was one of the the all-time Meredith-is-a-drunk-slut nights. Meredith and I have been friends for a long, long, long, long-ass time, to put it in the language of Meredith's crude, Dumbfuck-Ohio friends.
Meredith was herself from Dumbfuck, Ohio. We met pledging the same decent sorority at a shitty college outside of Dumbfuck, Pittsburg.
Meredith, to her credit, while she constantly did dumbfuck things, and has done, and did since, and is still doing dumbfuck things, of course, such as the marriage and the night before the marriage, does not speak in a dumbfuck way.
Her trashy, mostly-Ohio (but some Pittsburg) friends, speak dumbfuck and uneducated and inelegantly, unlike Meredith, unlike me, but those friends of Meredith went on, from our adequate but maybe kinda shitty sorority, to lives as nurses. Seeing them at weddings and life events, over the years since graduation, it is like running into the same group of drinking, smoking, cursing, hot-bedding sailors, who happen to have an alarmingly shorthanded language for life, death, and the seemingly innumerable body horrors that humans are capable of experiencing, and that other humans are somehow capable of responding to in a hopefully helpful manner.
They spend their days with shit and worse up to their elbows. And they drink.
The drinking is what probably attached Meredith to these women in the first place. By the time of her wedding, Meredith had been drinking to blackouts for as long as I had known her and had never showed any signs of stopping or needs to stop.
Fast forward since then, and Meredith is getting married a lot later than she had originally planned, back in college.
So you can do the math. It had been a lot of years of blackouts. Some years, in our thirties, I saw her maybe once a year, for some girls' trip or somebody's babyshower, or just because we were, like, in the same city at the same time, or at some college alumni event or whatever. Social media used to make it much more about having cool, casual meet-ups like that, unexpectedly. Serendipitously.
But every time, Meredith would have one night during those hang-out trips, of drinking to blackout.
And not every night that she blacked out, would she hookup. But, yeah. Less as she got older, but when we were younger, especially right after college in our twenties when we were both living in the same city?
Damn!
Let's just say, from college to today, that girl got herself on some men with the regularity, and while the men she posted on social media over the years about her being "in a relationship" with always tended to look a fairly certain way, when Meredith was partying with her girls, she did not discriminate, not in that way, oh no.
Handsome, clean, successful-looking, yes. That was Meredith type. She was the sorority girl who fucked, but she only fucked the Presidents of the Fraternities.
And even if he was way too old, far too old, for Meredith to ever take him home to Dumbfuck, Ohio to meet her hard-drinking parents, way too old and too age-inappropriate for Meredith to list him as "in a relationship with" on her social media, if he made the conversation about his Divorce, and his Boat, and his Mercedes and his Other Mercedes, he would have Meredith's thong panties off and her bare, bald pussy bouncing up and down on his successful-man's cock of showy materialism, maybe even in that Mercedes he drove to the bar in that night, while her friends make tipsy small-talk back inside.
For Meredith, it would not be the first time. She's been fucking in bar parking lots for quickies since at least we were Juniors. That I know about. That I've personally seen and watched happen.
However, it might be the first time that time in Cleveland. Or in Baltimore. Most of these girls' trips were organized by Meredith's nurse friends, and they scattered throughout the Ohio Valley and across both sides of the Appalachians. Sometimes they would go on a destination trip to Vegas or Miami or New Orleans, but as they got older, these womens' weekends of gossip and drinking generally came to take place in one of the dumbfuck locales where the nurses had settled, some, as they got older, with first or second husbands, none of whom were ever doctors, none of whom ever joined their wives.
These were girls' only trips, and never in a city where one of the married women lived.
It was easy for Meredith to pull men when she was out and safe with her friends. Bars had been her regular spots since forever. She knew the rules, she respected the staff and always tipped generously. Meredith was, like her parents, a friendly drunk. Full of bonhomie and camaraderie.
She was patient, and cautious, and never made moves with men until the hour was quite late and everyone was as drunk and as approved by her friend group as they could be.
All her dating life, Meredith was cute and sweet and looked like the girl next door. She always dressed hella femme because she was hella femme, a girly-girl even in her twenties and thirties, with curly hair that men loved to pull and she loved for them to pull.
With handful tits that men loved to suck on and squeeze, and so did she love it when they did, Meredith's sweet and available chest always got her attention.
With a tummy always kept flat enough from disciplined diet, never eating when she drank, casual exercise, and greek genes on her father's side, Meredith always presented a cute package for strangers hands.
And, I think she, like, had been a full-wax girl since college, so when those lucky strangers got this adorable cutie home with them, they found her smooth and soft and touchable and kissable.
Which I know she always made them do, because while Meredith was not a lover of giving head, claiming too many bad experiences that she refused to come to terms with, she was an absolute pillow princess when it came to receiving head.
When we went out, we were classy girls, you know, but Meredith was an expert at dressing in ways that were totally sophisticated, totally trendy-but-never-trashy, ways that always seemed to get a handsome, fit, successful-looking man to have his hand on her by the end of the night.
Like, some guy would buy her a drink, late in the night, and we girls would be at our table, and she would go over and sit at the bar and talk to this guy whom she had been making eye contact with off-and-on for like, whoever knows. And, then, some time would go by and then, once you looked over at the bar, and Meredith and he were chatting furiously about who knows what, and his hand was on her hip and just kinda, hanging out there, I mean like, she was wearing a wrap dress and everything was where it should be, but this guy whom we had met maybe one drink ago had his hand on her hip as they were both sitting next to each other at the bar, and like, yeah, when we left maybe an hour later, she left with him.
I am sure Meredith does not remember half of the men she hooked up with in those years.
I do know that any boyfriends she had, had to put up with seeing those Magnum condoms in Meredith's drawer. They had to be okay with that. It was always a clear sign Meredith left out about where she had been. You know, prior to the new relationship. She did not flaunt it, but she never, ever pretended otherwise.
Now, before your morality police get all judgy-judgy, this is but one side of an incredibly complex and accomplished woman.
She has a college degree; an unblemished and unbroken work history since graduation.
Her graduate-degree, she got part-time over several years, while working (and partying) full-time. She has always been on-time and alert at work, her career is one of promotions and lateral moves to higher positions. By the time she has that wild pre-wedding night, she has been elevated to an equity-track position at her real estate management company.
