What were they going to do if the two of them had married? Continued to screw each other behind her back?
One hand reached up to slip the sleeves of the gown from her shoulders, and she shimmed out of it. She allowed it to crumple against the floor in a forlorn little puddle of silk and beaded lace. It wasn’t exactly the way she’d planned undressing on her wedding night to go.
Her eyes turned to the mirror as the limo drove off and she saw the lingerie underneath everything. The corset that cinched her waist and the stockings attached to her lacy underwear. It was supposed to be her and James. He was supposed to be undressing her. He was supposed to be the one looking upon all this lingerie.
Not Eris.
Not her bridesmaids.
“I can hire you a hitman,” Eris suggested.
She flung herself onto Kallie’s bed, a half-empty glass of wine in one hand. Her bridesmaid’s dress had already been discarded in favor of a pair of ratty sweats and an old Harvard T-shirt. Kallie knew she was supposed to laugh at the comment, but she couldn’t really find it in herself to be amused. Her heart was heavy and the mess she still had to clean up was too much to bear at the moment.
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” she said.
“A mime to follow him around all day and make ‘you’re a piece of shit’ gestures in front of important people?”
“Eris.”
But a giggle did leave Kallie’s lips and it pulled a smile across her best friend’s face.
“Ugh. Fine. You’re no fun anyway.”
Her best friend took a sip of wine from the glass in her hand and walked up behind Kallie. She wrapped her free hand around Kallie’s waist and held her wineglass up to her lips. Kallie took a long pull from the glass before Eris kissed her cheek, then her fingers began to undo the tight lacing in the back of the corset.
“I just don’t think he should be allowed to get away with it without some kind of retribution. Preferably of the divine sort, but the kind I have to pay for will do in a pinch.”
“The scandal will, undoubtedly, be at least local news,” Kallie said as the corset fell from her body. “That’s probably punishment enough for a man who bases his entire personality on what other people think of him.”
Eris looked up at her, contemplative, before passing her best friend an old, ratty college shirt.
“You know, the last time I said that you told me I was wrong,” Eris said.
“The last time you said that, I hadn’t realized what an absolute tool he was.”
There was no accusation in the words, but they still stung. Eris had been entirely right about James, and Kallie had been too smitten to listen to her. So many times when her best friend had tried to, metaphorically and literally, talk some sense into her. So many signs she looked back on now that Eris had seen that she simply refused to see. She sighed heavily as she unhooked the connections holding up her innocent white stockings.
“We all make mistakes” Eris said. “I’m only glad this surfaced on the right side of ‘I do.’”
Kallie slid the stockings from her skin and reached out to Eris. Her friend tossed her a pair of jeans while her two other bridesmaids fielded people who were coming to the door. Kallie knew people wanted to talk. Wanted to see how she was doing. Her parents. Her cousins. Uncles and aunts. But her bridesmaids knew how she worked and they knew she wasn’t ready to talk.
Kallie was grateful for it all as Eris wrapped her up in a hug.
“It’s easier to kick the asshole to the curb when you’re not legally bound to him.”
“It doesn’t make it hurt any less, though,” Kallie said.
“I know.”
“Maybe the limo will get into a car accident.”
“That’s the spirit,” Eris said.
“You know, I saw her get in there with him.”
“What?” Eris asked.
“Yeah. James, his mother, his father, and her. They all got in together.”