There are quite a few things a groom might expect to hear from his best man on the night before his wedding. Things such as “I’m so fucking happy for you, Dude,” “Thank you for having me by your side,” or, if he’s the sentimental type, maybe “I’m so glad I can support you in this journey.”
Hell, some best men that double as jokesters, like my best man Kevin is known to be, might say something like “How’s it feel to be living the last free day of your life?” Or “Let me know how you feel about her after she becomes your old ball and chain.”
There’s one thing you really don’t expect your best man to say on such an occasion, though, and that would be what Kevin just told me.
“I fucked your fiancée.”
Of course, he didn’t say it exactly like that. He was more hesitant and self-preserving about it. The prick.
What he actually said was: “Gregory, pal, I’ve been thinking a lot about whether or not to tell you this, buddy. People have advised me not to. But it’s been eating me alive and I figured it’s better to tell you now rather than later. Meredith and I slept together.”
“What the fuck?” I’d exploded.
I would’ve hit him on the head if there weren’t so many people around. That’s probably why he timed his little confession to be in public, even if the occasion was my rehearsal dinner party.
“You slept with her? How could you? And when?”
He gave me a deer in the headlights look, as if he wasn’t anticipating follow-up questions to his bombshell announcement.
“Which question should I answer first?” he finally asked.
“You’re so fucking unbelievable,” I said.
“I don’t know how it happened,” he sputtered. “You know how it is. We were all on that trip for your singles’ tour around the States…”
“No, I don’t know how it is,” I’d told him. And then I said, “Wait, back up. That’s when it happened? Way back then? And that’s where it happened?”
“Well,” he’d stammered, and from the way he was responding, it dawned on me that I’d been asking the wrong question. Maybe I should have asked where didn’t it happen.
“So, this whole time, ever since then, she’s never told me that after she hooked up with me she also hooked up with you, but then she stayed with me and had a really good weekend with me? Fuck!”
“I guess,” Kevin answered, looking down at the floor like the pussy that he is. “I mean, it didn’t exactly stop right then…”
“What?!” I exploded all over again. “How long did it last?”
“Well, you know I had to come here on royal business a couple months ago…”
“Are you fucking kidding me? You’ve seen her more recently than I have?”
“Yeah,” he continued. “And then we got here, you hit the sack early, so…”
“What the fuck!”
Now he could stop telling me the answers to my questions, I’d thought. Apparently, I didn’t really want to know all of that.
“I had motion sickness from the plane!” I protested. “I had to go lie down.”
“Yeah, well, I guess she was kinda bored…”
“You are the worst friend I’ve ever had,” I told him. “I can’t believe you agreed to be my best man when you are fucking my fiancée. She seems almost as much your fiancée as mine by this point!”
“Well, that’s the thing,” Kevin said, sheepishly. “I wasn’t even quite sure that you’d… you know, like, care? Remember when we shared that girl on our backpacking trip throughout Europe?”
“That was completely different,” I told him. “We were nineteen fucking years old. We were never going to see that girl again.”
“Well, that’s all I thought that this is going to be, too,” he said. “It’s not like you’re the type to settle down so I was even planning to tell you about it and all of a sudden you’re like, “Oh, she’s the one, she’s my new princess!’ and I was like, thinking, ‘well, now I sure can’t fucking tell him.’”
“Well you sure kept doing it,” I told him. “You didn’t feel that bad, you didn’t have much of a guilty conscience… to just, like, fucking stop.”
“True,” he said, wringing his hands. “But, still, I mean, you know… This is all just some fake thing. It’s not like you really love her anything.”
That’s when I looked in his eyes and did my best to refrain from punching him, or crying. But the truth of the matter is: Kevin was right. I didn’t love her. I’ve never loved anyone. I was just doing this to make my family happy. I guess she was just doing it to be a princess. As I’d already said, who wouldn’t?
I suppose I got caught up in trying to prove to my mom that I had made the right choice in someone to marry, when clearly, I hadn’t. This is probably a good thing this didn’t last.
Except, what am I going to do about tomorrow? My mom will be so hurt if I don’t go through with this plan to make our family look good for the rest of the Kingdom.
After that unpleasant exchange, I went and found Meredith and had an even worse one with her. She seemed to think it was all fun and games, and that she was free to do whatever until we were officially and royally hitched.
“Fuck that,” I’d told her. “When did we ever say that? How do I know you wouldn’t keep running around after we had gotten married?”
“What are you saying, Gregory?” she’d asked me, tears welling in her eyes, starting to beg me. “I was going to give up my whole life for you. My acting career. To move to the middle of nowhere to be your wife…”
“Yeah, well it’s not the middle of nowhere,” I’d told her. “For the tenth time, it’s off the coast of Latvia and Estonia, in the Baltic Sea. And you are so full of promises of what you were going to give up for me, but you’re also full of shit, because you couldn’t even give up not fucking my best man. Get out of here before I tell everyone in here what you did to me.”
That worked. She clearly cared what people thought, just like my mom, but not enough to not screw around on me. She’d left and I was standing there alone like an idiot but I didn’t even care because I was glad she was gone.
George, one of my groomsmen, took me to the bar to buy me a shot, but I was still in a blind rage. That was a few minutes ago, and I’m still feeling that way. I also need to figure out what I’m going to do.
So here I am by myself wanting to have another drink but in a secluded bar, never wanting to go back to see all of those people again. I especially don’t want to have to see my mom right now.
I sip my whiskey sour while I think about what to do. I can’t let down my mom, my poor sick dad, and the whole royal family tree. Possibly the whole fucking country, as small and obscure as it may be.
I need to figure something out, some way to fix things. I sit my drink down and order another one because I know that sooner or later I’ll have to go back and face reality and I might as well do it with some liquid courage.
I decide I have to go through with things anyway. No one even knows what my fiancée looks like. Tonight was a fucking costume party. She’s never been to my country and we were very careful to keep pictures of us from being splattered all over the tabloids when we were together. I agreed to it as part of the deal with my mom. And I hate the damn paparazzi anyway.
So, I just have to find a girl. A replacement bride. A pretend princess.
I’m sure that just like Meredith wanted to, almost any girl would jump at the chance to be a princess, even if it was a fake princess of sorts. That’s what Meredith would’ve been anyway.
I just need to find a girl. Any girl will do.
And as the waitress returns with my next drink, one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen climbs down the stairs in a funky dress that looks half dirty and half sparkling gorgeous, and she runs right into me.
That’s my girl, I think to myself, and I revise my earlier plan in my head. Not just any girl will do. It’s clear to me now.
Looking at her hourglass shaped figure and her gorgeous blue eyes, I know that it has to be this girl. She’s going to be my fake bride. My princess. I just have to convince her to stand in at my royal wedding, which is set to occur in under twenty-four hours.