Yours, Whether You Like It Or Not

The dress was Cormac's favourite colour. That was why she picked it. Not because she liked it, it was a bit too tight across the shoulders and the burgundy made her look washed out, but because she knew he would notice and say something nice and that would make the whole night better. That was how a lot of her decisions worked these days. She rarely did what she wanted but what made things easier. She stood in front of the mirror and did her mascara and told herself she was just nervous. Normal engagement party nerves. Normal pre-wedding anxiety that every woman felt and got through and then looked back on and laughed about. Her Dad knocked on her bedroom door and asked if she was ready and she said yes and smiled at herself in the mirror. The venue was beautiful, she would give Cormac that. He had good taste and the money to do something about it and the result was a room full of candles and flowers and people in expensive clothes who all turned and smiled when she walked in. Her Dad squeezed her hand. Someone took a photo. A woman she barely knew hugged her and said she was glowing. She was not glowing. She was wearing good foundation. Cormac kissed her cheek when she found him and told her she looked stunning and for about twenty minutes things were fine. He was charming when he wanted to be. He steered her around the room with his hand on her back and introduced her to people and laughed at the right moments and she thought okay, this is fine, I can do this. Then someone pulled him into a conversation about work and she got absorbed into a group of his mother's friends and the next time she looked up he was gone. She was not worried. It was a big venue. He was probably at the bar or outside getting some air or talking to his cousin who had just arrived from Edinburgh. She got herself a drink and spent twenty minutes talking to her Dad who was having the time of his life, pink-cheeked and happy in a way that made her feel guilty about the tightness in her chest. After another half hour she started looking properly. The main room. Nothing. The garden, where a group of Cormac's friends were smoking and laughing and told her they hadn't seen him in a while. The room off the side where the coats were. The bar. She did a full loop of the ground floor and came up empty and told herself she was being ridiculous, he was at his own engagement party, he was hardly going to disappear. She went upstairs. The hallway was quieter up there. The noise from the party below came up muffled and soft. There were three doors. Two of them dark underneath. The third one, the guest room at the end, had a thin line of yellow light running along the bottom. She walked toward it slowly. She did not know why she was walking slowly. She did not know why her stomach had dropped the way it had. She just knew something felt wrong in the specific way that something had felt slightly wrong for months and she had kept talking herself out of it. She stopped outside the door. The room was not silent. She stood there and the sounds coming from inside arranged themselves into something her brain tried to reject for a full three seconds before it couldn't anymore. A rhythm, deep and heavy breathing. Her hand came up toward the door handle and then stopped. And then she heard it. Her best friend's voice. Breathy and low and moaning her fiancé’s name.