After he’d made the long walk down the aisle—in my mind, Oliver elbowed me and said, The nave, Lucien. The aisle is the bit down the side—there was a suitable pause before Miffy made her entrance. And it was significantly more entrancey. In retrospect, I wasn’t sure why Alex had been so keen to avoid seeing her before the wedding because the gown—and the five others she would be wearing over the course of the weekend—had probably been thoroughly profiled on Instagram and in multiple lifestyle magazines. To be fair, it deserved to be, on account of being a designer masterpiece in silk and lace, modern without being trendy, timeless without being fussy, and with a train that said Fuck off. I am taking up all the space, and I don’t care, but without running all the way out the door like Bridge’s had.

On the earl’s arm, Miffy proceeded down the nave like, well, like a princess. Not like a fairy-tale princess or a princess in a movie. Like an actual, real-world princess. Which is to say, like an incredibly rich, incredibly entitled person living out a social role she’d been groomed for her entire life.

When she reached the altar, she put back her exquisite veil and let it trail behind her. And I hoped to God, inappropriately given the context, that it was going to be a short service. Because I was already at my limit for grace and/or favour.

“A wedding,” began the vicar, or rather, from the robes, the actual bishop, “is one of life’s great moments, a time of solemn commitment as well as good wishes, feasting, and joy. Saint John tells us how Jesus shared in such an occasion at Cana…”

Oh no. We’d been here for fifteen seconds, and we were already getting a story about Jesus and some people who couldn’t be bothered to hire decent caterers. I guess I’d kind of forgotten, or let myself forget, just how, like, God-centric a full-on religious ceremony could be. And as much as I’d found the all-the-rainbows-all-the-queer-iconography-all-the-time setup of Miles and JoJo’s wedding a bit extra, this thing we were doing now was way weirder. I mean, we were sitting in a medieval building while a man in a triangular hat read to us out of a two-thousand-year-old book.

“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” the bishop was saying, “the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you.”

“And also with you,” chorused literally everybody else.