“Four months after his father’s funeral? Oliver might take that quite badly too.”

I turned my back to the river and sat on the ground, head tucked against my knees. “Fuck, the hope-it-was-all-a-dream plan is looking really shiny right now.”

Quietly, Bridge lowered herself down beside me. “Well, I could slap you if you like, but I think you might have to accept that this actually is reality.”

She was right. It sucked, but she was right. “So it’s be married when I don’t want to be married or tell the man I love, on our wedding day, that I don’t want to marry him.”

“Yes.”

“Fuck.”

“Yes.”

I looked up, and she looked back. Sometimes I thought Bridge’s capacity for compassion was endless, but maybe it just happened to be about the same as my capacity for bullshit. I suppose in many ways that was the same thing. “Leaving somebody at the altar is a pretty shitty thing to do, isn’t it?”

Bridge nodded.

“And probably…probably he’ll dump me?” That made my stomach move in a whole new and interesting way that I wished I hadn’t learned it could move.

“I don’t know. I–I think I would.” Her nose wrinkled. “I mean, if I was standing there with Tom in front of all our friends and the vicar said, ‘Do you take this woman? and Tom said, ‘No, but I’d still like to hang out,’ I might not respond well.”

I sighed. “Guess I really should have taken the blow-job option instead?”

“That would have been simpler.” She put an arm around me. “If this doesn’t seem like a silly question, why don’t you want to be married to Oliver?”

“I guess,” I began, although I wasn’t sure how I was going to continue. “I guess because…me and Oliver… It’s always been… We shouldn’t work.”

“Oh, but you do,” Bridge insisted. “And I always knew you would.”

“You didn’t know, you happened to guess right.” I sighed. “The truth is, I don’t quite know how we’re together. And it’s not that we’re fragile, it’s just that we’re…our own thing. And marriage is its own thing. And I’m not sure those things fit.”

“You didn’t think you and Oliver would fit at all, and you did.”

“I know. But this feels wrong, and being with Oliver has never felt wrong.”

“Getting married doesn’t have to change anything,” Bridge offered. “It’s just a party and a piece of paper.”

“It’s not, though, is it?” I said. “It’s everything marriage means to everyone who’s ever been married ever, or known anybody who’s ever been married ever, or everyone who’s ever been told they can’t get married ever. It’s this huge thing that eats things, and I think it’s going to eat me and Oliver.”