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It was a small ring—a thin circle of tasteful gold with a single small inlaid diamond. It was still in the velvet box from the store and that velvet box felt heavy in the pocket of Dan’s suit jacket. In a few hours, Dan would pass that ring to Phil who would slide the precious metal onto someone’s finger. Someone else’s finger.
Dan shut his eyes, letting out a tremor of a breath. Keep yourself together, mate.
He sat down on the edge of his bed and started to pull on a pair of shoes. They were shiny and black, but a little tight and uncomfortable around his toes. He’d bought them online—without trying them on—like Phil had told him not to.
“Don’t do it, Danny,” Phil had said. “You can’t buy shoes without trying them on.”Dan didn’t listen because he was stubborn and the shoes had looked cool. So he’d bought them and was now destined to have at least one blister on each foot by the time the day was over. With a sigh, he laced them up and tried not to think about the pain.
Dan had gotten really good at not thinking about the pain.
He stood up and brushed some lint off his dress pants.
There was a knock at the door, then June’s hushed “Can I come in?”
A lump grew in his throat. “Yeah, come in.”
The door to his bedroom squealed as June slipped inside. She was a bright spark of white with her lacy cap sleeves and a loose chiffon skirt that draped over seven months of a baby bump.
“Can you, um, I can’t reach the zipper in the back?” She pointed at her back. “It’s bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the wedding and you know Phil.”
“Yeah.” Dan put on a smile. “We were all here for the great Mirror Breaking Incident.”
Phil had accidentally broke June’s makeup mirror when they were moving her stuff into the flat, and every minor inconvenience for the next three months was, to Phil, a result of that broken mirror.
Dan walked over to June. He pinched the small zip and tugged it up slowly. “There you go.”
“Thanks, Dan.” She turned to face him, her lips upturned into a nervous smile. “How do I look?”
“Not bad at all.”
She’d curled the ends of her strawberry blond hair, and done up her makeup a little more than normal. Her lips were pretty pink and rosy. She didn’t look not bad. She looked beautiful. She had always been beautiful, from that day she’d shown up their doorstep holding a positive pregnancy test. Her cheeks had been tear stained, but she’d still had this look of defiance to her. At the time, he probably shouldn’t have been thinking about how pretty she was, but he couldn’t help it. And he couldn’t help hating her a little bit for it too.
He didn’t hate her anymore.
Over the last seven months, Phil had fallen in love with June and Dan had fallen out of hate with her. He wouldn’t say he liked her. Dan wasn’t a saint. But he didn’t hate her. She’d shown herself to not be like the worst person in the world.
He guessed if Phil had to fall in love with someone who wasn’t him he would pick that person to be June. But that was it. That was the total and complete amount of happiness he could muster for them. The only thing Dan could do now was grin and bear it.
June sighed and smoothed her hands over her belly bump. “This is so not how I pictured my wedding.”
Dan just put on what he hoped looked like a sympathetic smile. He had never pictured anything like this either.
There was another knock at the door. It had to be Phil.
“Don’t come in,” June said, ducking behind Dan. “I’m in here.”
“I know,” Phil said through the door. “I won’t. I just wanted to say your cousin just called and she won’t be able to make it.”
“W-what?” June asked. “Why?”
“Food poisoning, I guess,” Phil said. “I’m so sorry, June.”
“It’s…it’s okay. Thanks for telling me,” June said. But Dan could see the quiver in her bottom lip.
“The car will be here in like fifteen minutes, okay?” Phil said.
“Yeah, that’s good.”
“Dan, you ready too?” Phil’s voice came a little quieter this time.
The words stuck a little in his throat. “Yeah, yes.”
After that, Dan heard footsteps as Phil walked away.
June just sort of plonked down on the side of Dan’s bed. “This is really not how I pictured this day. Rebecca isn’t coming now. None of my friends. Not even my parents.”
“I’m sorry, June.” He was. That was pretty shitty that her parents hadn’t even replied to multiple invitations. That was objectively shitty.
“I’m seven months pregnant and we’re taking a cab to the courthouse. It’s not how I pictured… I always wanted a traditional… and there’s no tradition in this at all.”
Dan couldn’t believe he actually felt sorry for June. He assumed that part of him was just boarded up and off, but here she was seven months pregnant and teary eyed on her wedding day.
Dan noticed a ring of royal blue on his computer desk. He had taken the bracelets he normally wore off his wrists because they were worn and stringy and didn’t go well with a formal suit. But one of them… one of them was blue.
“You want tradition, eh?” Dan said.
June looked at Dan with a small crease in her brow. Then, he walked over to his desk and pulled the blue string bracelet out the pile and then walked back over to June.
“Give me your wrist,” he said.
Slowly, June held out her wrist, a questioning look still on her face.
Dan knelt down a little and started to tie the worn-down thing around her wrist.
“What are you doing?”
What was he doing? Witnessing this wedding at all was an exercise in masochism. Actively trying to make it better for the woman who’d stolen the man he loved? That was a whole different level.
“Tradition.” He finished tying on the bracelet and stepped back. “Something borrowed, something blue.”
June looked down at the circle of blue for a moment—a tiny smile playing on her lips— then she tried to stand up and struggled, so Dan put out a hand to help her wobble to her feet. She sniffed back a tear, and put on a smile, pulling her shoulder back.
“Stiff upper lip, and all that right, Howell.”
He looked at her for a moment. No shit.
“Stiff upper lip,” he said.