The bridesmaid

 So, my best friend from uni got married in September 2017, and I was one of her bridesmaids. I was also, at the time, nearly 6 months pregnant.

 

When she asked us to be bridesmaids, back in April, I wasn’t pregnant. Well actually I was, but I didn’t know it at the time. Anyway, we started to have some dress fittings early in the spring. My friend is posh and rich, to say the least – and we all had dresses custom designed and made to match the wedding dress itself.

 

The dress designer was brilliant. When she found out I was pregnant, and due to be quite large by the time the big day came, she said ‘ok we’ll just have to figure out how to make that work’. (My friend was adamant I must still be a bridesmaid!)

 

So I had a bunch of extra fittings, and as I got bigger the dressmaker figured out a load of modifications, extra panels and straps and bits of elastic to hold everything in place. On the morning of the wedding itself she was there to help us all get dressed, with a team of assistants, and yet more modifications were needed because I was even bigger than expected. More bits of elastic, and various bits cut and pinned into place once it was on.

 

But despite the faff, it worked and it looked fabulous. We walked up the aisle behind my friend, I didn’t fall over, everything was lovely.

 

After the ceremony there was that long lull when everyone stands around and gets drunk, except of course I couldn’t get drunk, so I just chatted awkwardly to a bunch of people. A nice guy offered to being me out a chair… I didn’t need one but I was grateful for the offer.

 

When we finally sat down for dinner, the same nice guy was sitting next to me. He was somebody’s brother on the grooms side, friendly and nice looking. He paid attention to me though dinner and laughed at my jokes, and if he had an ulterior motive based on wanting to see what was under my bridesmaid dress, well, I didn’t object to that.

 

He went off to dance after dinner, but then came back and persuaded me onto the dance floor with him, where I was a bit of a liability… like a dumper truck in a classic car garage. But it was fun and we laughed and danced until I needed to cool down (it was a hot day), and I kinda just reached for his hand as I left the room, and led him outside.

 

We sat on a bench in the garden. He was tipsy, and though I was sober it was an easy progression from sitting and chatting to sitting and snogging. He was a good kisser, and didn’t seem to mind how sweaty I was after all the dancing.

Because I was a bridesmaid I had a room in the same hotel as the wedding itself. It was a big old country-house affair, with lots of confusing staircases and corridors.

 

Not wanting to waste any time (it was only about 9pm), I led him round to the hotel entrance and up to my room.

 

The sex was nice – very nice actually. One-night stands are often a bit disappointing, but this one was lovely and everything clicked. We had an amusing moment when we realised neither of us had any condoms.

“Do you want me to go and find one?” he asked.

“From where?” I said. “Anyway, it’s not like I’m going to get any more pregnant than I already am. I’m happy without if you are…”

And so we went without.

 

Afterwards we thought we’d better get back to the party before anyone missed us and started asking questions. And that’s where the trouble began.

 

Because it turns out, when a dress has been made and modified and custom fitted by a professional dressmaker, it can be quite tricky to get back on. And a slightly tipsy groomsman, along with a heavily pregnant tomboy, do NOT possess the skills to do it.

 

Having removed it in a hurry, with other things on our minds, we were now faced with a cats-cradle of satin and straps, elastic and safety pins and not the slightest clue how to get the thing back onto me.

“Shall I get someone?” he said, after we’d been fighting with it for 10 minutes.

“Like who? Trinny and Susannah? Everyone is shitfaced down there… they’re going to be no help…”

 

After literally 20 minutes of faffing and fighting with it, we finally got me into a state where I looked roughly like the bridesmaid who had started the day, albeit rather more disheveled. More just-fucked that just dressed, but I figured it would do.

 

We went back down to the party where, as expected, everyone was too drunk to notice we’d even been gone.

 

I saw the guy at breakfast the next day, and he offered to swap numbers, but I turned him down. With a hug, I said – truthfully – that my life was too complex for any further entanglements. He was a nice guy though. A couple of years later I saw him again at a summer BBQ at my friend’s house. He was there with a girlfriend, and I was there with Ela. We didn’t speak, but we smiled and raised glasses across the room and I wondered… is he remembering the sex, or the crazy battle with the dress. Or maybe he didn’t remember me at all!