Monica snorted. “Go ahead and take your whining out on us, hun. That way when it comes time to make nice with your lady, you can have a clear head.”
Brandy blushed. In all this talk of how defensive Brandy was, she had forgotten to remind herself that she wasn’t the center of the controversy. It was Sunny, who had kept a secret from Brandy for so long because she was afraid of her fiancée’s reaction. What kind of fiancée am I, anyway? She doesn’t feel comfortable telling me what she really wants. Then again, Brandelyn had never encountered something like this before. Not in her years with Sunny, anyway. The lovely, energetic, amiable Sunny.
Here I was, stomping my foot all over her. No wonder Sunny had to grow a backbone. Brandy had a mighty strong foot.
Chapter 12
SUNNY
The thing about having a bachelorette party at a dive bar? It didn’t matter how few people Sunny invited along. Eventually, the whole town was in on it.
Especially at the lesbian dive, which was full of locals and out-of-towners alike.
“This girl over here is getting married!” Anita snapped a party hat that said BRIDE onto Sunny’s head and led her through the depths of Paradise Lost, the only bar in town that catered to the overwhelming clientele. The other bar, Wolf’s Hill Dive, was usually Sunny’s preference when it came to the food and drink, but it wasn’t the kind of place to parade one’s gay wedding through like it was Pride. (Not that she couldn’t, per se. The fine folks at Wolf’s Hill Dive were firm supporters of all the gays about town. They simply had more men than women most of the time.)
Cheers erupted. The women enjoying their end-of-the-week drinks and date nights with their gals turned around to lift their beers and spirits. Most of them probably recognized Sunny, one of the two stars of that month’s biggest wedding. Shit, they’re all invited, I bet. Sunny had handed over her list of fifty people she’d like to see invited and allowed Brandelyn to take care of the rest. How that list of fifty people ballooned to three hundred would always be beyond Sunny, who thought they had overlapping friends, concluded that Brandy wanted a proper audience, and that was all there was to it.
“This gal right here,” Anita continued, her own party hat askew as more women gathered around them on the stage, “is marrying the woman who you talk to about your itchy crotches, so you better buy her a freakin’ drink!”
Usually, the erupting laughter would have amused Sunny, who took most things with the kind of good humor that won her more friends than enemies. But ever since she rushed out of the clinic, tears streaming down her cheeks, she hadn’t the heart to think about the wedding. She hadn’t exchanged a word with her fiancée, although not for a lack of trying on Brandy’s part. I barely missed her when she finally drove up to Waterlily House to corner me. That was the day Sunny drove to PDX to pick up her aunt and uncle from the airport.
That aunt was really tickled about being in a gay bar on a Saturday night.
“Oh my God, look at this!” Jill pulled her plastic straw out of her fruity cocktail and waved around the loops that looked like a pair of boobs. “Every bachelorette party I’ve been to before this one has been an utter dick-fest. This one’s going down in the history books, and it’s barely started!”
That was the plan, anyway. Plenty of gratuitous mammaries in Sunny’s face, every vagina joke under the sun, and an array of games, drinks, and gifts that reminded everyone in the room that they were never too young to understand the meaning of the word “carpet” when uttered in a gay bar.
It only got crazier as the drinks filled everyone’s veins.
“Open it!” someone barked from the side of the stage, where Sunny and Anita sat with a stack of gifts by their side. “It’s in an Amazon box, so you know it’s raunchy!”
Sunny grabbed her beer for another drink of courage. She dove for the scissors that had aided her in the opening of other presents, but her shaking hands and falling torso told Anita to leap in and intervene. Good thing Anita had stayed mostly sober that evening.
“Let me get that for you, Sun.” Anita left Sunny propped up on her side on the floor and popped open the box. “Oh… oh my God, who can fit this in their hooha?”
Aunt Jill was the first to shove aside everyone in her line of sight. “Whoa!” she exclaimed, tossing her drink into the air. Red liquid landed on another woman’s head. That woman didn’t look like she had noticed. “Now that’s what I’m talking about! That’s some wedding night shit right there, Sunny!”
Her sister, Sunny’s mother, perked up from her conversation in the corner and nearly died of embarrassment when she saw the behemoth toy in Sunny’s hands. This is not my first time holding a dildo in the same room as my mother. Sunny was too tipsy to remember the last time, but she was pretty sure it was when she and her mother stumbled into a Spencer’s Gifts.
Aunt Jill remained front and center at the stage like she was at her favorite rock concert. Someone refilled her spilled drink and cheered her on for being a supportive family member. Her two thumbs up and giant smile reminded Sunny why she had protested the presence of family at her bachelorette party.
Didn’t help that she felt like shit. The alcohol was supposed to take the apprehension off her mind. Instead, it made her fixate on what she was doing. Namely, preparing to marry Dr. Brandelyn Meyer sometime the next week.
Sunny overturned a small plastic bag and unearthed a dozen glow-in-the-dark pencil toppers shaped like breasts. She held a neon green one up to the stage light above her and said, much more loudly than she intended, “These will be the biggest tits in my marriage.”
More laughter erupted. Anita gently pointed out that Sunny had perfectly sizable breasts.
To that, Sunny could only reply, “You would know. You stared at them in the locker room during high school.”
The laughter soon turned into gasps of scandalized awe. The only woman in the room who wasn’t laughing was Anita, who checked her blushing, looked to her partner in the audience, and said, “Nobody stared at boobs like you did, Sun. Let me guess. The whole reason you went out with Brandelyn was because you liked how she stacked that white coat.”
Sunny wasn’t surprised to hear some inappropriate murmurs from the audience. Everyone had an opinion about the kind of sexy doctor fantasies Brandelyn served. Even those who didn’t otherwise find her attractive had to admit she had “the demeanor down.”
“Truth or dare,” Anita said to her best friend.
Sunny, guzzling more beer like it was going out of style, foolishly said, “Truth!”
Everyone leaned in to listen to Anita’s question. “You ever have a bit of roleplay with everyone’s favorite town doctor? Come on. Her patients are dying to know.”
For every person wrinkling their nose in disdain, there was another waggling her eyebrows as if this were the question they had been waiting for all night. Sunny pulled herself back up into the chair in the center of the stage, the one bedecked in pink streamers and purple glitter. Anita had really dug into her old school supplies for this party. How much did the owner of this joint threaten her when she brought out the glitter, though?
“All I’ll say,” Sunny interspersed her sentence with a ladylike burp, “is that she really knows how to snap those latex gloves onto her hand.”
Sunny couldn’t tell if the crowd’s reaction was from how funny they found that… or… well, she didn’t want to know. The most roleplaying Brandy and I ever do is when she gets on top for two seconds. One would think Brandelyn was allergic to riding the waves, so to speak. Every time she ends up on top of me, you’d think it was an accident. “Whoops! How did I get up here?” Sunny could practically hear that in Brandy’s voice. “I don’t belong up here! I wear dresses!”
The usual assortment of bachelorette party games appeared. Pin the Nipples on the Playboy Bunny was a staple in Paradise Lost, even without a good reason to play. A wedding bell-shaped pinata full of red jellybeans spilled on top of Sunny’s head when Aunt Jill gave it a mighty whack with a
n old baseball bat. The drunker people became, the more they uproariously laughed at the off-colored jokes and gifts popping out of boxes left and right. Everything happened as sober Sunny would have wanted. People split off into groups, laughing over the old times, their own relationships, and who they wanted to bone. Drunk and hurt Sunny, however, wasn’t satisfied. She demanded a sacrifice, and it had to come at her own expense.
Because it wasn’t fair. How could these people prance around the bar, cheering her relationship to Dr. Brandelyn Meyer, and make it sound like a good thing? Didn’t they know the real Brandy? What? Did they think that because they went home going, “That doctor sure is a good doctor. I wonder if she acts that uptight all the time…” they were somehow wrong? Did they want to believe that people were that much different than from who they were at their jobs? Was Lorri Abrams gonna sit there at the bar and pretend that she wasn’t Little Miss Black Humor at the hardware store and at home with her partner? Or was Mikaiya Marcott, who famously made her living with a Bluetooth in her ear and a MacBook in front of her, bound to declare that she wasn’t the prissiest person to ever leave Paradise Valley? Sunny was the first to admit she was exactly the same here in this bar as she was at Waterlily House. I’m a fucking ray of sunshine, after all! Ask my mother over there! Her mother, who was only there out of support for her daughter, would rather not talk about gender and sexuality. She was content to sit with some older friends and nurse their gin and tonics.
She should probably clamp her hands over her ears for this.
“Do you guys wanna know what it’s really like being with big ol’ Doctor Meyer?” Sunny went to finish her fifth beer, only to realize someone had drunk it for her. Whoever the bitch is, I’ma cut her. The irony? She scraped her arm against her chair two seconds later. “Because I can give you the freakin’ tell-all right here.”
She stumbled from her chair to the edge of the stage. It was only a foot and a half off the ground, which was mediocre for a live stage in a crowded bar, but a lifesaver for a drunk woman named Sunny Croker. Anita and her partner, Bonnie, both leaped forward to catch Sunny in case she fell. Look at them. They’ve got panic on their faces. They think I’m gonna splat! Sunny had perfect control of her motor skills, thank you very much. She only had two beers! (It was two, right? Because she only remembered two.) If anyone should be worried about falling over, it should be Aunt Jill. There were three of her. Any one of them could collapse at any moment!
“I’ll tell you,” Sunny reiterated, already forgetting that she said the same thing a few seconds earlier. I’ve only had seven beers tonight. One is hardly anything! I’ve only had four beers tonight. It’s my bachelorette party! I’ll have five beers if I want five beers. Ah, there it was. The correct number. “If you’ve ever, ever had her reach up your blouse with her stethoscope, then you know what it’s like.” She paused for effect. “Cold, hard, and it’s over in five seconds.”
The awkward sputtering and chuckles around them had Anita gritting her teeth in disbelief. “Sunny!” she hissed from the front of the stage. “What are you doing?”
“You ever dated a wet fish?” Sunny had to laugh at her choice of words. Wet! Fish! One would think she said that on purpose. “Because I’m gonna marry one. A wet fish who thinks the whole world revolves around her aaaaand she’s gonna tell me what to do for the rest of our lives.”
The crowd wasn’t laughing anymore. Anita, however, was climbing back onto the stage to grab Sunny and go.
“When you come to my wedding next week,” Sunny crowed, “I hope you enjoy the surprise of what’s going on as much as I do! I don’t know what I’m wearing yet! Still waiting for Brandy to get back to me on that!”
Sunny was so plastered that it only took Anita four attempts to drag her into the women’s restroom, where she shooed away two loiterers and splashed some cold water onto the bride’s face.
“Hey!” Sunny spat the water all over herself. “Whatchu doing that for?”
“I’m trying to get some sense into you, idiot.” When Sunny’s eyes focused again, she beheld a woman with her arms akimbo and a Serious Teacher Face looking back at her. “You’re out there shitting on your fiancée in front of everyone! At your bachelorette party!”
“Huh? I didn’t say anything.” Sunny rocked back and forth on her feet. Eventually, she braced herself against the chipped bathroom sink. “What are you talking about? I said what everyone is already thinking about Brandy.” She spat her fiancée’s name as if it were verboten. “She’s a controlling butthead who has to have everything her way. All the way down to how we have sex. Do you know what happened the last time we had some time to ourselves?” Sunny could clearly remember it, with or without inebriation. That beautiful, sunshine-filled day in my little cottage at Waterlily House. I threw down my laundry, guided her into my room, annnnnndddd did the same thing we always freakin’ do. “I didn’t even come, but she got to like three times before taking a shower.”
Eyes rolling and hands turning on the sink, Anita was now compelled to splash some water onto her own face. “Thanks for that lovely image, Sun. You know how much I love fantasizing about the same mediocre sex you and the rest of us are having.”
“She’s gotta feel like a princess at all times, and I’ve gotta be her prince charming. Which means she’s a pillow-biting princess who can’t get enough of ignoring what I want.”
“Look, Sun, I know this is really about the wedding.” Oh, Anita knew all about what happened in Brandy’s office. She was the first person Sunny told after it happened. “I’m sorry things are going rough with her right now, but airing out your dirty laundry at your bachelorette party is really not the way to handle it. This is going to bite you in the ass.”
“What do you know? You’re not the one who is sitting off to the side like a piece of discarded chicken.” Sunny spat that, not knowing what the hell she was talking about. “I don’t want a big ol’ wedding, you know? Three hundred people! Who around here has three hundred people to invite to their wedding? The mayor? I don’t… I don’t know three hundred people. Who’s coming to my wedding? What are we eating? Who’s carrying the rings? I don’t know anymore! I feel like I’m going to someone else’s wedding!”
“To be fair, Sun, you washed your hands of most of it.”
The tears Sunny had been holding back poured from the corners of her eyes. “I wish I haaaaadn’t!”
Anita lightly patted her friend’s shoulder as Sunny ugly-drunken-cried into a large mass of paper towels. Why do I have to be such a pushover? Why do I always have to be the one to compromise? That point was only further exacerbated when Brandelyn pointed out the church thing. So what! She still got everything else! She got a lemon cake when Sunny vastly preferred chocolate, to the point she joked about having her own cake at the wedding. Brandy picked a photographer who had albums full of highly Photoshopped images of other people’s weddings, and Sunny worried she wouldn’t recognize herself in her own wedding photos. Don’t get me started on the flowers! She knew Brandy wouldn’t rest unless there was an orchid garden at the wedding, but did it have to happen at the expense of the flowers Sunny and her aunt had planted over the decades? Some of those bushes had been around since Carter was in office. The wedding planner asked if they could be “relocated” to make room for more seating, and Sunny had to inform both the planner and Brandy that there would be no disturbance of the flowers.
And if Brandelyn thought her Pomeranian would be carrying the rings…
If there was one thing Brandy excelled at, it was seducing women and then getting the hell under their skin.
“Come here.” Anita drew Sunny into an embrace. There they stood, swaying back and forth in a dive bar restroom while Sunny sobbed and Anita adopted her everyday schoolteacher’s voice. “I know it’s been really stressful and hard. Brandy’s been a bit of a… yeah… but you know she loves you, right? I can’t imagine there’s anyone in this world who can love her like you do, either. This wedding is merely one da
y in your whole life together. I hate to say it, but most people won’t remember it a year from now, but they might remember what you were saying about your love life.”
Sunny was still too drunk to feel proper shame for what she had said a few minutes ago. Did she have regrets, though? A few. In the heat of her frustrations, she had implied that Brandelyn was an awful lover. If that wasn’t bad enough, she had done it to a number of her fiancée’s patients. People who would soon go to see her for their ailments and not be able to think of anything beyond, “Dr. Wet Fish.”
“Let’s clean you up a bit and get you back out there. You’re probably not gonna remember tonight because you’re so stupidly drunk, but I’ll make sure you’re drunk and having fun at your bachelorette party, not drunk and crying in the damned bathroom. Let’s go.”
Sunny felt a little better after she splashed some water on her face and straightened out her clothing. Laughter and music filtered through the door, implying the bar patrons – and Sunny’s guests – had already moved on to other topics and games. Although she stumbled through the door, Sunny adopted the attitude that this would be the most fun she had without Brandelyn in a long while, but maybe she’d drink water or Coke for the rest of the night.
The bar fell into silence about five seconds after Sunny emerged from the restroom.
“Oh, that’s not good.” Anita, who still had her arm wrapped around her friend, said. “Someone’s stolen your thunder at your bachelorette party.”
“Is it that celebrity lady?” Sunny leaned against the nearest table, nausea overwhelming her again. “Because you have to make a reservation to stay at Waterlily House. She hasn’t… she hasn’t made a reser… reserva… ah…”
“Nope. It’s definitely not that actress,” Anita said, staring ahead.
“Did you know that Brandy’s sister got married at a New York City courthouse? City hall? Something like that? Her mom was soooo pissed.”
“Nope,” Anita said again. “It’s not the mayor.”
June Bride Page 9
