Read Online A Bad Bride's Tale by Polly Williams - Free Book Online

house to buy a skim latte to help her strategize.

    SEVEN Æ

    lara froze mid-bite. she put the croissant back on her plate. “Say it again. I’m confused. You’re not sure you want to get married because of some charcoal pencils and, what did you say, a lip ?”
    It sounded so absurd Stevie wanted to smile, but her jaw felt locked—she’d been grinding her teeth in her sleep. Neil’s weed hadn’t helped, either. She knew it wouldn’t, but Lara had insisted and Neil obliged with his best weed because he fancied Lara. A domino of disasters already and it wasn’t even noon. “Sorry, I know it doesn’t make much sense.”
    “Not really. But Stevie . . .” said Lara softly. “. . . I do know that you must do what you feel is right. It doesn’t matter if it makes sense to me or anyone else.”
    Stevie put her head in her hands, her chestnut hair falling for- ward in fuzzy chunks, as if it had been towel-dried after swim- ming. It struck her as somewhat ironic that here was Lara, radiant and plump-lipped after a sleepless night on a single bed in a wood- paneled room somewhere in Oxford being ravished by a horny
    twenty-two-year-old. And here was she, bride-to-be, coiled like a spring, with an unsightly skin disease breaking out over her décol- letage, and heart and head locked in mortal combat. “It’s not that I don’t love Jez, Lara. I do. But something isn’t right. Something’s missing.” A tear scraped the side of her nose. “Maybe I’ve misled us both. Maybe I so wanted it to be right, so wanted to put myself into a position where . . . where . . . Oh, I don’t know. Christ, what a to- tal mess.”
    Lara, solemn-faced, spoke slowly. “Do you think you’ve confused marriage with the biological clock stuff?”
    “Maybe.” But there was no point in pretending that marriage had nothing to do with having a family. It was the natural progres- sion: boyfriend, girlfriend; cohabitation; marriage; baby; more ba- bies; grandbabies; old age; death. A conventional sequence. She wasn’t a freak for wanting all that, was she?
    “Don’t cry, hon.” Lara stood up from the armchair and sat next to Stevie on the sofa. “If this doesn’t work out, for whatever reason, it doesn’t mean you won’t meet anyone else. You’re hardly over the hill.”
    Stevie sniffled.
    “Please don’t buy into that thirties panic thing,” said Lara, as if reading her thoughts. “It’s so not worth it. It’s a conspiracy to get us all married and breeding and behaving ourselves. Besides, I could name you literally hundreds of women who got pregnant in their forties. Think of my sister’s best friend, Lynne. Forty-three. My neighbor was thirty-nine or something. Then there’s Liz Armitage, you know, the columnist. Forty-six!”
    “Donor egg.”
    “Okay. Still. And then there’s the IVF lot. Christ, you can’t walk in a London park without seeing women old enough to be my
    mother pushing Bugaboos full of IVF twins and triplets. I’m afraid, Stevie,” she said with a grin, “you’re just freaking out.”
    Stevie smiled. Lara was right.
    “Listen, I’m thirty-three years old. I have a better relationship with my dentist than I did with my last boyfriend. In the last two years, none of my relationships have lasted longer than a few months. And you know what? I couldn’t care less. I’m having a blast.”
    “You get bored, Lara.” Stevie thought of the carousel of attrac- tive young men who entered, then departed from Lara’s bedroom. “And there was Will. Wasn’t there? That was a proper relationship. You did yoga together for God’s sake.”
    “Okay, thirteen months.” Lara frowned. “But we wanted differ- ent things.”
    “He wanted you, Lara,” mumbled Stevie, struggling to pay at- tention, but grateful for a strand of conversation that took her away from the tumult in her own head.
    “He wanted children. I didn’t.” A flicker of hurt twitched be- neath the muscles of Lara’s jaw. “It’s not a