Let’s find you the best dress in the goddamn room, Bren says, and thennotbuy it, out of principle, and send that woman a crate of mouldy pears to thank her for her services. Unless you legitimately find the best dress on the planet, in which case we can swallow our pride.
He is trailing past the gowns as he speaks, touching the hangers as if they’re books on a shelf. These look good, he says, stopping at a colourful section near the back. You don’t want to wear white, do you?
She said we should start at –
Oh, live a little, Nora, Bren says. Start wherever the hell you want.
And despite how he had defended her, just then, she senses that he’s angry with her, too, and not only the beige woman. Avoiding her eyes as he moves through the rails, and she stands there, with her split-open heart, wondering whether she should leave.
What about this, Bren says, before she can speak, and he pulls out a lace slip with off-the-shoulder straps, in an almost-gold, definitely-not-white. It shimmers under the shop lighting, the fabric reminiscent of sunlight.
He looks at it, then lifts it off the rail.
Strange sensation, then, like a flower opening inside her. Because it is beautiful. And because he knows her. And because he is here, for her, for this, holding out an olive branch made of fabric and dainty, near-invisible stitches, the sort of thing she’d have chosen herself.
So she doesn’t leave.
She looks at the dress on the hanger.
Maybe, she says, as if daring herself to say it. Maybe … something like that.
Then peg it, Bren says, holding it out towards her.
And she does.
_
Bren taps his foot against the wooden bench outside the dressing room. The beige woman is in there, to begin with, helping Nora into the first dress, and then the telephone rings, sharp and high from behind the glass office door so she retreats, heels clicking. Good riddance.
She put a bag over my face, Nora says through the curtain.
She what?
She put this shower cap-style bag on my face so I wouldn’t get make-up on the dress, Nora tells him. Even though I told her I’m not wearing any.
Crazy, he says, weddings make people crazy, and Nora does not respond to that. He keeps tapping his foot, scrolls briefly on his phone. Alone, now, on the shop floor, only the shuffle of clothing audible while he waits.
Mouth dry. He wishes he had water. Weren’t they meant to drink champagne or something, at these things, cheap wine at the very least? The adrenaline of the morning – the push-pull of not wanting to be here, but wanting to be here forher; his fury at the woman, seeping into a fury with Nora he’s not quite managed to let go – is waning. Instead he feels stupidly nervous, like Nora did before they came inside. Surprised by the jitters in his chest as he reminds himself that this is just his friend in an outfit, and he’s seen her in plenty of outfits before. Pyjamas. School uniform. That red dress she wore when they were sixteen, some sequined thing she’d found in a charity shop which meant he couldn’t look at her, all night, didn’t know what to do with the feelings it unleashed.
I don’t know, Nora says to him, from behind the curtain.
Don’t know what?
I don’t know what I think about this. I’m not sure that it feels like me.
Well good, Bren says. Else you’d get married in your rainbow poncho.
… you remember my rainbow poncho?
Just come out, Nora. Let me see.
A pause then.
The moment, before it happens.
And then she pulls the curtain back and she’s standing there, and despite his prolonged preparation, like a long-haul flight, like a dozen years of talking himself out of this, Bren is not ready for what comes over him, right then. Seeing Nora, in that dress. In this soft, flowing fabric that is also somehow fitted around her hips, sheer and stretchy and almost blush in colour, like the inside of a strawberry; like her cheeks, when she is pleased, or self-conscious, or shy. The lace stops just beneath her shoulders, and he’d never thought about that part of her body before. Never noticed them. She is not an apple, or a pear, or a person from his past. She is here. She is now. She is … perfect.
What, Nora says, as Bren stares at her.
