The Bridesmaid Rules

Babs Cartwright had been planning this weekend for eleven months. Twenty-eight years old, three years out from telling her whole family she was a woman, two years of saving tips from the kitchen for the surgery, which was now eight months healed, and one full year building a wardrobe for exactly this kind of occasion. A beachfront resort in the Keys. Her cousin Daisy's wedding. The first big family event since everything changed.

"You're gonna be fine," she told her reflection in the hotel mirror, smoothing the front of her emerald green dress. "Better than fine. You're gonna be the hottest person there and you're gonna enjoy every second out of pure spite."

Because that was the honest truth of it. Half her extended family still treated her like a ghost. They didn't say anything mean, not anymore, they just sort of looked through her. Talked around her at dinners. Asked her mother how she was doing like she wasn't sitting right there eating a bread roll. So Babs had made a vow on the plane down from Chicago: this weekend she was going to laugh loud, dance hard, and look so good it hurt, and if any of those ghosts had a problem with it, that was their ghost problem.

The welcome cocktail party was Thursday evening, poolside at the resort, string lights everywhere and a bar with way too many flavored vodkas. Daisy ran over and hugged her within the first five minutes, which was nice. Daisy was one of the good ones.

"Babs! Oh my god, the dress! You look incredible!"

"Thank you, babe. Now go be a bride, I see champagne with your name on it."

She got a mango thing from the bar and found a spot near the edge of the pool, and that was where she caught him. Tall guy, dark hair, shoulders that said former athlete all over them, standing near the tiki torches in a pale blue shirt. And he was staring. Not a glance, a full-on stare, going on ten seconds now.

Babs set her drink down on a table and walked right over. Spite looked good on her and she knew it.

"Hey. Do I have something on my face, or is there another reason you're staring at me?"

The guy blinked, and then, to his credit, he laughed. "Okay, fair. Busted."

"So which is it? Face or staring?"

"Neither. I was trying to figure out if you're a bridesmaid," he said, holding up his hands. "That's it, I swear. I'm Antonio, I'm a groomsman. George's best friend."

"Babs. Daisy's cousin. And I'm not a bridesmaid, I'm a regular guest, no duties, no obligations, just here to drink and look fantastic."

Something visibly relaxed in his whole body. "Oh thank god."

"Excuse me?"

"No, it's just, the bridesmaids are off-limits," he said, grinning now. "Rule of the weekend. George made us all swear. So if you were one, this conversation would have to end immediately and tragically."

"And since I'm not?"

"Since you're not, I'm extremely pleased to meet you, Babs, Daisy's cousin."

They ended up at a little cabana table by the pool with fresh drinks, because one mango thing had turned into two and the party was mostly family small talk anyway. Antonio worked in logistics, used to play rugby in college until his knee filed for divorce, and had a dry way of talking that kept sneaking up on her.

"So the bachelor party," he was saying, "George booked a fishing charter. A fishing charter, for his own bachelor party. We will be on a boat, holding fish, at seven in the morning."

"That's the saddest thing I've ever heard."

"He's very sincere. It's his whole thing."

And at some point in there, Babs got an idea, the kind of idea that comes after drink number two. She pulled out her phone and opened her notes app.

"Okay, new game. Since you've got all these wedding weekend rules, we should have some too." She typed a title as she talked. "The Bridesmaid Rules."

"I thought you weren't a bridesmaid."

"Doesn't matter, it sounds better than The Guest Rules. Shut up." She typed. "Rule one. No flirting."

Antonio leaned over to look at her screen. "You realize we've been flirting for twenty minutes."

"That's why it's rule one. Rules are for breaking, that's the whole fun of it." She kept typing. "Rule two. No kissing."

"Naturally."

"Rule three. No sneaking off together."

"Rule four," Antonio added, "no touching."

"Rule five. No real names after midnight. You're just Groomsman and I'm just Not A Bridesmaid."

He was shaking with laughter by then, that quiet shaking kind. "This is the worst list ever made. Every rule on it is a bad idea dressed up as a good one."

"That's the point, dummy. We write them down so we can break them one at a time and keep score." She held up the phone. "Look at it. It's beautiful. It's a eulogy for our common sense."

"Can I add one?"

"Go for it."

"Rule six. No pool swimming in formal wear," he said. "Because I can already tell one of us is ending up in that pool before Sunday."

"Only one of us?"

"I'm a gentleman. I'll let you push me."

Babs saved the note, slid her phone back into her little clutch, and looked out over the party. Daisy was doing some kind of choreographed hello with the bridesmaids over by the bar. A couple of her ghost-relatives were eating shrimp ten feet away, not looking at her, and for once she did not care even a little, because the person beside her was laughing at her jokes and her dress fit like it had been sewn on her body and the whole weekend was sitting there like an unopened present.

"So Groomsman," she said, "what's your damage? Why does a best friend of the groom need a rule list to stay out of trouble at a wedding?"

"One bad weekend in Tampa a few years back. Bridesmaid, my roommate's sister, a karaoke machine, and a lot of tequila. It got messy. Never again." He raised his glass. "Hence the rules."

"Hence the rules," Babs agreed, and clinked hers against it.

Somewhere behind the tiki torches, someone's uncle had already had too much rum cake and was telling the same story twice. Somewhere ahead of them, the whole weekend waited, every rule lined up like bowling pins. Babs ordered another mango thing and settled in.

The rehearsal dinner was Friday evening, and Babs had planned her outfit for it eleven months ago. A deep red dress, simple, sharp, the kind of dress that made a person walk differently. She'd spent two years of kitchen tips and one year of hunting and fitting and returning things, and tonight the dress got its moment.

The family had rented out the hotel's main dining room, long tables with white cloths and too many chairs. Babs found herself seated at the far end, near a great-aunt who looked through her twice and then gave up pretending she could see her at all.

Fine. Babs had survived worse dinners. She ordered wine and watched the room.

Antonio was at the groom's table, pale blue shirt, hair pushed back, sitting next to George like a bodyguard at a funeral. Every so often he'd catch her eye down the length of the table and look away fast, a man who'd been told about rules.

Rule one, she thought. No flirting. She picked up her phone under the table and checked the list, just to refresh her memory on what she was about to violate.

The salt came into play around the second course. The shakers had wandered, as salt shakers do, and the one nearest Babs was empty. The full one sat about a foot past Antonio's elbow, all the way down at his end of the table.

Well. That was that, wasn't it.

She got up, walked the length of the table with her empty shaker like she had official salt business, and reached past him for the full one. And as she reached, the back of her hand drew a slow line along the back of his.

He went completely still. She could feel him go still, as if the entire room had a power cut.

"Excuse me," she said, sweet as pie. "Just need the salt."

"Sure," he said, in a voice about half an octave off its normal floor. "Sure. Take it. It's yours."

"Thanks." She swapped shakers, let her hand trail his one more time on the way out, because if you're going to commit a crime, commit it clean, and walked back to her seat without looking at him. She could feel him watching her the whole way. She could probably have felt it through a brick wall.

Ten minutes later her phone buzzed in her clutch. She checked it under the napkin.

It was a photo. Antonio had screenshotted the list she'd sent to his phone at the cabana, "for the record," which meant he'd been thinking about the list, which was its own little victory. The photo showed Rule One with a single red line drawn through it, the kind of strikethrough a person does with one deliberate finger swipe.

Underneath, a text: *You did that on purpose.*

She typed back with her thumbs half hidden. *Did what? I needed salt. Food was bland. Very innocent.*

*Your hand brushed mine twice. Once was the salt. Once was a felony.*

*Prove it, Groomsman.*

Three dots appeared, then vanished, then appeared again. Then: *Rule one says no flirting.*

*Correct.*

*You just flirted with a hand in front of my best friend's father. So rule one is dead. Which means somebody at this table has no respect for the law.*

Babs looked down the table. He wasn't even looking at her. He was nodding along to something George's father was saying, face perfectly neutral, thumbs going a mile a minute.

*You have no evidence,* she sent.

*I have a red line on a screenshot and a handprint burned into my skin. See you at the party, criminal.*

She put the phone away and drank her wine and tried very hard not to smile, and failed at it so completely that the great-aunt looked directly at her for the first time all weekend, apparently startled by whatever her face was doing.

After the dinner there was the after-party, in a different ballroom, where the hotel people had pushed the tables aside and a DJ was playing songs from about 2009 because that's what DJs do at wedding weekends. The older relatives had mostly gone up to bed, which meant the lights got lower and the dancing got dumber and the bar stayed open out of what seemed like pure spite.

Babs danced with Daisy first, because Daisy grabbed her the second she walked in and hollered something about how amazing she looked, which, correct. Then Daisy got pulled away by the bride squad and Babs got a drink and found a wall to lean on and watched Antonio lose a dance-off to one of the other groomsmen with total dignity and zero skill.

Later, he materialized beside her at the wall with two fresh drinks, handing her one without a word.

"You're a terrible dancer," she said.

"I'm aware. My knees are decorative at this point. They're like museum pieces."

"They looked it. That spin was horrifying."

"That spin nearly ended my career, and my career ended in 2019." He clinked his glass against hers. "So. The salt."

"What about the salt?"

"Babs."

"What. It was salt."

"You drew a line through my rule."

"Your rule? It's my rule. It's my list. I sent it to you for the record and you edited it like a vandal."

They were standing close, she realized. Closer than the wall required. The DJ was playing something slow and stupid and half the floor was swaying like they were at a school dance, and the lights in here had gone down to that warm restaurant-dim level where everybody looks like an improved version of themselves.

"Look," Antonio said, and nodded toward the far corner of the ballroom. There was a shadow back there behind a big potted palm situation, near the doors to the terrace, where nobody was standing and nobody was likely to stand. "Walk with me. Just over there. Nobody can see us and we can talk like actual people."

"That sounds suspiciously like rule three."

"Rule three is no sneaking off together. This is walking eight feet. There's a palm tree as a witness. It's legal."

Babs considered it, which took about a quarter of a second. "Fine. Eight feet. The palm supervises."

They walked the eight feet. The corner was genuinely dark, tucked behind the plants and a folding screen the hotel staff had put up to hide a service door. From here the party was all glow and bass, and their voices could drop low.

"So," she said. "We're hiding at a party we were invited to."

"Technically we're just standing at a party we were invited to, in a corner, conspiratorially."

"Same thing."

"Is it?" He was looking down at her, and up close, in that light, he was a problem. Broad shoulders under that blue shirt, jaw like it had been drawn by somebody with a grudge, and eyes that kept doing the thing where they dropped to her mouth and then snapped back up like they'd been caught.

"Yeah," she said, quieter. "It is."

"We're in trouble," he said. "You know that, right? We're both in trouble. Rule one is gone. Rule two is sitting right there. I can feel it sitting there."

"Rule two is no kissing."

"Right."

"Which we're not doing."