The Wedding Project 💍

'Nothing Else Matters' - The Groom (@MikeMacColin)

9:55 am

Callum Wallace had not listened to his father's advice. And now he was paying the consequences.

"Don't overdo it," he echoed the voice of Arthur Wallace, Wing Commander of the Royal Air Force. Then he took the cap off the bottle and poured two more pills into his open hand. A glass of water was standing ready on the sink, and he flushed the pills down with a healthy heap of it. For a moment he tried to get his stomach back under his control. It was a close one, but he managed. When he looked up from the sink, his reflection in the mirror showed what he had feared: He was looking like shit. Not like someone who would be marrying a beautiful rich girl in a few hours.

Damn! The bachelor party had taken place more than 24 hours ago, and he still didn't feel sober enough to pull through this!

He heard a knocking on his hotel room door. With a sigh he turned away from his horrifying reflection and left the bathroom. As he answered the door, he found two of his best friends standing in front of it, both with a wide grin on their smug faces.

"May we come in?" Alex asked, knowing very well how Callum was feeling right now. Alex Aswell himself had a rough night behind him, but compared to the groom he was still in a pretty good mood.

With a grunt Callum invited the two men into his room. As they had entered and closed the door behind them, he turned to the other person of the group - the one he unwisely had picked as his best man. And he gave him the sort of welcome that only best of friends could give each other without risking a punch in the face:

"You asshole!"

The grin on his friend's face got wider and brighter even. "Ocean" Creed, as he called himself nowadays, was probably the one who got through the bachelor party the easiest. Probably knew all the tricks to avoid a devastating hangover. But he had not been a good enough friend to share those little secrets with the others. And the party he had arranged... Memories of that night were hazy at best, hidden behind a curtain of expensive liquor, exotic side dishes and blurry images flashing in Callum's mind that even in hindsight didn't make any sense. Yet he was standing there, in the light-blue suit of the groomsmen, with the white flower and the white handkerchief looking out of his chest pocket and his white teeth radiating between his open lips, like nothing in this world could ever touch him.

"I told you," he reminded Callum. "Over and over I told you: Don't mess with this stuff"

"Yeah, but then you kept pouring one after the other," Callum recalled a bit of that evening that was not completely fogged out by alcohol. "Seriously, how many bottles did you order? A dozen?"

The upside was that whatever this beverage from the seventh circle of hell that his best man had come up with was actually supposed to be, it had not left any aftertaste. The downside was that it had basically destroyed all of Callum's taste receptors, especially when it came to drinks. Now even water had this "Meh..." feeling to it. Last night's rehearsal dinner, as delicious as everything looked and smelled, came with a lack of decent flavor that only Callum had suffered from. The drink hadn't even been so bad at first - a hint of herbs and a strong note of booze, but still bearable. Until he had let out his breath after swallowing it. Then the effect came back like a sledgehammer.

"Good thing those bachelor parties only happen once in a lifetime, right?" "Ocean" slapped Callum on his shoulder and Callum almost flew back into the bathroom, head-first into the open toilet. He struggled to keep standing and frowned

"If you ever get to marry and make me your best man, I'm gonna make you pay for this. You know that, right?"

"Ocean" laughed at this idea. They talked a few more minutes while Callum did his best to arrange his bowtie and tuxedo, combed his hair and put some aftershave on. The taste of the booze had vanished, but somehow he still smelled it. Hopefully none of the other wedding guests wouldn't notice. But suddenly, at a pause within trivial smalltalk and anecdotes from that fateful night he noticed that "Ocean" and Alex were exchanging looks.