Bride-To-Be, Toasted Pt. 01

BRIDE-TO-BE, TOASTED

PART ONE

The night before Meredith's wedding was one of the the all-time Meredith-is-a-drunk-slut nights. Meredith and I have been friends for a long, long, long, long-ass time, to put it in the language of Meredith's crude, Dumbfuck-Ohio friends.

Meredith was herself from Dumbfuck, Ohio. We met pledging the same decent sorority at a shitty college outside of Dumbfuck, Pittsburg.

Meredith, to her credit, while she constantly did dumbfuck things, and has done, and did since, and is still doing dumbfuck things, of course, such as the marriage and the night before the marriage, does not speak in a dumbfuck way.

Her trashy, mostly-Ohio (but some Pittsburg) friends, speak dumbfuck and uneducated and inelegantly, unlike Meredith, unlike me, but those friends of Meredith went on, from our adequate but maybe kinda shitty sorority, to lives as nurses. Seeing them at weddings and life events, over the years since graduation, it is like running into the same group of drinking, smoking, cursing, hot-bedding sailors, who happen to have an alarmingly shorthanded language for life, death, and the seemingly innumerable body horrors that humans are capable of experiencing, and that other humans are somehow capable of responding to in a hopefully helpful manner.

They spend their days with shit and worse up to their elbows. And they drink.

The drinking is what probably attached Meredith to these women in the first place. By the time of her wedding, Meredith had been drinking to blackouts for as long as I had known her and had never showed any signs of stopping or needs to stop.

Fast forward since then, and Meredith is getting married a lot later than she had originally planned, back in college.

So you can do the math. It had been a lot of years of blackouts. Some years, in our thirties, I saw her maybe once a year, for some girls' trip or somebody's babyshower, or just because we were, like, in the same city at the same time, or at some college alumni event or whatever. Social media used to make it much more about having cool, casual meet-ups like that, unexpectedly. Serendipitously.

But every time, Meredith would have one night during those hang-out trips, of drinking to blackout.

And not every night that she blacked out, would she hookup. But, yeah. Less as she got older, but when we were younger, especially right after college in our twenties when we were both living in the same city?

Damn!

Let's just say, from college to today, that girl got herself on some men with the regularity, and while the men she posted on social media over the years about her being "in a relationship" with always tended to look a fairly certain way, when Meredith was partying with her girls, she did not discriminate, not in that way, oh no.

Handsome, clean, successful-looking, yes. That was Meredith type. She was the sorority girl who fucked, but she only fucked the Presidents of the Fraternities.

And even if he was way too old, far too old, for Meredith to ever take him home to Dumbfuck, Ohio to meet her hard-drinking parents, way too old and too age-inappropriate for Meredith to list him as "in a relationship with" on her social media, if he made the conversation about his Divorce, and his Boat, and his Mercedes and his Other Mercedes, he would have Meredith's thong panties off and her bare, bald pussy bouncing up and down on his successful-man's cock of showy materialism, maybe even in that Mercedes he drove to the bar in that night, while her friends make tipsy small-talk back inside.

For Meredith, it would not be the first time. She's been fucking in bar parking lots for quickies since at least we were Juniors. That I know about. That I've personally seen and watched happen.

However, it might be the first time that time in Cleveland. Or in Baltimore. Most of these girls' trips were organized by Meredith's nurse friends, and they scattered throughout the Ohio Valley and across both sides of the Appalachians. Sometimes they would go on a destination trip to Vegas or Miami or New Orleans, but as they got older, these womens' weekends of gossip and drinking generally came to take place in one of the dumbfuck locales where the nurses had settled, some, as they got older, with first or second husbands, none of whom were ever doctors, none of whom ever joined their wives.

These were girls' only trips, and never in a city where one of the married women lived.

It was easy for Meredith to pull men when she was out and safe with her friends. Bars had been her regular spots since forever. She knew the rules, she respected the staff and always tipped generously. Meredith was, like her parents, a friendly drunk. Full of bonhomie and camaraderie.

She was patient, and cautious, and never made moves with men until the hour was quite late and everyone was as drunk and as approved by her friend group as they could be.

All her dating life, Meredith was cute and sweet and looked like the girl next door. She always dressed hella femme because she was hella femme, a girly-girl even in her twenties and thirties, with curly hair that men loved to pull and she loved for them to pull.

With handful tits that men loved to suck on and squeeze, and so did she love it when they did, Meredith's sweet and available chest always got her attention.

With a tummy always kept flat enough from disciplined diet, never eating when she drank, casual exercise, and greek genes on her father's side, Meredith always presented a cute package for strangers hands.

And, I think she, like, had been a full-wax girl since college, so when those lucky strangers got this adorable cutie home with them, they found her smooth and soft and touchable and kissable.

Which I know she always made them do, because while Meredith was not a lover of giving head, claiming too many bad experiences that she refused to come to terms with, she was an absolute pillow princess when it came to receiving head.

When we went out, we were classy girls, you know, but Meredith was an expert at dressing in ways that were totally sophisticated, totally trendy-but-never-trashy, ways that always seemed to get a handsome, fit, successful-looking man to have his hand on her by the end of the night.

Like, some guy would buy her a drink, late in the night, and we girls would be at our table, and she would go over and sit at the bar and talk to this guy whom she had been making eye contact with off-and-on for like, whoever knows. And, then, some time would go by and then, once you looked over at the bar, and Meredith and he were chatting furiously about who knows what, and his hand was on her hip and just kinda, hanging out there, I mean like, she was wearing a wrap dress and everything was where it should be, but this guy whom we had met maybe one drink ago had his hand on her hip as they were both sitting next to each other at the bar, and like, yeah, when we left maybe an hour later, she left with him.

I am sure Meredith does not remember half of the men she hooked up with in those years.

I do know that any boyfriends she had, had to put up with seeing those Magnum condoms in Meredith's drawer. They had to be okay with that. It was always a clear sign Meredith left out about where she had been. You know, prior to the new relationship. She did not flaunt it, but she never, ever pretended otherwise.

Now, before your morality police get all judgy-judgy, this is but one side of an incredibly complex and accomplished woman.

She has a college degree; an unblemished and unbroken work history since graduation.

Her graduate-degree, she got part-time over several years, while working (and partying) full-time. She has always been on-time and alert at work, her career is one of promotions and lateral moves to higher positions. By the time she has that wild pre-wedding night, she has been elevated to an equity-track position at her real estate management company.

She has personally overseen, for five years, the highest-revenue-producing building in the company's commercial office Grade-A, non-LEED-certified portfolio.

She has gone to almost every company event, birthday, holiday party, summer cookout, happy hour, anniversary, ceremony, golf tournament, and gotten wasted with most of her colleagues at almost all of them.

The ones who cannot drink at that pace and then also return to earning that salary during business hours, find other places to go. Other companies to work for. The ones who can, like Meredith, thrive and get promoted.

Those who have interests other than in drinking and vaguely conservative small-talk, do not thrive and do not get promoted.

Meredith has rules for herself with work-drinking that she has almost always kept with only two single but non-consequential exceptions over a decade. One was a colleague who had left the company two weeks prior.

The other was her boss, who was married, right after she got engaged.

The afternoon of the day she first showed up at work with her ring on, to be precise.

He took her out for afternoon drinks at a swanky bar, just them two, to an upscale, quiet spot two blocks away from their office, and forty-five minutes later, they were in a hotel room belonging to the swanky hotel that had the swanky bar just off its ground floor lobby.

In ninety minutes, Meredith's boss was bareback in her and she was writhing under him. He was a beefy guy. Meredith had a thing for beefy men. She was small, but stronger than she seemed, and she preferred men who looked like they could take a lot of beating, and who would never be hotter than her. She felt safe that way.

Alcohol, as you see, played a part in this encounter, but alcohol was her sole hobby, or sole vice. She did not care for grass, she mostly but not always took her Adderall for her ADHD, she did not gamble, have an eating disorder, knit, exercise more than casually as mentioned before, did not do or dabble with any other drug or substances, except alcohol. Regularly and often to excess.

When they arrived at the swanky bar, the bar was nearly empty. This was not a spot anyone from work ever went to. The bar had the calm sounds of a bar waking up to the early, easy part of its day.

The sunlight came in through the high windows just right--Meredith hung her purse on the hook under the bar and felt the leather back of the leather bar stool, firm and comfortable behind her. As she sat down, she felt instantly calm and relaxed.

Her boss offered her, her favorite shot, first. "Whatever it is, let's drink that. To start."

She chose it, and they drank it, and they chatted for awhile before he suggested another, and a water chaser.

Each shot was delicious. It was her mood-stabilizer. Her mood-equalizer. Her mood-lifter. So many different things could do it. A fine wine, an aged liquor, occasionally some spiked wine cooler... the wide variety of flavors and the taste of sophistication that ignited in Meredith everything she wanted to ignite inside herself.

She might not have remembered them years later or the next morning, but during her hookups, she was alive and wild and awake and fully present, always fully present when she was relaxed enough to be her most true self, her most animalistic and naughty self.

When Meredith was drunk and fucking, she would say the filthiest things, tell the dirties stories if he wanted to hear them, no matter how new of an acquaintance he was.

The afternoon she fucked her boss it was filthy enough, the way he held his big hand around her left hand, staring at that big, silly diamond, pounding his cock unprotected in and out of her tight pink cunt, looking at her diamond ring the entire time.

Meredith told me she looked at his face while he was enjoying her promised-pussy. She said her boss looked beyond himself, like he could not make eye contact with her because it was too amazing to actually be finally fucking her, or by looking at her ring it was him having power over her fiancé, whom he had never met, just some type of weirdo, guy thing.

And it wasn't, like, the entire time, she said. It was, like, the first time, and they did it in a bunch of positions, real fast and hot, for an hour or two in the afternoon, and then he went back to work--stumbled back to work--and Meredith got a rideshare and went home early.

He came, she came, he came, she came some more. She told me she felt like she totally got what she wanted out of it. That it was totally random but, like, in that good way.

And he paid for the hotel, too, so she didn't even have to worry about that.

She got home early to clean and wash up, because she was dirty, if you know what I mean.

Filthy. Creamy-filthy. She said they had always kinda flirted with each other, and this was like, they both knew it, their only chance to connect like that, ever.


She said she looked at his face, and did not look at his simple wedding band, not once the entire time, because for her it was not about power, or about what he was like when she was not around in the rest of his life. For Meredith, it was about him and how he always made her feel--this had been going on, for, like, years at that point--and it was kinda like, yeah, in a different life, yeah, maybe... and they needed that one afternoon to give themselves permission to find out--to just know, y'know? To feel what it would be like, just once, for real.

And the liquor before hand was not a problem, it was her mood-enhancer, her little blue pill.

The small thing she did, she took, to let her live one of those "normal lives" that she always heard about, where people were "happy," and "felt good about themselves."

Not just to help her with the adulting, but to help her live her best life.

To have the courage to kiss and to touch, and to be kissed and be touched, first in the elevator of this swanky hotel, and then in this plush king-sized bed of this fine downtown-style grand hotel, to fuck one last hurrah, one last pickup and hookup, as far away from her actual wedding as she could make it; like, had this happened a week or a month prior, then she wouldn't have even been engaged when it happened... and by the time the wedding happens, nobody would even remember. And this was actually her former boss, whom she worked under (pardon the pun) in her previous department, before her internal promotion across departments. But she did not even see him now, except, maybe once a month or less, unless she made the effort to, so it's not like she was going to see him every day until the wedding.

It was guiltless, and truly, when Meredith told me the story, in a pre-blackout state, probably a week or two after she fucked him, she had no guilt at all. She felt smart for getting this temptation out of the way so quickly, so that by the time of her wedding back home in her family's church in Bumbfucksville, this former boss would be a distant--but happy and warm--memory, and his lack of invitation to the actual wedding would be no more than an afterthought.

Even though her former boss, this otherwise happy and successful family man, was not at Meredith's wedding, perhaps it was this creamy, condomless encounter of love and passion, (which did nothing to slow down her career, her relationship, or her wedding plans and seemed to have no ill-effect on her whatsoever), that gave Meredith the idea, way back in her mind, that such things were possible.

That such exceptions to the rules did and could exist.

Perhaps it was the spark that set the slow-burning fuse which would finally ignite on the night before her wedding.