I found her charming and funny - she complimented me on my dress, my hair, my shoes. In hindsight I suppose we were flirting in a way that felt completely devoid of meaning or jeopardy because we were both straight. I’d spent time with them as a couple but before this wedding Sarah and I had never really talked. But then he brought her to meet us and she was perfect: fun but calm, wild without the violence. We’d winced behind his back when he said he’d found someone he thought he could have a future with. His relationships, up to Sarah, seemed to me more like protracted acts of masochism. Our whole group had been pleased the first time Steven brought Sarah to meet us he’d spent years dating women with wild temperaments who’d end up trashing his room or threatening to set his car alight unless he capitulated to whatever demand they had. We’d spent our year abroad together, living out a silly, sepia-tinged Italian fantasy - ' che bello! che dolce!' - and then graduated and moved to London and ended up with a circle of six or seven close friends. Steven and I had known each other since university. She was my best friend Steven’s* girlfriend. We were acquaintances, really, rather than friends. This is what I told myself the next day - this is how I wrote it off when Sarah* and I had sex. The hysteria of nighttime at a wedding - everyone an inflated version of themselves, like bubbles close to popping.
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