˗ˏˋ ꒰ Vi ꒱ ˎˊ˗

The air in the cabin smelled of old pine, damp wood, and cold ashes. The fine rain of the afternoon had left a silvery mist over the lake, wrapping the world in damp cotton. You stood by the window, watching how the last drops slid down the glass, drawing ephemeral paths that vanished instantly.

Behind you, the creak of the floorboards. You didn't need to turn to know it was Vi. Her presence had a specific weight, a frequency your body had learned to recognize over the years. Ten years of friendship that now culminated in this final week of pre wedding rituals.

The bachelorette party had been exactly that: an entire week dedicated to bidding farewell to the single Vi. It wasn't just a night of drinks and plastic tiaras, but seven days of intimate ceremonies designed by her closest friends. It had been a week of ritualized transition, where each event marked the end of an era

Tuesday, the confession dinner at the old Italian restaurant where they used to celebrate everything. Where between plates of lasagna and cheap Chianti, the circle of friends had shared stories of Vi, that time she snuck into a concert, the night she met Caitlyn, the trip to Portland where she got lost for hours. Each story was a thread weaving her single identity, now being carefully unraveled.

Wednesday, the karaoke party until dawn in the apartment they shared, where Vi had sung 80s songs with a heartbreaking passion, sweating under portable disco lights, while everyone chanted her choruses. There was something ceremonial in how she held the microphone, as if she were saying goodbye not only to her singlehood but to freer versions of herself.

Thursday, the ritual of the notebook where all her friends wrote advice, memories, and good wishes. You had spent hours on your page, writing and erasing, until you left only three simple lines that hid everything left unsaid.

And then this weekend at the cabin, the culminating event, the final retreat before the transformation. Originally planned for the whole group of friends, an unexpected storm and last-minute conflicts had reduced it to just the two of you. As her maid of honor, you had volunteered to accompany her on this final retreat. "The last trip of the single ladies," Vi had joked while packing, not knowing how literal that phrase would become.

"There's wine left" her voice said now, softer than usual. The week had been a whirlwind of carefully choreographed emotions, but this, this weekend alone in her uncle's cabin two hours from the city, was different. More intimate. More dangerous. The last unsupervised space before her life would reorganize around "us" instead of "me."

She handed you the glass. Her fingers, those fingers that could draw fantastical landscapes in her sketchbooks, the same hands that that very morning had practiced the wedding knot with a robe belt, touched yours. She didn't pull away immediately. The contact lasted long enough for the warmth to spread up your arm, reminding you of all the casual touches of the week: the prolonged hug during the toast, her hand on your back while laughing during the truth game, her head on your shoulder during the drive to the cabin.

"I've never seen the lake so still" you murmured without thinking, keeping your gaze on the window because looking directly at her seemed, suddenly, too great a confession for the last day of her bachelorette.

"Everything is still" she replied. Her shoulder brushed against yours as she leaned beside you in the window frame. You could feel the texture of her worn flannel shirt. It smelled of woodsmoke and the lemon soap she always used, but also of the new perfume she had been gifted at the bridal shower. "As if the world were holding its breath before... well, before next Saturday."

Dinner was spaghetti with canned sauce, the same they made in their poor student days, a deliberate nod to the past that both recognized without mentioning it. They ate on the floor in front of the fireplace, legs outstretched and feet almost touching. Every time she laughed, a genuine laugh, the kind that wrinkled her nose and lit up her green eyes, something in your chest tightened. I only wanted to see you laugh, you thought. Just one more time, like this, unfiltered, without the shadow of the approaching wedding, before you get married and our dynamic changes forever.

But that wasn't true. You wanted more.

The second bottle of wine disappeared. The rain returned, a soft drumming on the wooden roof. Somewhere between the third glass and a story about her first year of college, a story you'd heard before but that this time felt different, more loaded with deliberate nostalgia, you found her hand among the blankets. You didn't know who had sought whom. You only felt her fingers intertwining with yours, her calluses from years of drawing grazing your knuckles, the engagement ring absently stored in her backpack, leaving her ring finger inexplicably bare.

"Remember that time at the garage band concert?" she asked, her voice barely a whisper over the crackling fire.

"You fell off the stage trying to stage dive during our own college bachelorette party." The precision of the detail surprised even you.

"And you caught me." Her thumb drew circles on your palm, a hypnotic motion that seemed to undo ten years of restraint. "You always catch me when I fall."

The gaze they exchanged then was the bridge both had been avoiding crossing for a decade, but that this week of farewell rituals had made inevitable. In her eyes was a question, a vulnerability she rarely allowed herself to show. In yours, the answer you had never dared to give, but that this final night before the end of her singlehood demanded to be expressed.

The first kiss wasn't on the mouth. It was on the cheek, near the corner of her lips, as you brushed a strand of copper red hair from her face, a gesture you had made a thousand times, but never with this deliberate slowness, never with this awareness that every common gesture was becoming extraordinary because of its final context. She slowly turned her head, capturing your lips with hers.

It was a kiss that tasted of red wine and broken promises. Of lost time. Of all the conversations they never had, of all the moments they had looked at each other and looked away too quickly, of this entire week of celebration that suddenly seemed like an unconscious prelude to this.

Her skin under your hands was softer than you had imagined, and yet stronger. The scars you knew by sight, the one on her elbow from a bike fall, the small one on her eyebrow from a childhood fight, you now explored with your lips, mapping her history with your mouth as if you were archiving every detail for the future. She responded with her own explorations, her hands finding the ribs protruding under your skin, the curve of your spine, the birthmark on your shoulder that she had once drawn from memory for an art project.

"We shouldn't" she murmured between kisses, but her hands were already unbuttoning your shirt with an urgency that contradicted her words.

"I know."

They did it anyway.

The main bedroom had an iron bed that squeaked with every movement, sounds that mixed with the occasional creak of the ceiling beams and the constant patter of rain against the wooden roof. Outside, the storm intensified, washing the windows, erasing the outside world and with it, all responsibilities, commitments, and wedding plans. For hours, nothing existed but the heat of her body against yours, the sound of her ragged breath near your ear, the feeling of her nails gently digging into your back, leaving temporary marks you knew would fade before she put on the wedding suit.

You never spoke of Caitlyn. You never mentioned the engagement ring that shone on the nightstand next to her keys, a silent witness in the dim light. For a weekend, they pretended time had stopped. That decisions had no consequences. That what had always been between them could flourish in this liminal space between her singlehood and her marriage, in this last gasp of freedom before the vows.

Sunday dawned with a pale sun filtering through the blinds, illuminating dust motes dancing in oblique rays of light. You woke with her head on your chest, her hair spread like flames across your skin, her calm breath against your collarbone. You watched her sleep, memorizing the curve of her lashes against her freckled cheeks, the small twitch her mouth made when she dreamed, the exact shape of her parted lips. You wanted to freeze that moment. Make it eternal. Steal this last fragment of time before you had to return her to the world, to her real life, to her future with Caitlyn.

But time, like the tide of the lake outside, advanced relentlessly. The final hours of her bachelorette were slipping away like water between fingers.

She woke up. Her green eyes opened, clouded for a second by confusion, and then cleared with a pain so sharp it could almost be touched. She said nothing. Just curled closer against you, as if she could crawl under your skin and stay there, avoiding the dawn that would bring the end not only of the weekend but of an entire era.

Breakfast was silent. The crunch of toast, the clink of spoons in coffee mugs, the distant cry of a heron over the lake. Every sound was a reminder that the bubble was deflating, that the bachelorette retreat was over, that they would soon return to the city where the wedding preparations would continue, undisturbed, ignorant of what had happened in this cabin by the lake.

"I have to..." she began, but didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to. Both knew what was coming.

You were already washing the dishes, scrubbing the same plate over and over, watching how the soap bubbles foamed and disappeared like her last days of being single, like this weekend, like everything they had been.

She went upstairs. You heard the sound of her backpack zipper, the firm steps on the floorboards, the creak of the bed as she sat to put on her boots. Each sound was a nail in the coffin of what they had been, of what they could have been, of all the possibilities this bachelorette had hinted at and that were now sealed forever.

When she came down, she was no longer the naked and vulnerable Vi from the night before. She was Vi Lanes, engaged, a week away from marriage, with her jeans torn at the knees, her oversized flannel shirt, her backpack over her shoulder. She was wearing the ring again. The silver shone in the cabin's grayish light, a beacon marking her changed status, her new loyalty, the official end of her singlehood and of all it represented between them.

She looked at you from the door, her fingers toying with the backpack strap. In her eyes was a storm of emotions: guilt, longing, sadness, and above all, a heart wrenching determination. The same determination that had led her to plan every detail of her wedding, that now forced her to do the right thing.

"You know this can't happen..." she said, her voice cracking on the last word. She swallowed, straightened her shoulders with the visible effort of someone putting on a suit that doesn't fit comfortably but knows they must wear. "I'm about to get married and you know it."

The words floated in the air between you, heavy and irrevocable. You said nothing. What could you say? That you had loved her since that first day in art class, when she lent you a pencil because you had forgotten yours? That every laugh of hers during this farewell week had been a gift you treasured and yet tore you apart? That never, in ten years, had you wanted to "steal her" from anyone, you only wanted to be close, to be her kind of friend, the one who made her laugh, the maid of honor who accompanied her in her final week of singlehood toward a destiny that didn't include staying by her side as always?