Cake Smash

One minute, my new husband and I were laughing, joking, having fun, and enjoying our wedding day (ish,) and the next, there was a cake smash event. It was probably the zillionth time that day that I’d realised, I’d made a huge mistake in marrying him; but it was too late for second thoughts now that the deed had been done.

Whisky was already pretty drunk by the time the cake-cutting portion of the event came around. I was, too, admittedly, but not quite to his level. No one would blame him, to be fair. The wedding had been an absolute shit show. None of it had gone to plan. That’s what you get for bringing a wedding forward two years on a whim, I guess. Still, we got to the cake-cutting part, which was a miracle in itself.

“Grab us a knife,” he shouted to someone. No please or thank you.

Had he always been that ill-mannered?

Whisky didn’t wait for me to cut the first slice; he just went straight in… on the wrong tier. So much for saving the top part for some big event in our future. He grabbed the slice of cake and smashed it in my face before I’d even had a chance to grasp what was happening. Hard. I feared that he’d broken my nose for a few minutes, but, thankfully, it was fine. There was a pause in the room, as if everyone were waiting for my response before they dared to respond. My face flushed with humiliation. My beautiful wedding dress was covered in crumbs and icing, inside and out. I was picking bits out of my cleavage for the rest of the evening.

I could feel tears welling in my eyes, but Whisky had already gotten his laugh and moved on. So, I laughed, too. I bowed my head, wiped the cake off my face, licked my fingers clean, then laughed, quickly wiping the one escaped tear away with a faux-flick of my hair.

Everyone else laughed.

He had abused me in public… and everyone, including myself, just laughed.

I wish I had done so many other things that day, but the era was different. The cake smash was just a laugh. Everyone knew someone who’d done it/had it done at a wedding. It didn’t feel like a laugh, though; it felt humiliating, like he was putting me in my place in front of everyone – my family, my closest friends, those few acquaintances that we felt we had to invite…

On my wedding day.

I started drinking hard after that: those single malts that Whisky loved so much, shots of tequila and sambuca, glass after glass of Martini Asti Spumante. I was so drunk that I needed a new word for drunk. I’d gone far beyond the definition of it. Thankfully, Whisky seemed to have the same idea. So, off we went, downing drinks at every possible opportunity and no doubt wondering what the fuck we had both gotten ourselves into.

We got so drunk that we couldn’t even get me out of my wedding dress in the hotel that night. I slept in it, and those tight rosebud-twists in my hair. Bobby pins and all. There was definitely no consummation; Whisky had booked our wedding night in a hotel that was infamously known for one-hour room rentals and ladies of the night. It became a very painful running joke in both of our families… and a whopper of a sign of things to come, unfortunately.  

I should’ve got the whole thing annulled. 

The next blog post in the dating timeline is this one: The Honeymoon From Hell.