I Won’t Serve Wedding Tea to Her Male Best Friend

During our wedding tea ceremony, we were supposed to start calling each other’s parents Mom and Dad. Instead, Yan Mingyue’s male best friend, Chu Zheng, charged up from the groomsmen’s table.

He dropped into a chair beside her father and crooked a finger at me.

“Come serve me tea, son-in-law.”

The guests burst out laughing.

Without the slightest embarrassment, he put a video from the night before up on the big screen.

In it, he was straddling Mingyue’s lap, making her call him Dad.

Once she had, he asked, “What if your husband won’t call me that too?”

She lowered her head to light a cigarette, smiling with complete certainty.

“He wouldn’t dare.”

“He loves me too much to embarrass me at my own wedding.”

When the video ended, Chu Zheng reached out to pat my face.

“Be a good son-in-law. Say hello to Dad.”

I didn’t move.

So Mingyue picked up the tea herself and brought it to me.

“Chu Zheng has been by my side for twenty years. If you’re marrying me, you have to respect him.”

When he’d taken our wedding ring and put it on his own hand, she’d said they’d known each other longer.

When he’d deleted our photos together, she’d said he was just insecure.

When he’d drunkenly left a hickey on her neck, she’d said she couldn’t let twenty years of friendship grow distant because of me.

Now she was using those twenty years against me again. She rose onto her toes and kissed my chin.

“Kneel once, and I’ll love you for a lifetime. That’s a fair trade.”

Looking at her, I suddenly found the bargain very easy to weigh.

I decided not to make it.