Shaun and Lorna’s big day approaches

When the stripper removed his shirt and began playing with his nipples, that was when Shaun knew he wasn’t drunk enough. Nowhere near it.
These kinds of things are supposed to happen in an anaesthetic haze of drunkenness that you barely remember the morning after. Everyone’s supposed to be falling-over, shambolically wasted, bellowing and hooting. This just wasn’t right.
Shaun himself couldn’t have had more than three beers and a tequila by the time the strip show started. Four drinks in two hours! He was just about legal to drive!
Now here was this woman, Colette from Executive Entertainment, rubbing her boobs in his face and he was experiencing it all in crystal clarity. No one had even thought of dimming the lights in Julian’s lounge, so Shaun could see every bulge of her cellulite as she bent over in front of him in her lime-green G-string.
Grief! A dead-sober nudie show! How awful. Whose idea was this anyway? Shaun blamed Lorna’s brother Eric. He was just the kind of sexually frustrated, closet case who would arrange something like this. It had either been him or Chris from that band with the weird name. Blow. What kind of name is that anyway? Blow what?
At last someone started hooting half-heartedly from across the room. Almost to be polite, as a professional courtesy to the stripper. Shaun looked across the lounge and it was Tshepo from that TV show. Great, now there were celebs watching him get stripped naked by a dancing girl. And Shaun hardly knew Tshepo anyway. Who invited him to his bachelor’s?
Colette produced a pink feather boa and strung it around Shaun’s neck, this time eliciting some pretty much sincere laughter from the dozen-odd okes in the lounge. She gently tied him to the chair back with it and then…
Then she got out this massive pair of granny’s bloomers and put them on his head. He couldn’t see after that, but he was conscious of her pouring some kind of sticky lotion on his chest. It smelt a little like baby oil, but there was something else mixed in with it.
Shaun heard her digging around in her bag behind him. Then she came back, and the laughter got louder.
Inside the bloomers, he closed his eyes and waited for it to be over. But it wasn’t going to be that easy. Now she was whipping him with some object. It felt floppy and rubbery. Shaun hoped it was a rubber chicken and not something worse…
He sat unmolested for a couple of minutes, then she placed something delicate on his head and something else in his hand. There was a final round of whistling and applause. It appeared the strip show was over.
“Thanks, guys. You were great,” Collette called out. He heard her ejecting her CD from the hi-fi and then Jules went and let her out the front door.
Sean was left holding this greasy rubber object, alone in Julian’s lounge with a pair of granny panties and something mysterious on his head.
The laughter reached a new crescendo after Colette had left and then someone whipped the bloomers off his head. Shaun blinked in the far-too-bright lounge light and looked down at himself.
He was topless, covered in a mixture of honey and baby oil, bound to the chair with a pink feather boa and in his left hand he held a floppy rubber cricket bat. Someone had placed a cricket helmet between his legs. Off to the side was a cricket box. It looked like it might even be his. That was probably what she’d put on his head.
“Well done, boet,” David shouted. “This one was for the Titans!”
No one knew yet that Shaun hadn’t been signed for next season. Still, it was a nice thought.
“Sheez, you guys,” was all he could think of to say as he shrugged the boa off him and stood up. “Who’s got a beer for me? I’m spitting feathers here.”
He took the Castle from Jules, then stripped naked and walked out to the pool to have a swim and wash the gunk off.
At least the worst was over. By this time next week they’d be married. He’d have his lovely Lorna by his side and they’d be listening to speeches at the reception.
Then, then it would all be over and done with.
Shaun stood in the shallow end, carefully picking honey out of his chest hairs and sighed. The things you do for love.