“My heart will never belong to you. This child will never belong to you. Even if your name is on the birth certificate.” I swallowed back the fear that climbed at those words. “Even if you tattoo it on our bodies. We still wouldn’t be yours.”
He removed his hand as if I were fire, and I sucked in air, trying to fight back the tears.
“I wanted to aim for your heart,” West growled. “Don’t make me aim for your obedience.”
“You wouldn’t even know where to look for my heart.”
West glared at me a moment longer, then rolled to his back.
I cursed myself for being so fucking bad at this job of deception.
And so we stayed like that, shoulder to shoulder, neither one falling into sleep. I tried to stay awake, refusing to sleep next to him. But each blink got heavier, the wall fuzzier…
I woke disoriented, quickly scrambling up. The songbirds were singing, but it was still dark out. The clock read two in the morning. West was gone, where he’d slept rustled. For that I felt grateful, and I relaxed into the sheets.
Put my heart in a cage and treat it like a songbird.
My song will wait until you return.
Is that what happened? Was my heart still waiting to sing for West, all these years later? Even though it had been left to rot in the cage, its song now emaciated and withered.
I drifted back to sleep, listening to the sweet yet oddly macabre sound of a songbird at night. And I cursed my heart. Cursed it for holding on to West like a rusted, flaking thing.
Seven
Dear Atlas,
I’m looking out at the moon and I want to pretend you’re here with me. That it’s you in my sheets. That I can see your tired eyes and you’ll wrap your arms around me.
I feel like I’ve cheated.
More so than when I had another man inside me.
The night belongs to you.
My sideways view belongs to you.
My shadowy confessions belong to you.
I don’t like him beneath the sheets.
I hate the mess he left, the wrinkled confirmation he was here, even more.
But I’ve decided that memories are armor as much as they are wounds.
Because,
The night belongs to you.
To us.
So whatever he does in the night, it can’t hurt me.
Because,
I remember your sideways face.
I remember your shadowy smiles.
The way you shift on the mattress when something hurts your heart. Or how the mattress shifts beneath me when you slide on top. The perfect weight of you, or your perfect strength and heat. Your groan that echoes in my bones and lungs.
I know it’s been less than two weeks since I left, but it feels like ages. Too much has happened.
I’m worried about you.
I’m worried about your sad smile.
I know you’re not reading this, so I’m hoping you can feel it.
Please don’t give up.
I’m not giving up.
I’m safe…we’re safe. As cruel as he is, there’s a line he doesn’t cross. Maybe because he thinks he has a real chance with me, maybe because he knows you’ll always come—I feel you here. A ghost watching me, watching him.
Or maybe he doesn’t cross it because he’s not all evil.
That thought haunts me the most.
The thought that keeps seeding that briar inside of me, giving it water and light.
When he left me, I stayed awake watching the stars give their wishes back to the sun. I couldn’t stop wondering as I looked out at the billions of vanishing stars keeping us apart: why do so many love stories keep princesses locked in towers?
The princess spends more time with the villain than the hero.
Eight
STORY
Two weeks had passed.
Two weeks without Grayson.
The phone was dead.
Useless.
“I heard a story about the Cinderella of Crowne Hall,” my girl whispered—my girl, because I had one now. At least I was allowed to talk to her…
“You are her, aren’t you?” she pressed.
“Why does it even matter?” I sighed. I kept getting asked this question with the same, low-voiced excitement, as if they were asking for an extra piece of chocolate after being told no.
“The Cinderella of Crowne Hall is a servant.” My girl looked away. “It would be so amazing if she’d become a mistress.”
I frowned at my girl in the mirror. More amazing than when I’d been his wife? Behind me, she fastened a silky blue dress, so beautiful it looked like it had been plucked from a painting. My curls de-frizzed, shining like satin.
I felt like I was losing myself, getting uncomfortably used to this life. A porcelain doll, silently purposeful.
Another line from Emily Brontë came to mind.
I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free. Why am I so changed?
“You have the wrong person…that girl doesn’t exist.”
“Oh.” Her face dropped.
“I don’t know why everyone is acting as if being a mistress is such a big deal. I’m basically a whore.”
She dropped the pearls she was about to string around my neck on a gasp. They scattered everywhere. I got down to help her, when a violent flashback assaulted me. The night Grayson married Lottie.
I hate you because I know he’s going to be thinking of you tonight. The same way, maybe, you hate me. Because after tonight, he’ll be mine.
Tangled and twisted, that’s what the four of us had become.
My girl startled at me helping her. “I’m sorry, miss.”
“I didn’t mean to shock you,” I croaked.
“You didn’t…” She scooped up the rest of them. We both rose to our feet, and she went to find another necklace for me.
“Well…you did. It’s quite a big deal. You stand behind them. They don’t let just anyone be you.”
A mistress is not an excuse to lower the bar; even your father knew that.
I was weary with memories, they held my shoulders down like too much gravity. If I only knew how prophetic Beryl’s words would have been that very first day I spent with Grayson.
“So you want to be a mistress?” I asked as she came back to me.
“There is nothing more romantic than being a mistress. A prince sweeps you off your feet, and no one can touch you ever again. You belong to Mr. du Lac and anyone smart won’t even look at you. There aren’t many more powerful than a du Lac.”
I thought of my Grayson.
“Is that what they tell you?” I said, catching her eyes as she tightened a diamond pendant at my neck. “This is romantic? You are nothing more than another piece of property. If it was romantic, you would stand beside him, not behind him. You wouldn’t be beaten until you forget how to speak. You wouldn’t need an archaic tradition to keep other men’s hands off you. But you’ll get the holidays. So there’s that.”
Her brows caved, just as the lawyer from the first week came into the room, briefcase in hand.
My girl faded from my back like the fog outside, rolling from the hills into the sky.
“Have you decided?” the lawyer asked, directing me to the table we’d first sat at.
She laid out both options just like she had two weeks ago, only now I was expected to sign them.