“Holy shit,” I say, as soon as we’re back in the Dungeon.
I’d already filled in Sharon and Nikki as we rushed over here and now I can’t wait to tell my aunt.
First, though, I have official business to attend to.
“Did you have fun?” Aunt Ashley asks, looking up hopefully from her spot behind the computer.
“Way too much,” I tell her. “You’re never going to believe it.”
“Oh, good, I can’t wait to hear all about it,” she says. “Yeah, but first, how did it go with the assistant? I assume there are no problems or you would text me.”
“You know it,” she says, pointing to the perfectly prepared invoices on the computer. “Pending your final approval, this is ready to push send. I already looked over them.”
“Okay then, we’re gonna jet,” Nikki says. “There’s an after party I want to go to.”
Sharon says, “Ella, can you ca-come when you’re da-done with this?”
“I see she’s had more to drink,” I tell Nikki, laughing. “Thanks for the invite, guys, but I think I have some pretty important plans tomorrow I need to be ready for.”
“Oh yeah,” they both squeal together in response.
My aunt looks at me curiously. “Cool. Did you meet a guy and you have a date tomorrow?” she asks
“I’ll tell you later. Let me look at this,” I say in a rush.
“Bye, guys.” I give Sharon and Nikki a quick kiss on each cheek. “Thank you so much for making me go tonight to this is crazy but amazing Ball.”
“Glad you’re so happy happy joy joy,” Sharon says. “Just don’t…”
She trails off but my aunt figures out what she’s saying just as soon as I do.
“Fall in love?” she asks. “Get your heart tangled up too much?
“Exactly,” Sharon says.
“Don’t worry,” I tell them. “I have a heart of steel. I’m never gonna fall for anything again after what Paul did to me.”
I can’t help feeling some knots mixed with the butterflies in my stomach though as I say this. I’ve never felt anything like I felt for the Prince. And the way he made me come was incredible.
I try to tell myself it’s just the sexual infatuation. I know he wants to take my virginity and I want to let him. That feeling that was missing with Paul is there with the Prince. It feels perfect, so it doesn’t have to make sense. Just like how it didn’t feel perfect with Paul, so it didn’t have to make sense that I didn’t want to be with him in that way, and it had turned out to be good that I had listened to my gut. I want to listen to my gut now too, without putting my heart on the line.
But I don’t even care that he’s going back to his faraway land. I don’t care that I’ll never see him again. Well, if I’m honest with myself I might care about that a little. But not enough to let it stop me from being with him for my very first time.
If he can do all that he did to me with just with his fingers – and inspire me to do what I did to him with my mouth – I can only imagine what sort of magic the rest of our bodies can make together.
I look over the invoices and everything looks fine. My dad’s company has been going well under my leadership, even if my step mother doesn’t want to admit it. I push send on the computer program with ten minutes left to spare. Just enough time to fill my aunt in on what happened tonight.
“If it were anyone but you telling me the story I wouldn’t even believe it,” my aunt says, when I’m done. “I would think you were crazy and making all of that up. It’s so hard to believe all of that really happened.”
“It’s hard for me to believe too,” I tell her.
Of course I didn’t fill her in on some of the finer details. I just said that we kissed – which is true. I just didn’t tell her the kiss was so amazing that it motivated me to do other things with my mouth.
“Well, I think the fact that he wants you to be his pretend Princess means he’s really into you,” my aunt says.
“Don’t be silly,” I tell her. “He has to get married tomorrow for the good of the Kingdom.”
“That’s not true,” my aunt says. “He could’ve just told his mom no. She sounds understanding enough that she would’ve found a way to work with him on it. What would he have done if you hadn’t said yes?”
“He mentioned something about searching everywhere far and wide and paying someone to stand in,” I respond. “Actually, that’s what he is going to do once he gets back because he’ll need a more permanent replacement for me, his temporary, fill-in bride.”
My aunt looks at me with a sparkle in her eye and says, “Why can’t that be you?”
“Very funny,” I tell her. “I have a business to run.”
“But is that really the only thing holding you back?” she asks. “What if he asked you to extend the length of the fake marriage? You would say yes if it weren’t for this business?”
“I can’t even, with you and your hypotheticals,” I tell her, but mostly because I don’t really want to think about the answer to the question. “I have no idea what I would do. But he hasn’t asked yet, and he won’t be so please just leave it at that, okay?”
But she presses forward, as my aunt is known to do.
She says, “I’m asking because while I was holed up in this dungeon babysitting your assistant, I did a little digging. Look at this document. Here on the computer.”
She pulls up a document titled Final Draft of Will. It looks different than what my step mother showed me after my dad died.
“See?” Aunt Ashley says, pointing to clause 3.
I stare at it, trying to make sense of what she’s telling me and what I’m reading.
It still says that my step mother and I are to run the business and that my dad hopes we can get along. But it gives me the power to decide how well the business is working out under this arrangement and if I want to buy out my step mother’s quite lower share of the business than I thought he left her (which, she had said 50/50), I can.
“This is strange,” I say. “I wonder why he changed it.”
My aunt stares at me again. “Well, maybe he didn’t”
I can’t even fathom what she’s saying. I know my step mother is evil but is she evil enough to change my father’s Will and pass some altered version off on me as the real one when it’s not?
The more I think about it the more I realize that she just very might well be that evil.
“Well, I guess I’ll go see his attorney and try to see if there’s some way I can contest his Will,” I say. “I never really tried because it certainly wasn’t at the top of my priority list and I stupidly trusted her.”
But then I realized something else. “It doesn’t really matter because how can I buy out her share? It’s less than I thought he’d left her but that would be a lot of money still.”
“I thought about that,” my aunt says. “But I think, knowing my brother, that clause was put in there as an incentive to make sure that you run the business well. Because the business is already doing well and I think you can make it better and then you would be able to buy her out.”
“You know,” I told her, “If I have the money I would just hire a manager to run it in my place. I mean, let’s face it: medical supplies have never really been my thing. I’m more of a daydreamer. Wish I could pay someone else to do it so that I could use the money to go to college and focus on creative writing. Or literature. Something impractical and unprofitable like that.”
“Well, I really think you can do whatever you want to do,” my aunt says. “You’re a very smart and determined woman and I’m proud of you. And I know your dad would be too. Just like he always was.”
“Awww, thank you, Aunt Ashley,” I say, as I hug her. Looking at the clock, I jump. “It’s almost midnight . You have to get out of here,” I tell her. “And I have to get all this stuff off.”
She laughs.
“So that’s what your friends outfitted you up with?” she asks. “You look beautiful and it’s fitting because they’re like your little animal friends getting you ready to sneak out to the Ball you were supposed to go to.”
I laugh and say, “then that would make you my fairy godmother.”
“Well, I’m honored to be that,” she says I hug her long and hard. For what must be the millionth time I think about how glad I am to have her in my life and how lost I’d be without her.
“Thanks, Aunt Ashley. I hate to rush you out but…”
“I know, the wicked stepmother is coming soon,” she says.
And then, poof!, just like that, she’s gone and I’m scrambling out of my costume clothes and into my normal office clothes.
Midnight comes and goes and my step mother isn’t here to make sure that the spreadsheets and invoices were done. This is not like her. She’s always checking in on me.
I start to worry that she knows that I left. I sit down and stare at my father’s draft Will on the computer. The way he has it set out here makes a lot more sense than the version my step mother showed me.
I really didn’t think he would leave me stuck working with my step mother my whole life. Although I did not directly express my feelings about her towards him, I think he knew.
One of the last things he said to me when we were working at the homeless shelter was that he didn’t realize that my step mother was the type to not want to volunteer there, or he might not have married her.
“Maybe it was kind of a rush decision,” he says. “Because after we got married, I assumed she’d come with us but I brought it up to her and she said no way. Said it was grimy and dirty.”
He was shaking his head as he told me.
“It just really offended me and I’m sorry… I’m sorry if my choice wasn’t the best.”
He didn’t say it but I sensed that he meant for me as well as for him, as our little family had changed drastically. My step mother and step sisters went out of their way to be fake nice to me around my dad but treated me awfully when he wasn’t around.
But he must’ve somehow picked up on the tension and felt bad about it. I think my trying to get along with them is my way to ease my guilt for knowing that my father had guilt due to me. It’s a complicated situation but if this Will is right then there might be a way out of it finally.
Suddenly the door thunders open and I quickly hit X on the document that’s on the computer.
“Hi there,” I say to my step mother, trying my best to look innocent. I’m so glad there are so many boxes around so I could easily stash my fancy clothes in one of them; she’d never be able to find it with all the mess in here.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
I freeze. I don’t know if she caught me looking at the Will or if she knows where I went. I’m afraid to answer any question in case I’m assuming that she asked a different one and unwittingly give myself up.
“Nothing,” I tell her, going with the safest and most vague answer. “Just waiting to show you that I sent the invoices.”
I open up the program that shows they were sent. “And these are the spreadsheets,” I tell her, showing her the tabulated columns that the assistant had put together. My aunt had assuredly sworn her to secrecy so that it looks like I did it all.
“Strange,” my step mother says, sitting down on a chair in the corner and staring at me.
Oh great. She knows something was up.
“You know, Sheila and Gloria went to the ball tonight and they said that it was a clusterfuck of royal proportions,” she says.
“Really?” I ask her, trying my best to look interested. “What happened?”
“The prince was observed having a fight with the Princess and then nobody could find either of them,” my step mother says. “I think all those partygoers mooching off all the alcohol were too drunk to notice or care but because Sheila and Gloria are caring, kind people they decided to search for the Prince.”
How very altruistic of them, I think sarcastically
“They saw him grabbing the arm of and trying to talk to a girl who they say was dressed like some kind of Gothic Cinderella,” she says. “They say this girl is someone they haven’t seen around and they think it’s very suspicious. They don’t know who she is.”
“Oh,” I say, hoping that’s all there is to it. So they don’t know who the girl is. They can wonder all they want but if they don’t have hard proof then I’m not in trouble.
“I just think it’s very disgraceful if the prince was talking to a girl other than his fiancée, don’t you think?” my step mother asks me. “Even if they did have a fight.”
I shrug, feigning disinterest now instead of interest. I just want her to stop talking and leave me alone. I don’t want her to ruin this for me, like she ruins everything.
“I don’t really know,” I tell her. “I’m tired from working on all of this office stuff. I just need to get back home and get to bed. I’ve had a long day.”
She has no idea how long it actually was, or at least, I hope she doesn’t. But she clearly suspects.
“Well let’s just say that if somebody were with this prince while he was engaged that would be a big scandal. I hope it wouldn’t interfere with his wedding plans tomorrow,” she says.
“I sure hope not either,” I agree.
“Well, that’s that then.” She pats her leg, as if that settles things. “I’m going to need you to clean out the house all day tomorrow.”
She says it with a smug smile on her face. “It’s very dirty.”
“Clean up the–” I gasp, unable to believe my ears. You can’t make me do that,” I say, forgetting my vow to myself to try to get along with her. “That has nothing to do with this business that we’re supposed to be running together…”
“It does have a lot to do with the fact that you’re staying in my home for free,” she says.
“Your home!” I explode. “I’m the one who lived there first…”
“And I’m the one who pays the mortgage and you’re a grown adult now and adults usually leave their parents’ home…”
This is laughable, since my step sisters are older than me, but I ignore that part of a valid argument.
“You pay the mortgage with Dad’s money,” I say. “It comes out of the estate. It’s both of ours.”
My step mother glares at me. “Do you really want to risk the business over not cleaning the house tomorrow?”
I can’t believe she’s blackmailing me like this. Tomorrow is Saturday. I highly doubt I can get in touch with the lawyer to figure out my rights here.
If she’s right that she can just throw me out and disband the business because I won’t clean the house then there’s no way this is ever going to work out. But I have to do everything I can to make sure to save my dad’s business from her evil grasp. Who knows what she would do with it if I weren’t around.
“Fine,” I say, storming home.
When I get there, I throw myself on the bed, not even remembering anymore at first that this is same place I caught Sheila and Paul having sex. That seems like a lifetime ago. I don’t even care about it anymore.
What I care about is that I agreed to get fake married to the Prince tomorrow and I’m not going to be able to do it. Nor am I able going to be able to ever lose my virginity.