I have never called myself romantic, never understood the point of it, but now I do.
My palms cup her face. Her cheeks wet, her lips salty as I pull her into a kiss.
The world around us stops.
There is only her and me, and before I can do anything about it, the words slip from my mouth.
“I love you, my beautiful princess. I love you.”
Mia
“You know what?” I shout with spitting anger at the phone in my hand while I walk up and down the drawing room. “You can go to bloody hell! Take you useless husband, your ignorant existence and your judging arse and leave me the fuck alone!”
“Mia, love,” says my mother on the other end. “Don’t you see what that woman does to you? Never would you have dared speak to me in a tone like this?—“
Oh, how I want to strangle my mother right now.
“What she does to me is show me my worth,” I say dangerously, trying to keep myself from shouting. I look at Victoria, who stands opposite me, signalling me to breathe. I do. And then, I say what I should’ve said a long time ago.
“You have done everything you could to keep me small, and now that I ain’t, you can’t stand it. You can’t stand it because you profited from me being small, enduring all your moods, judgments, and expectations,” I say, and my voice gets threateningly silent. “But I am done with you. The only person you ever loved was you. You never loved me for who I am, but for what I can gain for you, which was never enough, and I am done with it.”
With that, I hang up.
I stand there, panting, as I realise what just happened.
Victoria looks at me, smiling.
“I am so proud of you,” she says.
I bite my bottom lip with all my teeth as a grin appears on my face. I stood up to my mother.
I did it.
And everything feels so much lighter. As if a burden was lifted from my chest.
“Henry!”I shout so loud it might be audible in the entirety of Glenmere Manor. My voice echoes from the stone walls quite painfully into my own ears.
He enters after a soft knock on the door.
“You called?”
“What for the bloodiest of damning hell is this?” I ask him and hold up poor Porridge, who hangs lifeless in a suit made for cats, so he looks like he’s wearing a tailcoat. Pebbles lies on the floor like dead, with a train fixed to her collar.
Henry laughs.
“Well, they need to be properly dressed, too.”
“The hell they do! They’re bloody cats!”
“Yes,” he says. “But they’ll also be the flower cats, as you both made it abundantly clear there won’t be any kids at the wedding.”
“Yes!” I shout. “But this?!”
I put Porridge down; he usually runs away whenever I shout, but the suit has completely immobilised him, and he flaps onto the floor.
“I don’t want to get bloody married anyway!”
“Did you tell her that?” he asks dryly.
