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January 1 - January 6, 2025
Beauty and poise and accomplishment she can fake, but deep down, she knows she’ll make a horrid wife. She’s sure they can smell it on her, like dogs do fear.
Not the son he wanted, that’s all she ever was.
but she thought—what did she think, she’d meet a pretty boy and suddenly she’d want to be married for the first time in her life?
“I’d rather be single and penniless than stuck in a marriage like that.” Gwen sighs. “Agreed. Though penniless looks different when you’re really in it.”
“Please, I am so bored. I’ll take twenty-year-old gossip,”
That makes her chest tighten and Beth forces a smile. She’s not sure at all that she wants his children, nor that she wants her fabled tree house on his lands. Never her lands. She won’t have her own lands after this at all, even if they do marry. Even if he comes into a thousand acres, they won’t be hers.
“He’s perfectly lovely,” Beth admits. “Just . . . it’s only pleasant. Should it feel like more than that?” “Pleasant is more than many women ever get,” Mother says immediately, before turning pensive.
She’d let the whole world watch for another minute pressed against these aging barrels with Gwen’s lips on hers.
Is what she’s feeling love? This all-consuming thought? The heated tickle across her skin when she thinks of their kiss?
“If it’s consensual, two people touching that way should always be nice,”
She wouldn’t ask if one of them was a man. No one need ask when one is a man. That’s simply how it’s meant to be. You’re born a girl, you grow up to be a wife, then a mother, then more than likely a widow, and then you pass, hopefully with a smattering of male heirs. You don’t grow up to kiss your best friends and become a spinster.
She didn’t know women could be rough together, could be playful together, could be heated and wanting and clutching together until Gwen kissed her at the party.
In this room that isn’t hers, this house that isn’t hers, she sits with a life ahead that won’t be hers either, devoid of all happiness and desire. No love, no hope, no Gwen.
Just because her best friend and . . . lover is about to marry the season’s most eligible bachelor doesn’t mean she can’t still walk tall.
At least she had this, that’s what she’ll have to tell herself for the rest of her life. At least she had one brief moment of love and joy and affection before a life without.
