“Have a good night,” Aunt Ashley says, as she sits down and picks up her cell phone to call the assistant to come do the spreadsheets.
“I definitely think it’ll be a good night thanks to you guys,” I say, genuinely smiling for the first time in a very long time.
See? I told you things would be starting to look up soon enough. I just don’t know why I can never believe that myself.
Chapter 8 – Ella
Two hours later, I’m outfitted from head to toe in clothes my friends found for me way quicker than I expected them to. I have no eye for shopping for anything, let alone Halloween costumes or Princess Ball dresses, but we went to Buffalo Exchange and then a costume store for make up and props, and Nikki and Sharon threw together all three of our outfits in record time.
Nikki is Belle from Beauty and the Beast, except that in her Halloween twisted version of the story, while Gaston was fighting the Beast, he grabbed the rose that the Beast was about to present to Belle out of the Beast’s hands, and tried to throw it at him. Belle intervened and took the rose in her face, where it impaled her, thorns sticking up everywhere and blood gushing out. The red makeup all over her face ensures that hopefully my step sisters won’t notice that it’s my best friend.
Sharon is such a ride or die kind of friend that she’s going as a clown version of Snow White. She has white and colorful clown makeup on, with apples instead of blush on her cheeks. She’s wearing a black curly wig that looks like clown hair.
Then there’s me: Gothic Cinderella. I have white makeup on and a black mask to cover my eyes and part of my face. On the rest of my face, brown clumpy makeup is streaked and splattered to represent the cinders that Cinderella had to sleep in.
“And I thought I had it bad,” I snorted, as I recounted this part of the story to Sharon and Nikki while we were shopping. None of us could remember how fairy tales went very well, since none of us really liked them. But when I said that part, they said I had to be Cinderella. It was just too fitting.
My dress is black and lacy with little pieces of fabric that are picked up and hung with tiny skeleton pins. It’s black and white and looks like a lovely combination between tattered housedress and elegant evening ball gown. Leave it to Buffalo Exchange to be selling something like this, undoubtedly sold by some hipster teenager after she wore it to Prom.
“You look absolutely gorgeous,” Nikki assures me as we enter the resort where the Ball is being held.
The environment is festive and lavish; obviously no expenses were spared for the Prince and his future Princess to have the rehearsal dinner and then celebration of their dreams. The costumes are stunning, and my own happens to fit right in with the decorations. They’re frosty and Gothic and it looks like we’ve been transported to a Palace in a faraway land. A haunted Palace, that is.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the MC announces, once we’ve grabbed cocktails and are mingling with Princes of different Halloween varieties: vampires, ghosts, even a Dragon. “I now present to you his Royal Highness Prince Gregory Martin Carrington the Third, and his Princess to be, Miss Meredith Jane Landers.”
They descend a spiral staircase and they both look magnificent. They weren’t kidding when they said this Prince was hot. His fiancée is a lucky girl.
She’s wearing a silver dress, with her face painted all silver and with sparkles added to it, and a long and pointy tiara. I believe she’s supposed to be the Ice Queen. From her body language— she almost seems like she doesn’t even want to be here— I can’t help thinking that she really looks the part.
Stop being jealous over someone you don’t even know, I try to tell myself, but then I hear Sharon beside me, whispering, “Is it just me or does she have kind of an upturned nose? She looked really snotty.”
I have to agree with her. This Meredith Landers chick looks a little perturbed that she even has to be here tonight but I’m probably only imagining that, since I don’t believe in fairy tales and all.
She’s probably thrilled to be marrying this royal hunk who has her arm wrapped tightly in his. I mean, who wouldn’t be? Even though I don’t believe in any of this stuff, I’d go along with it, for the extra special effects.
A love song begins to play and as they reach the base of the staircase they begin dancing and hearts begin falling from the ceiling.
“Awwww,” everybody coos, myself included.
I usually have a heart of stone but there are some things too cute for even me not to coo at. So far, the list includes cute little babies, furry puppies and, apparently, hearts falling down from the ceiling while an engaged couple dances at their rehearsal dinner party the night before their royal wedding.
Sure, it’s a little over the top to have a party after your rehearsal dinner and invite everyone in the entire city. I can’t complain, though, since is my first night out in a long while and I’m grateful to Mr. and Almost Mrs. Prince Charming for giving me the opportunity, as well as for paying for this open bar and not carding me. If I weren’t so shy, I would propose a toast and say just that.
For the rest of the night, Sharon and Nikki and I have fun dancing to everything from oldies to songs from the Rocky Horror Picture Show Soundtrack to the latest pop hits. It certainly is the party of the century.
I can’t help sneaking some glances at the handsome Prince throughout the night, with his muscular looking chest nearly bursting out of his fitted tuxedo, which perfectly caresses his wide shoulders and shows off his toned arms by becoming trimmer in the sleeve area.
His eyes are a unique shade of green— like grass, almost— and he has a full head of dark brown curly hair. How lucky does one have to be to be born rich, royal, and handsome? I bet he has a huge cock, too.
They really don’t make guys this good looking here in this country. I guess you have to go to some far-off place I’ve never heard of in order to find one of these.
I keep an eye out for my step sisters as well, but there are so many people here that I only see them once during the night and they’re in line for the bathroom. Although I was headed there, I take a bee line back to the dance floor and decide to wait so that I can avoid running into them.
Thereafter, I resume my pastime of watching the Prince. I know I shouldn’t lust after an engaged man but it’s only in my fantasies. And I’m sure every other girl here is doing the same thing.
What would it feel like for him to pick me up and wrap my legs around his strong-looking hips? Would his hair fall into his eyes as his cock entered me, filling me up for my very first time…?
“What’s up with the Prince and his chick?” Sharon asks at some point.
I had been so busy staring at his eyes and focusing with a laser lens stare on his face and body that I didn’t even realize he’d been fighting with the soon to be Princess. Or at least it looks like that’s what they’re doing.
They’re obviously trying to keep it to hushed tones, but their mouths are moving furiously. And her body language expresses that she’s pleading with him while his is stone cold and resistant.
“I don’t know, probably crazy royal family type shit,” Nikki says. “Maybe they just found out they’re related or something. But the night’s almost over. We have to get Ella back to the Dungeon so she can send those invoices, in about an hour and a half. So let’s make the most of it, shall we?”
I hold onto the pumpkin necklace around my neck, nervous that we won’t make it on time and grateful that Nikki is reminding me. When I look back at the Prince, his fiancée is no longer there. One of his friends has his arm around him and is talking to him as he leads him over to the bar for a drink.
“Must be a lover’s quarrel,” I murmur under my breath.
“Or else maybe they broke up and he’ll be looking for a new Princess,” Sharon suggests. “If so, I volunteer.”
“You’ll have to beat Sheila and Gloria away with a stick,” I tell her scornfully. “Their whole plan was to try to steal the Prince away tonight and him breaking up with h
is fiancée would just make it all the that much easier for them.”
“No offense but— b-but— I don’t know what Paul was thinking when he hooked up with Sheila,” Sharon says, slurring her words and sounding a bit tipsy. “I know you think she’s so pretty but it’s just because she ha-has some strange power over you.”
Yeah, the power of ruining my life forever and my not being able to do anything about it, I think.
“B-but, well, she shouldn’t, because you’re wa-way prettier than her and you have a much better personality too,” she continues, sloshing her drink around. “It’s definitely Paul’s loss. You’ll find someone wa-way better.”
“Thanks, Sharon,” I tell her.
I know she’s drunk and she just means well. But I don’t want to think about Paul, nor do I want to think about my step sisters hooking up with this Prince even if he did just have a falling out with his fiancée. On that note, I decide they’re probably done in the bathroom now, so I say I’m going to head that way.
But the line for the bathroom in the Ballroom is incredibly long and I don’t want to spend my last hour and a half standing behind a bunch girls who are asking each other— or, God forbid, me— if their hair became too frizzy and if that guy over there is looking at them. So, I make my way out to the hotel’s main lobby.
Even though I grew up in Denver, and this resort isn’t too far away from where I live, I’ve never been here. It’s way too fancy for my budget and I don’t know anyone who could afford it. I know there has to be a bathroom in here but I don’t know where. I wander around until I see a lobby bar where I figure there has to be one.
As I turn the corner, I step down some stairs leading to the bar area and run almost right smack into Prince Charming himself. His hair looks disheveled as if he’s been running his hands through it and his eyes are red as if he’s been crying, or maybe just drinking too much. In fact, the bartender had just brought him a drink but she scurries away when she sees me approach, probably because she erroneously assumes that we’re together.
I look up into the Prince’s grass-green eyes and then lower them but then I’m staring right at his scorching hot body, wishing that the bartender’s assumption had been correct. Even though it’s nothing at all like me, I seem to be spellbound in the Prince’s majestic presence.
How I wish I was marrying this guy tomorrow, instead of just dressed up like Gothic Cinderella, getting ready to hurry back to my evil step mother and step sisters. If only my life really was a fairy tale.
Chapter 9 – Gregory
There are quite a few things a groom might expect to hear from his best man on the night before his wedding. Things such as “I’m so fucking happy for you, Dude,” “Thank you for having me by your side,” or, if he’s the sentimental type, maybe “I’m so glad I can support you in this journey.”
Hell, some best men that double as jokesters, like my best man Kevin is known to be, might say something like “How’s it feel to be living the last free day of your life?” Or “Let me know how you feel about her after she becomes your old ball and chain.”
There’s one thing you really don’t expect your best man to say on such an occasion, though, and that would be what Kevin just told me.
“I fucked your fiancée.”
Of course, he didn’t say it exactly like that. He was more hesitant and self-preserving about it. The prick.
What he actually said was: “Gregory, pal, I’ve been thinking a lot about whether or not to tell you this, buddy. People have advised me not to. But it’s been eating me alive and I figured it’s better to tell you now rather than later. Meredith and I slept together.”
“What the fuck?” I’d exploded.
I would’ve hit him on the head if there weren’t so many people around. That’s probably why he timed his little confession to be in public, even if the occasion was my rehearsal dinner party.
“You slept with her? How could you? And when?”
He gave me a deer in the headlights look, as if he wasn’t anticipating follow-up questions to his bombshell announcement.
“Which question should I answer first?” he finally asked.
“You’re so fucking unbelievable,” I said.
“I don’t know how it happened,” he sputtered. “You know how it is. We were all on that trip for your singles’ tour around the States…”
“No, I don’t know how it is,” I’d told him. And then I said, “Wait, back up. That’s when it happened? Way back then? And that’s where it happened?”
“Well,” he’d stammered, and from the way he was responding, it dawned on me that I’d been asking the wrong question. Maybe I should have asked where didn’t it happen.
“So, this whole time, ever since then, she’s never told me that after she hooked up with me she also hooked up with you, but then she stayed with me and had a really good weekend with me? Fuck!”
“I guess,” Kevin answered, looking down at the floor like the pussy that he is. “I mean, it didn’t exactly stop right then…”
“What?!” I exploded all over again. “How long did it last?”
“Well, you know I had to come here on royal business a couple months ago…”
“Are you fucking kidding me? You’ve seen her more recently than I have?”
“Yeah,” he continued. “And then we got here, you hit the sack early, so…”
“What the fuck!”
Now he could stop telling me the answers to my questions, I’d thought. Apparently, I didn’t really want to know all of that.
“I had motion sickness from the plane!” I protested. “I had to go lie down.”
“Yeah, well, I guess she was kinda bored…”
“You are the worst friend I’ve ever had,” I told him. “I can’t believe you agreed to be my best man when you are fucking my fiancée. She seems almost as much your fiancée as mine by this point!”
“Well, that’s the thing,” Kevin said, sheepishly. “I wasn’t even quite sure that you’d… you know, like, care? Remember when we shared that girl on our backpacking trip throughout Europe?”
“That was completely different,” I told him. “We were nineteen fucking years old. We were never going to see that girl again.”
“Well, that’s all I thought that this is going to be, too,” he said. “It’s not like you’re the type to settle down so I was even planning to tell you about it and all of a sudden you’re like, “Oh, she’s the one, she’s my new princess!’ and I was like, thinking, ‘well, now I sure can’t fucking tell him.’”
“Well you sure kept doing it,” I told him. “You didn’t feel that bad, you didn’t have much of a guilty conscience… to just, like, fucking stop.”
“True,” he said, wringing his hands. “But, still, I mean, you know… This is all just some fake thing. It’s not like you really love her anything.”
That’s when I looked in his eyes and did my best to refrain from punching him, or crying. But the truth of the matter is: Kevin was right. I didn’t love her. I’ve never loved anyone. I was just doing this to make my family happy. I guess she was just doing it to be a princess. As I’d already said, who wouldn’t?
I suppose I got caught up in trying to prove to my mom that I had made the right choice in someone to marry, when clearly, I hadn’t. This is probably a good thing this didn’t last.
Except, what am I going to do about tomorrow? My mom will be so hurt if I don’t go through with this plan to make our family look good for the rest of the Kingdom.
After that unpleasant exchange, I went and found Meredith and had an even worse one with her. She seemed to think it was all fun and games, and that she was free to do whatever until we were officially and royally hitched.
“Fuck that,” I’d told her. “When did we ever say that? How do I know you wouldn’t keep running around after we had gotten married?”
“What are you saying, Gregory?” she’d asked me, tears welling in her eyes, starting to beg me. “I was goin
g to give up my whole life for you. My acting career. To move to the middle of nowhere to be your wife…”
“Yeah, well it’s not the middle of nowhere,” I’d told her. “For the tenth time, it’s off the coast of Latvia and Estonia, in the Baltic Sea. And you are so full of promises of what you were going to give up for me, but you’re also full of shit, because you couldn’t even give up not fucking my best man. Get out of here before I tell everyone in here what you did to me.”
That worked. She clearly cared what people thought, just like my mom, but not enough to not screw around on me. She’d left and I was standing there alone like an idiot but I didn’t even care because I was glad she was gone.
George, one of my groomsmen, took me to the bar to buy me a shot, but I was still in a blind rage. That was a few minutes ago, and I’m still feeling that way. I also need to figure out what I’m going to do.
So here I am by myself wanting to have another drink but in a secluded bar, never wanting to go back to see all of those people again. I especially don’t want to have to see my mom right now.
I sip my whiskey sour while I think about what to do. I can’t let down my mom, my poor sick dad, and the whole royal family tree. Possibly the whole fucking country, as small and obscure as it may be.
I need to figure something out, some way to fix things. I sit my drink down and order another one because I know that sooner or later I’ll have to go back and face reality and I might as well do it with some liquid courage.
I decide I have to go through with things anyway. No one even knows what my fiancée looks like. Tonight was a fucking costume party. She’s never been to my country and we were very careful to keep pictures of us from being splattered all over the tabloids when we were together. I agreed to it as part of the deal with my mom. And I hate the damn paparazzi anyway.
So, I just have to find a girl. A replacement bride. A pretend princess.
I’m sure that just like Meredith wanted to, almost any girl would jump at the chance to be a princess, even if it was a fake princess of sorts. That’s what Meredith would’ve been anyway.
Out of Line: A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance Page 51