my hand drifts from my neck, feathering over my collarbone.
I’ve gotten so thin.
God knows I’ve felt out of control, like a failure, like life was happening to me rather than I was part of it. Lately, I’d fallen into old habits of spending too long in the gym and not enough at the dinner table. Exerting control in the only way I could. It’s a dangerous ethos and a knife-edge I’ve balanced on before. But no more. No more punishment under the guise of being in control. No more living on supplements and salads as a point of power. It all has to stop.
I don’t have to be that person. I can be someone else. Didn’t I prove that last night?
I find I have no shame. Nothing to regret. And why should I? I spent the night being worshipped like a goddess. And like a goddess, I will leave this room.
Or like Beyonce.
A bottle of wine lies on the nightstand, drops of red staining the snowy pillow on the floor, bed linen clinging precariously to the bed. And then there’s him. Sculpted muscles lying under caramel skin. It would be so easy to peel back the corner of the sheet covering him and wrap my body around his to rouse him, kissing him back to consciousness. But that would lead us back to him meeting the real Fee. The Fee from before. Not the Fee I intend to be.
The door creaks as I open, but my sleeping beauty doesn’t budge. I slip from the room like a thief. I don’t remember the staircase being as noisy on the way up last night, and as I tiptoe through the empty reception, I almost collide bodily with an old lady bowed over a broom.
“Oh, pardon!”
Her response is a hmph sound as she very pointedly looks me up then down, her lips pulled tight like the strings of a purse and the wrinkles in her forehead increasing tenfold due to the weight of her frown.
A burn begins in my chest, the weight of her derision turning my skin beet red. Before I stop. Take a moment. And remember my promise to myself.
I made a decision. The choice is mine, and I won’t berate myself for living life as I see it. Think what you want, old lady. Call me loose. Immoral. A slut. I don’t care because I know the truth of it. Last night, I was valued. Last night, I was Beyonce—I mean, a goddess!
The last man I slept with? I played by the rulebooks. We didn’t kiss until the third date or sleep together until the sixth. We’d talked about our pasts, our families, took time to get to know each other, or at least I thought that’s what we were doing. But when he disappeared, it turned out not one thing he’d said was true.
I might know nothing about the man still sleeping in that little bed upstairs, but I know enough. And he’s restored my faith in men, first by stopping to help me and later by making me feel. Want and wanted. Desire and desired.
One man made me feel like a deity while the other left me feeling nothing but used.
So shove your judgment, little old lady. I refuse to feel bad.
I’m tired of playing by the rules.
“Bonsoir, madame!” My tone is sunshine personified—fake it until you make it, right?—as I make my way around five feet of attitude in a housecoat and a floral headscarf.
Outside, I can’t stop myself from glancing up at the first floor, a tiny part of me hoping to see him standing there. For him to run after me, to declare his undying desire for me.
A girl can dream, I think, as I make my way barefoot along the cobblestones.
After all, dreams are simply hope.
4
Fee
FIVE YEARS LATER
“Are you sure he won’t mind us staying here?”
“Absolutely.” Rose shoots me a reassuring smile over her shoulder as the key turns, the locking mechanism connecting audibly over the stream of constant questions coming from my four-year-old daughter.
Is this our new house?
Does it have a pool?
How high are we up here?
How far away is my new school?
“Trust me. He won’t even know you’re here.”
“As long as that doesn’t mean you haven’t asked him,” I add warily.
“Yes, because I totally just charmed the doorman into giving me the key.”
“I’m pretty sure you could charm the birds from the trees if you’d half a mind,” I mutter, adding then a little more audibly, “I’m just trying not to tempt