I often wonder what most people picture when they hear the word beauty. It’s such a simple word, a base from which many images and meanings can be pulled, but for some there is only one image that comes to mind.
Is a sunset the pinnacle of what beauty can entail? A wash of colors that blankets the sky, an abstraction of nature’s power written against the heat of a dying sun?
Perhaps a newborn child to a mother’s eye is the meaning. Or the rarity of a lone white deer passing through the lush verdant green of a thick forest.
It’s unthinkable, really.
Incalculable.
The amount of different opinions and images that weigh down a word with only six letters.
Despite the impossibility of ever truly defining the word, I saw it then, heard it, two syllables whispering in my mind as I snuck past a door left cracked.
It was a negligent error she always made because she didn’t care to protect herself. What could possibly happen to the baby of the family? Nobody would dare hurt the spoiled brat. Not in the fortress built around her with their family crest on the door.
Steam rolled out of her bathroom, a hot mist that fell against the colder air in her room. Above her, a ceiling fan turned in slow, endless circles, and her pale skin prickled in response. I wanted to think it was my presence that caused the reaction, but she never sees me. Not even when I am the only person standing nearby.
Lisbeth Rebel Rose, you are a monster, but more beautiful for it.
Does she know that I’m always watching?
Sometimes I think she does. Sometimes I believe that those hooded eyes and the puckered, dissatisfied shape of her mouth are intended specifically to lure me in. Ever since we were kids, she had that effect, her ridiculous childhood tantrums slowly transitioning into a cold silence that could chill my body to the bone.
Still, she’d grown into a beautiful woman.
Two years older than me, she had always been one step ahead. While I was the scrawny, worthless boy at her beck and call, she was a creature of habit, her favorite being to torture me.
I existed to serve her. To appease her. To take her abuse, whatever she deemed necessary, so that she didn’t have to wait too long for her demands to be met.
She could sit and I’d be her footstool. She could make a mess, and I’d clean it up. She could cry, and if she demanded I lick her tears, then my tongue would drag against her skin just like the beaten dog I was.
My mother was hired to tend the family estate, but I was allowed to stay because I made a decent servant for the spoiled bitch of a daughter who wanted a servant of her own to play with.
Tonight was her debutant ball. Lisbeth was seventeen and would be formally presented to society. She would have a bevy of adoring admirers, and I would remain the poor maid’s son that fetched her dirty laundry, changed her bed linens and provided her with clean towels.
In her eyes, I was the epitome of nothing.
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t watch.
Stepping up to a rack where a single white dress hung from a cushioned hanger, she waited for two women to walk up before dropping her towel.
Back facing me, Lisbeth turned her head to scowl when one of the women spoke. It didn’t matter what the woman said, Lisbeth scowled at everything. She was a petulant brat that wanted for nothing.
The towel fell to her feet. Soft. Damp. Still warm from the water and her body heat. My gaze traced up the shape of her calves, the tight muscle of her thighs, up higher to see the heart-shaped perfection of her -
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Snatched by the ear, I was dragged past Lisbeth’s door down a wide hall and around a corner.
My mother slammed me against the wall. I reached to rub where my skin was left burning. No blood seeped from a wound, but that didn’t make the pain any less. I stared down at my mother where she stood glaring up at me.
“Are you trying to get me fired? You know the rules.”
My jaw clenched at her hissed reminder.
The rules were a set of absolute requirements when dealing with Lisbeth. Only her. No other members of the family expected them of me. But then, the rules also applied to only me. As if I couldn’t be trusted