Page 248 of Swallow Your Sorries

Everything in the play that had happened to Cinderella, felt like it happened to me, even if some portions were a stretch of the imagination at best, but this? Something as simple as a wedding felt like some fantastical dream.

Again my hatred for Rin peaks. None of this had crossed my mind before. I’m eighteen. Marriage is nowhere on my horizon for a decade or more and yet…this little piece of jewellery is just another reminder of what I can never have with Gant Auclair. With any blue blood in this room. I don’t belong. Like Rin said, princes like Gant are real. Cinderella herself is real. But them actually ending up together? Not a chance in hell.

I peel my eyes away from the diamond for long enough to see that someone’s slipping my foot into the other pointe shoe. The one Gant hadn’t put on me. Quickly I dismiss them. I need to make sure the ribbons are tied just right on both. My moment isn’t over yet and if I hadn’t captured a scout’s attention before, now is my final chance.

The moment I stand up, Gant’s soft lips descend on mine, even as his arms are being tugged behind him as the costume department rips off his old jacket and replaces it with the white wedding one. When he has the use of his arms again, his hands cup my face and I allow myself to simply melt into them again.

“It looks good on you,” Gant says when we pull apart and get into position. The curtains will open at any minute.

“It almost looks real,” I whisper back, trying to not get distracted by the sparkle.

“It is real.”

“Twenty seconds!” a stagehand calls.

“What?”

“I wanted to see what the real thing could look like… one day. So I swapped it out.”

“Why?“ I gasp. “Why would you do that? It’s just pretend, remember?”

He kisses me again.

“Pretend is just a warm-up.”

A warm-up to nothing.

“Come to the penthouse with me. Warm up with me.”

I can’t. This isn’t real. He isn’t real. We aren’t real.

But why does he feel so damn real when he holds me against him? When I breathe in his scent? When he kisses me again, this time with more passion than I’ve ever felt before.

Something dark overtakes me, because suddenly I feel possessed when I peer into those endless abysses. They’re casting a trance on me. They’re parting my lips.

“I think I love you,” I blurt and immediately I bite my lips shut, but the damage is done.

There’s a new sparkle in Gant’s eye that mirrors that of the diamond on my finger. It’s in the glint of his teeth as he smiles. It’s in his hair that shines almost blue in the ethereal lighting. It’s in my dress, my hair and my heart as he leans in to kiss me again, his warm tongue coaxing mine gently. I didn’t know a kiss could be effortless, but that’s exactly what it feels like. Like we’re in such perfect harmony that it’s simply, easy.

Is this what love’s meant to feel like? Melty and warm and effortlessly comforting? Because despite my racing heart, I feel safe. I feel calm.

“I’ve loved you before I knew what it was,” he says when we break apart. “Thank you for being my little doll. Thank you for finally telling me what I’ve wanted to hear for weeks.”

It’s the second time he’s thanked me and somehow hearing it from his lips feels overwhelmingly intense.

So much so that it’s suddenly overriding my newfound calm. My newfound delusion.

In fact, as the curtain rises and I go en pointe, something stabs me back to reality as I twirl onto the stage.

For a second I can’t fathom what it is and then all at once when I perform a jump, it hits me. Pain. Sheer agonising blinding pain.

I miss a step, then another and then I fall out of pointe so hard to the floor that my bones scream in agony and the air’s knocked out of my lungs. But something else is screaming with a thousand pinpricks. My feet. They’re itchy, so itchy, so raw, like a million cuts have lacerated my soles. But they’re so small, so microscopic that they feel like individual and yet a collection of wounds all at once.

Gasps from backstage and from the audience sound, but there’s no movement. Everyone’s waiting to see if I’ll get up. To see if the show really can go on, but it can’t. Because I can’t move. It’s too painful.

Wetness.

Something’s wet.

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