Made a couple small edits and added a little bit more to the story. Aiming for 500+ words a day.
Prologue
My feet dashed over the wet slippery grass, the giggles escaping from my throat as I dashed across the park, heedless of the fact it had once again started raining. My friend was right behind me, only slightly taller and could keep up with my short stubby legs regardless of how fast I tried to run. When I lost my balance and tumbled to the ground, I collapsed into a heap of giggles. When I finally shoved the wet hair from my eyes, his worried face melted back into a scowl. He really was adorable, all chubby cheeks puffed by the fact he was trying so hard to look scary. Blonde hair, wet now from the rain, stood up in tufts and spikes, and curling against his cheeks. We were both barely past five, and I knew, with only the certainty that a child could have, that I loved this boy and would grow up and marry him one day. He scowled harder when I informed him of such, blue eyes going a hint of gold. They did that sometimes, change from blue to gold, and I swear sometimes I heard him growl when I really annoyed him in preschool. We had escaped out the little fence during recess, and knowing our teachers, we wouldn't be missed for a bit yet. Long as we came back before school was over, the teachers never really noticed or cared.
So we escaped to the little forested area, Malakai and I. Me in my overalls, muddy now, socks rolled up, and a dirty white tee shirt with matching dirty white sneakers. I hated wearing shoes, they always pinched my toes. Mama had gone away to Heaven, and Papa had left me with his parents, my grandparents, to go away to school. And they were funny, sometimes they called me weird names, if they noticed I existed, names that belonged to other people. Othertimes they would talk funny, especially when it got dark outside. Still, the afternoons spent with Mal more than made up for the fact that no one at home talked to me much anymore.
I brushed my hair out of my eyes once more, mostly managing to just smear mud on my face rather than anything, tugging on the red curls. I hated my red hair, all the other kids liked to make fun of my crimson red hair, calling me names and laughing at my green eyes so pale as to sometimes appear colorless. And the freckles, so many freckles, all over my body and coating my face. I was a freak, all the other kids assured me. But Mal, he just took my hand and led me away from bullies and their taunts, and told me I was pretty. It was mumbled, and he refused to look at me when he said it because Mal liked to pretend he was big and tough and mean. All the other kids were afraid of him, because he towered over them in size and height and he had a mean temper. You were dumb enough to pick a fight with Mal, he would come after you fists flying and he had a tendency to bite. The teachers had given up trying to suspend him, he always seemed to come back the next day as if nothing had happened and now just told the kids that they shouldn't pick a fight with Mal. And if they did, well, they learned their lesson.
But Mal for some reason, when he saw me, he didn't bully me like the other kids. He just walked up to me, grabbed my hand and told me firmly, "You belong to me now." I had stared at him, mouth open, watching in disbelief as he bent down and picked up the books the other girl had just managed to knock out of my hands. I loved books. I couldn't read, but I loved picture books, and looking at the bright colorful pictures and the happy families in them. And then, Mal kept holding my hand. He kept picking fights with anyone who tried to be mean to me when he was around.
Mal was my savior, my hero, my defense against the world. And so, in this rainy afternoon, when I told him that we needed to grow up and be married, he just scoffed and nudged me with one sneakered foot. He always dressed so nice, his parents had to be really rich. "Why do we have to wait until we grow up? We can just be married now." Delighted with the idea, I jumped to my feet, and then unable to resist, promptly jumped into the mud puddle next to me. Mal scowled at me again, he tried so hard to be mean and tough to me, but I saw his ooey gooey marshmallow side. Stomping out of the puddle as Mal grumbled about getting mud on his clothes and something about why he was stuck with a mate who was so rowdy, whatever that meant. I ignored his grumblings as I always did and instead marched off across the field.
"What are you doing now?" Mal groused, even as he stomped after me. I paused in the middle of collecting the pretty white roses that grew on Miss Lily's fence. Miss Lily was always kind to me, would let me come into her house and she would share snacks with me on the days that Papa forgot to pick me up from school. She would wait until her friend came home from work and she would give the other lady a kiss, and then she would walk me home. Sometimes I got tired, and sometimes.. sometimes I only pretended to be tired, just so Miss Lily's friend, Miss Jessie would carry me home. She was so big and strong, tall like a mountain, and I always felt so safe wrapped in her arms.
Now though, I had a wedding to enact. Recess was surely over by now, and we had a short time before school would be letting out. No time for a proper wedding. So I gathered up the roses in my arm and then scowled. "We need a priest."
"A what?" Mal stared at me blankly, clearly confused enough to forget to be snarly. "You know." I explained patiently, even as I looked around. "Someone to be official and marry us." Mal blinked, looking even more confused, before he finally scooped up one of Miss Lilly's fat white rabbits. We had both wandered into her yard, for she never locked her gate, though Mal was careful to shut the gate behind him. No letting the rabbits escape. They had a big fancy house, though I forgot what Miss Lily had called it. Something with an H. I had a hard time remembering things, especially on the days I was hungry. Mal set the bunny down on the special house, on one of the ramps, and pointed at it. The rabbit simply twitched its nose, not seeming to care about the rain that was steadily coming down, soaking all of us. Though, the garden certainly looked happy in the rain, all the pretty flowers and lots of pretty colorful plants growing in neat lines.
"Fine, Asparagus can be the priest." I giggled at the name. Miss Lily always gave her rabbits silly names. I could never tell them apart, but somehow Mal always could. Still, I clutched at my flowers and pretended to listen to the rabbit, as he twitched his pink nose and his long floppy ears twitched. Solemnly I repeated the words I heard in all the romance movies that Miss Lily let me watch with her sometimes. Though she tended to fast forward a lot with the remote, blushing as she mumbled about forgetting about this part. Whatever that meant. I always liked the endings, the way they always looked so happy to be married and live happily ever after. "I Arianna Suiat, take you, Malakai Winters, to be my husband. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life." I had practiced those words over and over again, always imagining myself in the big fluffy white dress and veil and Mal all grown up and standing beside me. But this was good practice too, I decided as I turned an expectant look upon Mal who only scowled darkly at me.
"What?" He demanded.
"Say the words," I explained patiently. He huffed a breath and then turned to the rabbit. However, the words he spoke, they weren't the right ones. They weren't even in English. Crossing my arms over my chest, I huffed out a breath, fighting back tears. He wasn't playing right! This wasn't right! I stomped one foot. However, instead of being mad, he looked scared for some reason as he saw my tears, mixing in with the now pouring rain. Promptly he grabbed my hands with one of his, the other scrubbing at me face as he mumbled, "Don't cry, kier, I'm sorry. I just wanted to make it real."
I sniffed, asking, "Make what real?"
"The mating ceremony." He told me, then peered anxiously at my eyes. "I'll say your words if you say mine." I bit my lip, but well, I was easily mollified by him, always so. So I sniffed again, staring at Mal until he finally repeated the words I had spoken, only barely managing to swap husband with wife with a little stumble. And so, I did my best to repeat his words, in that weird language. By that time, the rain was letting up, and well, I knew I wasn't going back to school all soaking wet. I would just get scolded. So I sat in Miss Lily's garden with Mal, until Miss Jesse came home. She sighed, ran her fingers through her short hair, and tsked with her tongue. Leaning down, she scooped first me and then Mal, who had fallen asleep against the rabbits' home. He didn't even stir, even as she carried us both inside to wrap us up in towels. He woke, wrapped in a thick fluffy towel, when a steaming bowl of chicken noodle soup was placed in front of him, realizing he had been set on the couch and the bowl set on the table in front. I had eagerly scarfed down my bowl and was in the process of my second one. And so when I put a noodle on my upper lip and crossed my eyes at my now pretend husband, he just rolled his own eyes and set to eating. And I knew in that moment, I would never be happier, as Miss Lily walked by, ruffled my hair and then pressed a kiss to Miss Jesse's cheek as she passed by to the kitchen.
Present Day - 30 Years Later.
"Ari!" I flinched at the strident voice, swallowing down my knee jerk reaction to apologize. Speaking without permission given was just asking for another beating. Instead I gathered up the folded laundry, and hurried up the stairs to see what Janette, Papa's wife and my step-mother, wanted this time. Laundry clutched my chest, I kept my eyes lowered and waited quietly. Jan turned to face me, her expression as always one of cool contempt. Papa had married for money this time, having managed to clean himself up from his drinking when I was almost twenty. Cleaned up and sober, he was a strikingly handsome man, who had gallant charm and a witty if dry sense of humor. Papa had worked his charm, and had quickly won over the CEO of the business he worked for. His daughter, a woman twice Papa's age, had decided to pursue him, and they had married within a year of marriage. Papa and Mama had had me young, barely past sixteen themselves. I hadn't learned until I was much older and Jan's daughter, Sabrina, had thrown it into my face - that Mama had died giving birth to me. Papa may be a terrible father, but at least he never made me grow up with the knowledge I had killed my own mother. We had moved into a house specifically bought for them by her father, and Papa was on the fast track of taking over for the CEO who was planning to retire this year, after a decade of grooming Papa for that specific position.
I had done everything in my power these last few years to make sure everything ran smoothly. Papa needed this position, he needed to make sure we were taken care of. We'd had many a long talks when he was detoxing and needed to lean on my strength to clean himself up first, and then later when he was to be married, and he stressed to me the absolute importance of being good and proper and behave and obey my new mother. I refused to call her Mama, and well, Jan didn't want me to anyway. It was just "Yes Ma'am, no Ma'am" for her.
Papa had finished high school, while his parents mostly raised me, and he had left me with my grandparents when he went away to college for business school. He had only taken me back when his father had passed away from a heart attack. Like a fool at fifteen years old, I had promised Mal I would run away with him to his home, certain I would run away from home and everything would be fine. And then grandfather had a heart attack and I had called an ambulance, because grandmother's dementia was too far gone to be aware enough to do so herself. So I had gone with him to the hospital, held his hand while the machines beeped. Papa had shown up then, and without warning, had grabbed my arm and dragged me away to his car. I had no phone, they didn't have cell phones in the early two thousands, at least not for poor kids like me, and I wasn't even sure he had a house phone. His family, whenever he talked about them, seemed the hippie, commune with nature type. I had wanted to say goodbye to him, even more wanted to run away with him. But I wasn't a fighter, not like Mal. So I had submissively gone with Papa, let him drag me far away, in his beat up pickup truck, to California of all places. It seemed to be the end of the world, even if it wasn't that far from Montana in reality.
I had dropped out of school as soon as I could legally without the state noticing or caring I was gone, a day after my sixteenth birthday. Papa had been deep in the bottle by that point, barely able to roll out of the bed most days. Someone had to work, someone had to pay the bills and keep the roof over our head and food on the table. I had juggled three, sometimes four jobs, with as many side jobs paid in cash as I could manage. When Papa had finally dragged himself from the bottle when I was twenty five, I still didn't know what possessed him, but I was grateful for it everyday, and I had spent hours each day applying for jobs for him. He had cleaned himself up for the interview, with me doing most of the work, and walking with him on the bus personally and then to the entrance of the building, just to ensure he actually went to his interview.
Somehow he had landed the job, and I went from working myself to the bone, to being able to work only one, sometimes two jobs. I had taken over finances, and to be able to use his paycheck to pay both electric and water instead of trying to decide what I could survive without that month had been a godsend. His parents had left the house to him in the will, but the house was old and falling apart and needed more repairs than it could ever be worth. The place was only worth selling so it could be torn down and the land used for whatever building. And when Papa had met Jan, and they had decided to marry, I had thought it was a sign from the gods that things were finally looking upwards.
Realizing that I had drifted mentally off in my thoughts, I clutched the folded laundry tight to my chest and focused my attention to the left of her shoulder, not comfortable with eye contact even though she was always scolding at me to "look her in the eye like an adult, you lazy, good-for-nothing freeloader." I couldn't help the fact I was so different from her and her daughters, that I struggled with social anxiety, that loud noises upset me, that I was even still afraid of thunderstorms. There was something fundamentally broken within me and I had simply accepted it as such and did my best to work around it. Jan had set me up in her business, mostly as a errand girl. I ran around and fetched drinks, ran notes to and from other departments, and was responsible for coffee and pastries for meetings, along with whatever else needed to be done that day. It was a physically demanding job, demeaning most days, but it was enough.
Five years I had bitten my tongue, been polite and respectful, and obedient. Five years Papa had been climbing the ladder and had been promised this CEO position now that Jan's father was finally ready to retire. I kept promising myself, as soon as Papa had been promoted, the paperwork signed and cleared, that I would run away. Where? I didn't know. It didn't matter. Maybe I would try to find Mal again. It was the year 2022, technology had developed in leaps and bounds after all. I still didn't have a cell phone, but I could work the library computers just fine. Surely I could find him on the internet. Somehow.
"-And that's why I've decided that you should be married." My brain tuned back in on that comment, and I blinked, nearly dropping the folded laundry in my shock. "I'm sorry, Ma'am, could you please repeat your words?" I asked, tone apologetic. The look I got was scathing, and the tittering of my step sisters did nothing to help the situation. I hadn't even noticed that they had wandered into Jan's study in the last few minutes.