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Sitting on the floor of her home’s library, Michaela perched over the book her mom had gifted her earlier that day and drew on it carelessly. It was a tremendously long treaty on good manners and ladylike values, concepts that Michaela was often found lacking.
Instead of reading it, she mindlessly drew around the pages’ edges and hummed to herself, uninterested in all the reasons her mother brought up about why she needed to pour more effort into her lessons and these yellowed-by-time pages.
All of her arguments could be summarized into one sentence: Michaela needed to be perfect, for only perfect girls found perfect husbands and had their perfect children.
The mere idea of a husband made Michaela feel sick to her stomach, and the prospect of bearing his children didn’t help in the slightest.
There was a whole world outside the comfort zone she was trapped in that she was dying to see. Unlike the boring book she was currently wrecking, the thought of a life that belonged to herself ignited her will to live. Perhaps the world was large enough to fit Michaela and her eccentricities. Large enough to allow her to find others like herself who had no interest in marrying and settling with men who could never make them feel anything more than bored to death.
It mattered not that what she yearned for seemed impossible. As long as she was alive, she would search for a place to belong to, regardless of how long it would take to find it. With those wishful thoughts in mind, she didn’t realize when her cousin entered the room until he was sitting across from her.
“I take that Aunt is not happy about you evading your embroidery class,” John quietly brought up. His long legs were extended and almost reached hers. His back was pressed against a tall shelf when he tilted his head to look her in the eye.
Michaela shrugged, unbothered by the mention of her escape. “Mother has unrealistic expectations regarding my capabilities of finding a husband. I am merely attempting to manage them.”
John laughed but didn’t allow her diversion to distract him. “She thinks she’s being helpful.”
Michaela abandoned the book and sat up, crossing her arms over her chest. “I understand, but the truth of the matter is that she’s not helping me in the slightest.”
John hummed, taking her words in carefully before replying, “For you don’t see any point in marriage. I know.”
Michaela remained uncharacteristically quiet for a moment. She wondered if John was hinting at what she believed him to be hinting at. And then she wondered if it was too late to run out of the library quickly enough to avoid this conversation.
She asked, “How could you know? I have my own reasons for not wishing to marry that I shared with no one.”
Her cousin merely smiled at her, lightly kicking her foot with his own. “You may not have said them out loud, but I know them as well as if they were my own.”
“You couldn’t possibly understand—”
John cut her off, “And yet I do.”
Michaela took a closer look at her cousin’s face. John had a knowing smile on his lips—the type he acquired whenever it was clear he was about to beat her in a card game. Except this was no game. It was a matter of ultimate secrecy. A matter of survival. Michaela held the key to a desire that could wreck their family name and put her mother to shame far greater than her skipping classes did.
Logically, John didn’t know that. If he did, he wouldn’t be looking at her with love in his eyes. He wouldn’t have spent the last years being her brother in all ways but blood. It was one thing for her to accept what her eccentricity entailed. It was another to expect the same from John.
And yet there he was, looking at her like he held all the secrets of her universe within his mind. As if they weighed nothing. As if she could finally put them down.
In a split second, Michaela made a choice that was outrageous and mad: she told John the truth.
For some miracle, her voice didn’t tremble when she said, “I hold no affection for men. I never have and never will, not in the way I do for women. To marry a man would be torture.”
She expected a great deal of things to happen after those words were said in the secure space between them. Maybe the kind, easy-tempered John of her memories would disappear forever. Maybe there would only be disgust in his eyes where there used to be love. Maybe he would never speak again.
Instead, he bent forward and hugged her. Michaela froze, remaining a lifeless body in his arms for a few moments, until relief washed over her, and she felt tears flowing freely down her cheeks as she hugged him back.
“You don’t have to marry,” he mumbled. “You don’t have to live a life of torture. You have done nothing to deserve it.”
She laughed bitterly, leaning away from John so she could look into his eyes again. “My mother would probably disagree. She wouldn’t help me escape a match if it came my way.”
“If your mother can’t help, then I will,” John vowed, leaning forward to whisper his promise. He used the same tone of when they were little and needed to plan their next secret adventure in plain sight of their worried mothers. “As heir, I will allow no one to pressure you into a match. You have my word.”
“I have never trusted anything more, John,” she confessed, “not since the day you learned to speak.”
Her cousin laughed, taking her hand in his to seal their vow. Then, he hugged her tightly, not allowing her to breathe for a moment, but Michaela didn’t complain.
She had never felt safer than in his hold.