Chapter 18

MY MOTHER HAD always been obsessed with the idea of me being a debutante. She was obsessed with anything bourgeoisie. I had a supply of designer gowns back home, gowns that would have been perfect for this occasion.

Maxime DuPont was turning forty-four this year. And a fancy dinner was thereby in commission to commemorate the special day. Fairmont Hotel had an extravagant ballroom, one that the DuPonts loved enough to deem this place a go-to venue for birthday celebrations.

There were crystal chandeliers and ice sculptures, cocktail bearing men and women dressed in formal-wear respectively. Classical music - Maxime's favorites - blared from invisible speakers, adding a certain atmosphere to the enclosed space. Thirty tables scattered the ballroom, but most would remain empty until 7, when the dinner would officially begin.

I had a spot at the main table. Elias, my 'fiancé' dutifully remained by my side even though the night was a perfect one to socialize. There were attractive females, my age, dressed in glittering gowns spritzed with expensive perfume, sporting saloon-fresh hair glitzing past in designer heels. Many a female attempted to engage in conversation with my 'fiancé'. Yet, he silenced and deterred them with a demure smile and an extension of his metacarpus in my direction (for me to hold his hands). The latter activity to remind the females that he was an engaged man, more than anything.

Such was his reaction to the blonde currently in our presence.

I clasped onto Elias's hand, my thumb brushing past our 'engagement ring' that we had purchased spontaneously earlier today. I suppressed smiling at the memory.

The blonde was beautiful and polite.

"It's been a while. How are you doing, Elias?" She asked through ruby red lips. Her eyes then landed on our entwined fingers, and they blinked several times. "Oh, yeah... Congrats on the, uh, engagement."

Elias flashed her a smile, the one that he wore so often. "Thanks, Georgia, means a lot."

As soon as she blonde left, Elias released my hands from his grasp. He sighed beside me.

"You alright?" I asked.

"Just wanna get this thing over with," he said.

"Who was the blonde?"

"Georgia? An ex. Someone who meant something to me," he said. Then he exhaled and he turned to face me. "But that's in the past, I have you now," he half joked.

As 7pm approached, the tables in the ballroom began to fill. The main table, which was the one I occupied, had 12 seats. These were the same occupants at the breakfast table earlier today. Enzo, the male brat took the seat beside me.

I tried my very best not to acknowledge him. The memory of the poor kid walking in on me half naked wasn't one that I wanted to revisit.

But the kid was friendly, too friendly.

"Hey Elias, Andrea," he greeted with a grin. "You look beautiful, Andrea."

"Uh, thanks," I returned.

I was many things, but I wasn't beautiful. I was dressed in a backless, halter neck black dress that reached mid thigh. The dress was made of leather and it hugged my curves so tightly that it slightly impeded breathing. In other words, it was the kind of thing you saw in strip clubs. We had gone shopping again, today, and this time we bought matching engagement rings along with knee length, heeled boots that further solidified my status as a stripper.

Everyone else was dressed in shimmery ballgowns. This was why everyone seemed to do a double take upon catching sight of my dress.

"Elias, this is a black tie event," Valérie was the only one who dared to speak out - albeit in a hissed whisper. Her statement was aimed at her son, but her eyes fixated on me. As though Elias had a duty to curtail my wild habits.

The boy shrugged. "I'm wearing a black tie, Ma."

"I'm talking about your fiancée."

Before they could descend down the path of an imminent fight, I stepped in.

"Sorry but who's getting married again?"

My question seemed to throw her off. "What?" She asked.

"Isn't this like a wedding dinner?"

"No, it's Maxime's birthday..." Elias said under his breath.

I feigned realization. "Oh. My bad. I’m just so drunk."

I spent the rest of the dinner using all the wrong cutleries, taking pictures of everything and of course drowning my sorrows in red wine. Needless to say, I was more than drunk towards the end and... I can't be sure how I ended up twerking on the stage but my next moment of sobriety came at 1am.

I was on a bed, not the one in the third guest room. This room had darker, cooler tones. I was cocooned in dark gray sheets, upon an empty bed. The only source of light came from the lighting fixture on the bed stand. I was still dressed in my hooker dress.

The place was silent, save for the sound of my own breathing. There was a beauty attached to the silence within this magazine-esque bedroom. The doorknob turned, and in stepped Elias with a glass of water.

"You're awake," he said at the same time I asked, "what the fuck happened?"

He handed me the glass of water. I proceeded to take grateful gulps out of it. I placed the empty class on the bed stand as I watched Elias gingerly take a seat on his desk chair. He was too far away. Too many metres between us. I chewed on my inner cheeks until pain overtook my inappropriate thoughts.

"You got so drunk you passed out," Elias shrugged where he sat.

"Jesus, I must have been embarrassing."

"Nothing I couldn't handle," he returned.

The next five seconds was silent and crackling with an ever-present sexual tension that I'd successfully ignored until this very second. My heartbeat was deafening in my own ears, punctuated with heightened breathing on my end.

Like clockwork, our bodies met in the middle. Elias was built, and he showed this off in the form fitting shirts he wore. His hands encircled my waist, drawing my body against his, tangling two peoples' bodies into one. His face was breathtaking, even up close. Then I kissed him. And it was an amalgamation of lust and excitement that possessed my form.

We made guttural noises, a primal, absolutely animalistic instinct took over as we tore through each others' clothes. But I couldn't reconcile what I did to Patrick and I couldn't conflate good grades with promiscuity. The thoughts fired one after another. They were intrusive. Jarring in comparison to the very images that filled my mind moments prior. I pushed Elias away.

Our breathing was shallow, Elias had a 5 o'clock shadow, but Patrick had no right to do what he did to me. It was rape. And Marc had every right to want to kill him. It made me wonder why the fuck my mind decided to bring the cunt up. It made me realize I was fucked up in every sense of the word and -

And I was in no state of mind to indulge in matters of the flesh. I sighed.

Elias quickly noticed something was off. He inched back, with furrowed eyebrows, he demanded an explanation.

"I wanna go somewhere," I said. "Anywhere."

"Now?"

"Why not?"

"Sure, you gave me blue balls, but sure. Where do you wanna go?" Elias seemed down, and it showed in how quickly he put his shirt back on.

"Not completely sure," I said as I struggled back into my tight dress.

I couldn't remember the last time I went to a beach. I'd ditched my shoes for the sensation of sand against my bare feet.

It was close to 3am, we had a full moon that cast a warm illumination on the beach tonight. The stars were beautiful, everything was beautiful except for the thoughts within my head. They were like white noise, I couldn't silence them no matter what I did. I could only make them more dim less roaring.

"What's a weekend getaway in Cali without the beach, right?" Elias's voice came from beside me.

I offered him no reply. Our hands would brush occasionally, neither of us seemed to mind though.

We finally settled on a smattering of rocks, a vantage point seemingly, one that boasted a vista that did not disappoint.

I started talking about the constellations in the sky. Just shit I picked up from the few Astronomers’ Club meetings I’ve attended. If Elias was impressed, he wasn’t showing it. He just let me talk, and I guess I’m okay with filling the silence with regurgitated (possibly inaccurate) matter I picked up from momentary pockets in which I paid attention at the club.

“Interesting.” He finally said. Probably asking me to shut up.

I laughed nervously.

We sat side by side for a long time. The only thing that came between us was the sea breeze that blew my hair askew.

"Do you know what it feels like to be helpless?" I asked the sound of waves crashing against the shore, I asked the stars that glimmered ahead, I asked the smell of brine that I breathed in, I asked the boy beside me.

But he didn't know, not really.

"Helpless in what sense?"

"To feel so helpless that you can only resort to doing things in hopes that it would elevate you from the symptoms of trauma and, to come to terms with the fact that life is ugly and we're all trapped here. I don't think you've felt truly helpless, Elias."

There was a silence that ensued.

"Trauma?" He finally returned. "What happened?"

"No use talking about the past," I admonished instead. I removed the diamond ring on my middle finger to hold it against the faint illumination of moonlight. "Do I get to keep the ring?"

"Sure," he said. "You can keep mine too, if you want."

A bitter laugh escaped my lips. "I'm not that poor, Elias."

"I never said you were."

I turned my head to take him in. His gaze was planted on the sea, focused on something that I could not see. I took his hands in mine, removing his ring as I did to mine earlier. Holding both rings against the moonlight, I couldn't help but smile.

"Thanks for the weekend, Elias," I said earnestly. "Thanks for giving me the experience to be someone's fiancée and to live in absolute fucking grandeur for two days."

"No," he dragged the word out. He'd turned his neck so he was staring at me now. "Thank you for helping me out. Hopefully my parents realize that marrying at 21 is ridiculous because I'm just too young to make sound decisions."

I gave both rings back to him. "Keep them for your real fiancée."

"Honestly, I'm probably never going to marry."

"Why not?"

"So many beautiful girls, man," Elias said jokingly. "With a face like this, how could I confine myself to one wife for the rest of my life?"

"That's not a self-absorbed thing to say at all."

"Don't confuse 'self-absorbed' and 'self aware'," Elias bumped me with his shoulders.

I laughed. And I revelled in the moment. If only things were this simple and this beautiful all the time.