Chapter 2
2
MAGNOLIA
“ I mean really, Magnolia, why can’t you just keep your mouth shut and do what the man is telling you to do? You’re about to be his wife for goodness sake.”
I looked away and tried to cover up the fact that I was rolling my eyes and gagging at the same time. My mother loved to remind me about ‘how good Southern women’ acted and how I needed to follow suit. Really what she wanted me to do was become her: a woman unable to think for herself all in an effort to please her husband.
No fucking thanks.
“I’ve told you a hundred times, mother, Daniel and I are not engaged. He hasn’t even mentioned a ring. I wish you wouldn’t insinuate things like that.” I shifted in the uncomfortable leather seat at the old, oak dining table and pulled the hem of my dress down. I picked at a loose string hanging from my LoveShackFancy dress that I had specifically picked out to wear to lunch with her. Ever since my father announced his bid for the state senate, she insisted that I be dressed and put together every time I left the house. ‘ We’re a public family now, Magnolia, we must always look our best,’ she had pressed.
“Well, I spoke with Daniel’s mother last week at morning tea and she told me he mentioned visiting Croghan’s down on King. You know they’re one of the finest ring designers in the city?” She looked at me over the bridge of her nose with a tight smile before taking a bite of her stuffed quail egg. There was nothing I wished for more than the conversations between Daniel’s mother and mine to stop. Gossiping about their children’s relationship over morning tea should be as big of a social taboo as wearing white after Labor Day.
“Well, Daniel and I haven’t even discussed marriage so you and Lilian should just let it be. We aren’t ready for that yet.” I sighed through a forced smile, pushing a green bean across my plate. I suddenly wasn’t very hungry.
“Daniel comes from a very good family, he would be quite the catch,” she reminded me from across the table.
“Well, then why don’t you marry him?” I mumbled under my breath.
“What was that dear?”
“Nothing, Mother. It was nothing.” I gave her a sweet smile before taking an overly aggressive bite out of a green bean.
“Good. Then next time Daniel asks you to do something, you do it. I don’t want to hear any more of this nonsense about how you canceled on him or didn’t attend a function with him. A proper Southern woman follows her husband obediently and without question. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mother. I understand. Since you love him so much, you’ll be happy to know I am heading to his place after this.”
“Oh good! It makes me so happy to hear you two are spending time together.” She clapped her hands in front of her chest and gave me an approving look.
I continued to eat my meal in silence, letting her fill me in on the ins and outs of my father’s campaign. She mentioned that they had hired someone to manage his security which I rolled my eyes at. Only my parents would be self-important enough to think anyone would want to hurt us. After I finished my lunch, my favorite housekeeper came by to take my plate.
“Thank you, Ms. Ruthie.” I looked at the brown-eyed woman who had worked in our home since I was a little girl and smiled. She had been a constant figure in my life and was more of a mother to me than my own. The memories I have with her were abundant like dancing around this very table on the nights my parents left me home alone to attend some function or benefit. Ms. Ruthie would make me all the normal kid foods and let me wear my pajamas at the dinner table, something my parents never allowed. She was my voice of reason as I grew up and someone I admired deeply.
“Magnolia, dear,” my mother gave me an exasperated sigh, “I wish you wouldn’t address the staff directly. They don’t need to be addressed. Take this,” she snapped at Ms. Ruthie and pointed to her plate. As Ms. Ruthie moved to clear it, she winked at me from behind my mother with a small noticeable grin on her face. I tried to hide my smile as she walked back towards the kitchen.
“Well, this has been nice, but I do have to go now. Like I said, I need to stop at your boyfriend Daniel’s house before heading home. Thank you for lunch.” I wiped my mouth with my monogrammed silk napkin and placed it carefully on my chair as I stood from the table.
“Do send him my love, dear,” she quipped back at me, taking another sip from the engraved crystal water glass as I walked out of the dining room. I turned the corner and looked down the hallway into the kitchen to see Ms. Ruthie standing behind the counter. I tugged my ear once at her, our silent signal of love to one another, and she returned it by tugging her own ear. Her mahogany colored skin wrinkled at her eyes as she smiled back at me. Even at twenty-eight years old, I still sent her my love like this just like I did when I was little.
It took me half an hour to get back to the city from my parent’s due to their incessant need to live on an old plantation far outside downtown Charleston. It had been a family home, my father liked to remind me, and they would live there proudly just as generations before us did. The generations before us also enslaved people and made money off the poor by taxing them on essential living supplies, I thought to myself every time it was brought up.
As soon as I could, I moved out of my parent’s house and into the city. They gifted me with a townhouse downtown after I graduated with honors from Dartmouth, which is the least they could do after I froze my ass off in New Hampshire for four years. I had wanted to go to the College of Charleston, but my father had gone to Dartmouth and so had his father, so I would too. This was one of the many ways my parents liked to remind me of their disappointment that they had gotten pregnant with a girl instead of a boy. When my mother almost died during childbirth, her doctor advised her not to have any more children, so they were stuck with me. From the earliest I could remember, I was taught and trained to take over the family inheritance once the time came. The first female in the family to do so in more than a hundred years.
I pulled into the parking lot outside of Daniel’s apartment and turned off the car. Before stepping out, I took a few breaths and tried to let go of what my mother had told me over lunch. He wasn’t going to propose, was he? I liked Daniel, sure, but enough to be his wife? I wasn’t ready to be anyone’s wife, not yet at least. Especially not his.
We met during our junior year of college and when our families caught wind of our relationship, we were pretty much betrothed. My father gave his family everything short of a goat and our marriage had been everything but paid for. The Bates were another prominent family from the city, one who had been around for a long time, albeit not as long as the Sinclairs. But he came from money, from power, and that’s all my parents cared about.
Not about my happiness, but about the image our family would hold if I married a Bates.
Since Daniel and I hadn’t moved in with one another yet, he gave me a key to his place so I could get in when I needed to. He was normally at the office this time of day, working for his father’s law firm as yet another heir to the throne, so I was surprised to hear his voice coming from his bedroom when I unlocked the front door and stepped inside.
“Just like that,” he grunted, his voice coming out low and gravely.
I walked down the long hallway toward his voice, getting closer to where his bedroom was. As I moved through the professionally decorated apartment, the noises coming from his bedroom started to grow louder.
“Yes, fuck, you’re such a little slut for me.” My jaw dropped and I half expected to find him jerking off to a porno once I pushed the door open. When I heard the giggle of a girl on the other side of the door, my heart nearly stopped.
The door to his room was opened enough so that when I reached it, I could see exactly what was happening in his newly renovated-with-Daddy’s-money penthouse apartment.
My boyfriend of nearly five years, my soon-to-be husband according to my mother, was fucking some girl I had never seen before. Without even meaning to, I burst out laughing and pushed the door open, startling them both in the process.
“Maggie, what the hell?” Daniel nearly threw the poor girl off of him as I stepped inside his bedroom and stood glaring at him from the end of the bed. The girl looked at me with so much fear in her eyes I thought she might start to cry.
“I don’t know Danny, I think I should be asking you the same thing.” I hated being called ‘Maggie’ and Daniel knew that. I threw ‘Danny’ back at him because I knew how much he disliked the nickname.
“And who’s this?” I cocked my head at the girl who was lying next to him, covering herself up with a sheet. I crossed my arms in front of my chest and had to bite back more laughs when I saw her look to Daniel, confused and stunned, as if he was going to save her.
“Daniel, what’s going on?” she quivered under the sheet and looked between us.
“What’s going on,” I started before he could speak again, “is you’re sleeping with my boyfriend , sweetie.” Her face fell in shock and quickly morphed into anger.
“What?” She looked back at him now and started to move away from him in bed. “You told me you broke up with her.”
“ No, I told you I was going to break up with her.” Hearing him say it shouldn’t have hurt worse than witnessing him sleeping with another woman, but somehow it did. I pulled my shoulders back and stood up straight, trying to steel myself from the pain of his words.
“That’s rich seeing as how our mothers think you’re about to propose. Susan just told me so over lunch, something about how you were talking to your mother about going ring shopping. What’s that about Daniel?” I brought my hands to my hips and looked at him as his side piece slipped out of bed with a sheet still wrapped around her.
He scoffed from where he lay in bed and looked at me, adjusting himself so he was lying against the headboard. The mystery girl was getting dressed quickly in the corner, watching us.
“Oh please, I only said that over dinner to get my mom off my case. She’s been bugging me for over a year now to pop the question, so I fed her a line to shut her up. I was never going to go through with it. I mean,” he scoffed, “you know as much as I do that this isn’t working Maggie.” There he goes again with ‘Maggie.’ He only ever called me that when he was annoyed with me or trying to make me feel small. He knew how much the name made me feel like a child, so he would use it against me when he saw fit.
“I mean, we haven’t had sex in what, six months? You really think I’m going to marry a woman who doesn’t even blow me when I ask her to?”
I wanted to slap the pompous look off of his face. Sure we hadn’t been intimate in a while but the way he was looking at me made me feel as if it was my fault. Like I was the reason we hadn’t slept together in so long. The truth was, he was the one who was always telling me no.
“How long have you been sleeping with him?” I turned to the girl who was finally dressed and calculating her escape. I had positioned myself in front of the door, blocking her exit, so if she wanted to leave, she was going to have to go through me first. She looked at me like a deer in headlights. “Hello? I’m talking to you. How long have you two been sleeping together?”
The poor girl hardly looked older than a college senior and I wondered if Daniel picked her up at one of the bars near campus. She hung her head low and whispered to the floor, “About five months.”
There it was. The answer I’d been looking for.
Daniel wasn’t wrong to say that I knew we were having trouble. I had chalked it up to the five-year itch. We were in a rut, but we would work our way out of it. There had been plenty of times when I had initiated things with him over the last few months but he had turned me down. The few times we had slept together, it felt stale and forced. The spark was gone from our sex life and part of me had wondered if there was something else going on.
Now I was staring at the something else dead in the eyes.
I brought my glance back to Daniel who was giving me a smug smile. He had his arms outstretched on the pillows next to him, his toned chest exposed as the sheet was just covering his waist. The more I looked at him, the more I realized how angry I was—but also how free I felt. A smile spread across my face as more laughs bubbled up in my throat. I couldn’t hold them in and I doubled over in laughter, holding myself up by pressing my hands into my knees.
“Maggie, what are you laughing at?” he barked from the bed. “Magnolia, stop it. Stop laughing,” he demanded.
I lifted my head to look at him and continued to laugh at just how ridiculous it all was. My boyfriend of five years was sleeping with another girl all while our mothers were already drafting our marriage proposal announcement for the Post and Courier. I can’t wait for everyone at the club to hear about this. They’re going to have a field day with the scandal that was the Sinclairs and the Bates.
“Magnolia, I demand you to stop laughing this instant!” Daniel shouted at me, pounding a fist into the mattress. I stood up again, set my shoulders back, and took a few steps closer to the bed and watched as he swallowed hard.
I leaned over the bed and looked at him with a stoned expression before speaking. “You are a very sad man, Daniel. I hope you know just how much you’re losing when you watch me walk out that door and never come back. Stay well, and don’t worry, that embarrassing little story of when you got your dick stuck in your penis pump is safe with me. It would be awfully indecent if anyone found out about how you needed to lather your limp dick in butter to get it out when the motor died and you were held captive by the balls. Literally.”
I stood up again, leaving Daniel with his mouth hanging open and walked towards the door again.
“He’s all yours sweetie, but honestly, you might wanna choose wisely. I don’t know if he’s shown you his stash of little blue pills that he hides in his bedside drawer, but they’re there. He tries to keep it a secret but he sometimes has a hard time, well, getting hard. I think you deserve better than that.” I pulled my lips back and made a face at her before dropping my head behind me, laughing again. I walked out of his apartment and let the door slam behind me on the way out because he had lectured me about not doing so a hundred times in the past.
As I stepped outside the old historic building, I felt a lightness in my chest I hadn’t felt in a very long time.