NOVEL NEXT Ch 2.54: Overdue
It had been hard for Elaina to talk to Prisma lately. She’d always been the one to approach, always been the one to to have to figure out what to say. Somehow though, knowing what to say didn’t make it easier this time. It was simple, but she found herself fighting her inclination to turn around and walk away anyway.
“Why?” she eventually said. “Why didn’t you just tell me.”
Prisma didn’t move, didn’t even glance back as she still examined the piece of mail in front of her. “There wasn’t anything to tell. Until last week, he and I were just family friends.”
“That’s not true, and you know it.”
“It’s not the type of thing you talk about. No one, talked about it.”
“Bullshit. You knew, everyone else knew, apparently. I know you were all talking about it.” Elaina herself felt like she was talking to a wall, to Prisma’s back as she was still turned away. “You think I don’t know what this is really about? I’m not like you, am I? I’m just Elaina Weaver, the girl who didn’t even have a last name a few weeks ago, so it’s okay to keep secrets from me, right?”
That finally moved Prisma, her heels spinning as she turned. Elaina wasn’t sure what she expected Prisma’s face to look like. She’d thought it might look mad, perhaps hoped it would look sad, that she would feel bad for keeping Elaina in the dark. It was neither though, instead just hollow, the face of a person who’d had the life sucked out of her eyes, the joy ripped from her soul. “That’s not it.” Even the emphasized word held no anger, just emphasis.
“I wanted to tell you, but I… I never talked about it,” Prisma continued. “Not once, not with Koh, not with Waine. I knew because I heard the way people whispered around me, but I didn’t want it to be real.”
Elaina wanted to stay mad, but the winds of anger were taken from her sails, because somehow she knew it was the truth. As bare as Prisma’s face was to her in terms of emotion, as dull as the tone she spoke in, Elaina could tell there was no facade in either, nor the meaning of her words. “Prisma, do you even like him? Like, do you like being around him at all?”
Prisma shrugged. “Not really. He was okay before, but ever since Koh’s awakening, he’s become… well, cruel. ”
“You don’t have to do it, you know. They can’t make you marry him.”
“They can. They will. I’m the heir to the house now that Koh took up the teaching job.”
“You say that like it’s a fact, like you having to marry him is the same as the sky being up and the ground being down.”
“If my father says the sky is down and the ground is left, then that’s what it is.”
Something about that last comment broke Elaina. her anger had tempered, was something she was proud that she was getting better at controlling in general, but it returned, swelling into a raging flame that rivaled anything Prisma could produce with her aspect. “That’s not true, and I’m not gonna stop until you realize it. I don’t care who you marry; you can be with anyone you want, as long as it’s your choice.”
Prisma didn’t respond with words, but as Elaina turned around she thought she saw something, a tiny shred of light returning to her eyes.