Ella Claire Gainsborough {Beauty} (bookshelved) wrote in bellumlogs, @ 2010-04-16 11:48:00 |
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Entry tags: | beauty |
Who: Ella
What: A narrative
Where: The Publishing House
When: After this and this.
Warnings: None
She'd had a rough morning.
Bessa and Edmund, in all their literary glory, had spawned a new terror: Cyrius and Remy - the werewolves.
When she'd asked for more work, she didn't think it would be hand-holding the middle aged woman who had created the glittering vampires that tormented her literary soul. Still, her father had called again the night before, and she needed the extra hours.
Ella's father had always been a swindler; to call him a con-artist was too complimentary, as he was never sober enough to plan anything on his own. The women in his life had always taken up that role, and now that he was on his own, he only managed small jobs (and even those sporadically). What happened more often was that he'd almost get caught, someone would be on his tail, he'd get evicted from trashy trailer park after trashy trailer park. And Ella always saved the day.
He was in New York now; a fact she hadn't yet told Vaughn, and he had called Ella the night previous because he needed money to rent a room in a dive motel across town. She'd woken up early, driven out to meet him, and paid him up for the next month. Then she'd called her mother.
Her mother was living comfortably in Texas; too smart to get caught, too mean to be messed with. Her cons were small, just small enough to evade notice, while still paying the bills. $500 dollars for a lecture on this (which never materialized), Long-term care insurance for a $750 dollar annual premium (money order please, but of course I'll give you proof of payment), small bank swindles (hello, I'm calling from your bank) and even the occasional pigeon drop. Small potatoes, and never big enough to get caught; at least not until she was long gone and it wouldn't do a bit of good.
When Ella was young, their bread and butter had been adoption swindles (with Ella filling in for the unfortunately pregnant teen (not yet showing, of course) of loving parents), and elder cons. It was why they were always on the run, her parents, those early days when Ella's mother planned and her father was occasionally sober enough to execute the scams. But Ella hadn't swindled a soul since one last scam (of the potential mail-order bride variety) had funded her move to New York for college, and her father could barely con a card game these days.
Her mother had, as per usual, been unsympathetic, and Ella was already stressed and frustrated. She'd agreed to go to Germany with Vaughn, and God help her, she didn't know if she could do it. She didn't even bother sharing her concerns with her mother (she would have just told her that Vaughn was as crazy as her mother and that Ella should cut the woman loose, kin or no kin), so she'd told her father instead.
He listened, as he always did, and he'd hugged her shoulder in the dingy motel room, and Ella had sighed as a rat ran across her shoe, not even noticing the vines that chased the rat away.
She'd moved him to a more expensive motel on her lunch break, and then she'd agreed to be the surrogate mother of the werewolf twins.
Now, she was staring, unseeing, at the blinking cursor on her screen. She hadn't seen Daniel in a few days, and she'd be lying to herself if she said she didn't think about him fairly frequently throughout the day. Asking Vaughn for an extension - After the moon - had been selfish, and she knew it, but she could almost tolerate the idea of not seeing him again if it meant she could just have these next few weeks.
Almost.
She reminded herself of the fact that he would be free again. She wasn't sure others understood just how much being locked away had affected him, how it had changed a supremely confident man to one that was scared to stand on a sidewalk. If she could spare him the possibility of Vaughn getting her clutches back into him, she would do anything. Anything.
Because she wasn't sure the bottle wouldn't take him down if Vaughn locked him up again; not now, not when he was so vulnerable and had tasted a little bit of freedom and life again.
And he'd told Vaughn he didn't love her (Ella). Vaughn was right; he didn't stand anything to gain from lying, not when his tale depended on his ability to love, and not when he'd openly admitted his feelings for Jane (who Ella imagined as walking perfection, since no one would talk about her). And she knew Daniel could barely tolerate her before; she knew that. She was 23 going on 40; she knew sex and love weren't in the same ballpark all the time.
She loved Daniel. He didn't love her.
And despite everything Vaughn had done, Ella still loved her sister. Maybe Vaughn would be happy away from her obsession, maybe she would change, find love, find something meaningful, lose the worrisome moods that seemed to be more and more present every day.
But she had two weeks. Two weeks to sleep in his arms, and feel his body close to hers, and to pretend he loved her as she loved him.
It would have to be enough.
Even if it never could be.