When the day I had been waiting for finally arrived, it felt unreal, like I had been pretending all this time.
I looked at myself in the mirror. Me at the age of only fifteen, in my white dress. About to meet the man I was supposed to fall in love with. "Can you really believe this? That this is actually happening?"
I smiled at him, giggling happily. I was wearing it up in a bun, but the ends of my hair were poking out, brushing my dimples.
Dawn lounged in the armchair, looking at me like an unfinished work of art.
He always looked at me like that. Is if he could see something I could be but I wasn't quite there yet.
"I can believe it because it was always meant to end this way," Dawn said.
He rose from his chair, brushing his hand over my shoulder. A shiver went through me, right up to my spinal bone. Every time he touched me, there was this feeling of something that he needed from me.
I wished he would let me help him.
I thought he was going to touch my face, but instead he touched the shoulders of my dress, straightening them.
I scanned my dress up and down, making sure there were no flaps. I felt the ends of my straps hugging my waist. There was a slight opening in the bust of the dress that exposed part of my cleavage, I could feel his gaze there. A twinge of confusion ran through me, it had happened a few times before.
I thanked him, "Thank you for everything you've done for me."
He smoothed back his gray hair. Despite his age, his skin had become smoother with age.
He opened his mouth, then closed it. He peered down his gaze at me, looking at the mirror. My front brushed my back. "I'd do anything for you, you know that, right? Even more after this marriage. Tell me you know."
The phrasing of it was a question, but it felt like he was stating a fact.
I replied, "Of course I would."
He sigh an air of relief, brushing his tension. He toyed with something in his hand. It was a delicate gold chain with a tiny pendant in the center. "I want to give you something, it was my mother's."
It was a perfectly cut diamond, the surface of it was perfectly even from all sides. I stammered, "I can't..."
"You can," he reassured me as he always did. It was hard to say no to him.
I could see how a woman would fall prey to his charms, easily securing in my marriage.
In all the years I'd known him, he'd never married any woman. It wasn't like he wasn't appealing, but I was the only woman that seemed to be around him, and he seemed to be content with that fact.
"I'm a little nervous, Dawn. How do you know I won't fall on my face or do something embarrassing or..."
I gulped down my anxiety, and I asked the real question. "What if he doesn't like me?"
Dawn grabbed my jaw, my cheeks whitened. He said to me, "you are perfect. I have made you so. Do not disappoint me."
I nodded even as he gripped me tighter.