“I’m too young to die, Meg,” I said, feeling like I was about to pass out.
Meg gave an exasperated sigh. She’d been putting up with a lot of melodrama from me in the last 24 hours…. everyone had. This was just the latest chapter in it. However, this time, I really did feel like I was about to die.
I was in Meg’s hotel with the morning light coming in through the balcony. The room was old, but everything in Venice was old. However, it was well kept, classic, and I fell in love with it the first time I saw it. I was in her room with the balcony door open and there was a fan spinning overhead but no air conditioning of any kind. Most of the buildings in Venice didn’t have any sort of AC. Daddy warned me that while getting married in Venice would be memorable and romantic, the downsides would be the massive crowds, the heat, and the humidity.
“Venice used to be a swamp, Kitten,” he told me. “The swamp has spent the last millennia trying to reclaim it. Which means you better be ready for 150% humidity.”
I laughed, thinking there was my Daddy being silly and exaggerating things. I’ve lived in Southern Ontario in the summer for the last couple of years. I could handle some heat and humidity.
Wrong. So very, very, very wrong. I thought the two months in Prague had prepared me for insane heat and humidity, but Venice was otherworldly. The heat was pushing towards 40 C. It felt like moving through soup. My corset seemed like a good idea in the design stage, but now it felt like it might kill me. And, oh yeah, I was getting married. To my Daddy. Forever.
When you’re 22, thinking about 30 seems like forever. Thinking about being with someone for the rest of your life… well, realizing what that meant hit me a little late in the proceedings.
I flopped on the bed, the dress spreading out around me and tried to remember to breathe. I ran my fingers across the pearl choker that Daddy had sent over as a ‘surprise’ wedding gift this morning. The note said it would be a more appropriate collar than my usual heart lock chain on our wedding day.
“Such a good Daddy,” I thought to myself and managed to breathe a little easier.
Meg sat next to me and looked a little more sympathetic to my situation. Perhaps looking like I might pass out will do that. Or maybe she was enjoying watching me suffer as some small payback for all the teasing and mocking I’d inflicted on her the last couple of years.
“You should drink something,” she said.
“I’m in a wedding dress. You know what a pain in the ass it is to go to the bathroom to pee in this thing,” I said.
“Who said anything about water?” she said, opening her small handbag to reveal a small flask. Since Daddy and I got together, we hadn’t had anything alcoholic. Originally it was to support Daddy after losing his wife to a drunk driver, but it evolved. I drank too much as a teen and was scared of what might happen if I started again. So Daddy told me he didn’t think his little girl should drink; it wasn’t appropriate. And that’s all it took to make it stick.
When I tell people, they think it’s nuts, but it has been easy. I’d been relieved to have an excuse to stop. Even the non-stop drinking on the movie set had been easy to handle. But for the first time in almost three years, I was deeply tempted. Still, it wouldn’t do to have Daddy taste booze on my breath for our first kiss as husband and wife, so I shook my head.
“Your loss,” Meg said and took a quick sip. “I got bombed during my second wedding. Which probably explains why things didn’t work out. But I maintain that being drunk is the only sane way to get through one of these things.”
I laughed, which centered me a bit more. This wasn’t a panic attack, but just an above-average freakout. I bet most brides have them. Today, I just happened to be the bride in question.
‘Bride.’ Me. I am a bride. Oh, holy fuck.
Meg must have seen me swing back from calming down to freaking out again.
“You’re going to be fine, Kitten,” she said. I glanced at her. She rarely called me anything other than Kit. Well, there were other words, but she usually stuck to Kit. Hearing her say Kitten worked at easing the anxiety.
“I don’t feel ok.”
“You’re a nauseatingly beautiful bride, and you’re about to marry one of the few decent men I’ve known in my life. Which you are never to tell him. Plus, the two of you are perfect for each other, which I will never repeat outside of this room,” she said, reaching out to rest her hand on mine. I looked over at her. “So yeah, you’re ok.”
I took some more deep breaths and, for some reason, Dory from “Finding Nemo” started talking in my head and said, “Just keep swimming,” which made me giggle. Ok, now I felt better. I walked over to the massive, weathered mirror along the room wall. Yeah, ok, even I had to admit this worked, and I looked good. Maybe even sexy for a bride. One more deep breath, and then I stood up a little straighter. Meg came up behind me and adjusted my cat ears tiara with a smirk on her face.
“You ready now?”
I nodded. She held out her arm and I looped mine into it. We started walking towards the door.
“Well, let’s go. We’ve got a gondola to catch. Time for you to get chained down for the rest of your life,” she said. I glanced up at her with a horrified look. She was smirking.
“I would cheerfully murder you right now, but it would get blood on this gorgeous dress,” I snarled at her.
“There’s my girl. You’re all feisty and pissed off. Now you’re in the perfect mindset to get married,” she said.
I shook my head and laughed.
“Ok, let’s go do this,” I said. One last deep breath as we headed downstairs.
Here we go.
***
(late April, three months earlier)
I did it. I survived and graduated from LaSalle despite the best efforts of the professors and everything else going on this year to drive me insane. It had been a near thing. I wanted to call Daddy more than once to tell him I was dropping out and coming to live with him. I’d just be barefoot and pregnant all the time.
I didn’t, though. I toughed it out. I was a big girl when I needed to be. And when I walked out of the last exam, Daddy was outside with flowers. I ran over to him and jumped into his arms. It’s probably why he was leaning against a light pole while waiting for me; he knew my reaction.
“I haven’t graduated yet,” I said into his shirt. “I might not have passed.”
“Oh, please. After all of the work you’ve done, if you don’t graduate we’ll just come back and burn the place down,” he said. I giggled.
At this point, I’d essentially moved out of my flat in Montreal. Kris had moved out without a word after our confrontation about Daddy in March. I didn’t hear anything from her for days and was about to do the unfathomable and reach out to people I knew in Saskatchewan to see if they knew anything when one of my classmates said they saw her working at a bar on Crescent Street. It got back to me that she was couch surfing with some of her co-workers until she could find a new place.
She never bothered to tell me. Never reached out, so I wouldn’t worry. I spent a few days not knowing how to process it until Daddy pointed out the obvious.
“She’s a grown-ass woman, Kitten,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like she’s losing sleep about her choices. Why should you?”
I’m marrying such a wise Daddy.
Anyway, once I put Kris out of my mind, I focused on my final projects and exams. Yeah, it sucked and it was hard. I asked Daddy if I could just move to his place in Kingston for the last few weeks as I was going nuts in Montreal. He agreed, but I had to swear up and down that it was so I could study. Other than making meals for me so that I ate and letting me sleep in the same bed, he wouldn’t agree to anything else so I wouldn’t get distracted.
There were times when I wanted some release, but any time I even vaguely hinted at it, he pointed at my box filled with vibrators and other toys. His sole concession was promising that he would “make it worth my while” when I finished my last exam.
So after finishing that last exam and having Daddy meet me at the school with flowers and looking good enough to eat, I was fully prepared to find an alley near the school to drag him into and have my way with him. Or rather, let him have his way with me. Instead, he sadistically insisted on taking the train back to Kingston. It meant having to wait nearly three hours to get him alone.
I thought I might die on that train ride, especially since Daddy kept teasing me. The train wasn’t too crowded, so he ran his hands up and down my legs. When I turned to complain that he was being mean, he looked me in the eye and then ran his thumb along my jawline, then traced my lips. Between the mental exertion of the exam and now this, I could feel my brain melting away. It felt amazing.
Naturally, that’s when my phone made a noise. A particular noise I couldn’t ignore. My eyes deglazed, and I shook my head a few times. It wasn’t fair. I was finally starting to get into a good headspace, and now this. Daddy leaned over and kissed my head.
“We’ll have weeks to play, Kitten,” he said. “It’s ok.”
“I know, but I want to play now,” I sighed – such a whiny brat. I focused and looked at the phone. It was a message from Susan asking if I had a moment to Zoom. Relying on the stability of Via Rail’s wifi for a Zoom call was pushing it, but I said we could try.
“So, how’d it go?” she said.
“I think I pulled it off,” I said. And I did. Now that I had some distance from the last exam, yeah, of course, I passed. But when you’re in the middle of it all and panicking, it’s easy to think you’re doomed. But unless I’d missed something or something catastrophic happened, I’d passed. My professors were worried about missing so much time earlier but said I’d bounced back nicely. So yeah, I passed. I graduated from fashion design school. Wow.