deeply shallow: #AtoZChallenge: Faithful

Saturday, 6 April 2019

#AtoZChallenge: Faithful

Felicity wasn’t unfaithful. She wasn’t. She was a fairywren, sticking to her partner through thick and thin. Thick, in this particular case; Harold had put on so much weight, she’d started calling him Fatso. True, she’d been eyeing several handsome, young men that crossed her path, but here she still was, faithful to her boyfriend, discussing marriage plans that bored her to tears.

“Let’s just elope,” she said, after the 398th argument on wedding venues.

Fatso looked shocked. “My mother would kill me!”

“You’re not marrying her, though.”

He side-eyed her.

“I’m not wearing a farthingale,” she insisted, after the 562nd argument on wedding dresses.

Fatso bit his lip. “Mother insisted it would look great.”

“On her, maybe.”

He stared down at the table.

“Look, let’s call this off,” she whispered, after the 796th argument on wedding dates.

Fatso closed his eyes. “Why?”

Felicity stared at her hands, her fingers twisting, tightening into knots.

“Has there been someone else?” His eyes shimmered with unshed tears.

“There’s only been you,” she said, words tumbling over themselves as they emerged from her mouth. “But I can’t. I can’t stay. I don’t know how. The tighter you bind me, the further I run. I love you, but I can’t stay.”

Harold’s lips curled up in a smile as his forehead crinkled. “I’ve always known that, I think. You love too many things, too many people to be tied to me.”

Felicity lifted a thumb to his face, wiping away a stray tear. “But I’ll always return to you.”

Felicity wasn’t unfaithful, oh no. She wasn’t because she never promised to be. Yet whatever she did, wherever she went, she always returned to the man who once held her heart and then let her go again.

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