Alicia was happily married for the time being. It was a strange and rushed marriage made by her old fashioned crotchety parents who had nothing better to do than monger for money from the pockets of rich suitors. Still, they didn’t exactly choose a bad suitor for her either- his name was Charlie Smithson, and he descended from a long line of gondolier sellers. What more of a perfect match could be made? A gondolier with a gondola maker. He would make the gondolas and she would row them- how quaint was that?
It wasn’t all that quaint. It would have been quaint if Alicia were still an undine, but now she primarily spent her days flipping through piles upon piles of research books and papers, trying to determine the location and severity of the next solar storm, the recent mutations in the marine life, and the whopping increase in blue whales due to a fruitful mating season. She was a geologist/ marine biologist now, more or less, and it was boring as heck. She had expected the job to include going on expeditions and drawing whale feces, but no. That was the manual side of the industry. They claimed that she was too intelligent for that sort of thing.
Charlie, on the other hand, was well suited for an office job. He was dry, humourless, and an overall bore. He would make the occasional stab at a joke but it would come out quite hackneyed and awkward, eliciting a forced laugh from anyone in the vicinity. He was the head honcho, the big cheese. He was the CEO of the gondolier company, and right then their biggest buyer was Himeya, who doled out endless amounts of money to replace the gondolas that were being abused by the new trainees.
Perhaps Charlie thought Alicia was boring too, mostly because of her calm and soft spoken demeanour. During dinner time, he would prattle away about his newest sales, the state of the economy and some drivel about pie graphs and the stock market on Aqua. Alicia would nod in all the right places and ‘hm’ in all the correct spots. She dared not correct the man, for she felt a sort of explainable uneasiness around the man. Though he was only 25, he acted like a worldly old geezer of seventy and possessed the same lechery that was stereotyped all over the elderly male age demographic.
She was cleaning up his room one day when she found a slew of bondage magazines stashed away in the back of his closet. It was kinky stuff- those glossy magazines newly ripped out of the plastic covering- to sum up the whole shenanigan, it was an eyeful of whips, leather, begging, Halloween looking costumes ,and a bit of blood.
After that incident, Alicia never looked at her dull husband the same way again. She now harboured the fear that he might have some of those ‘kinky toys from Manhome’ hidden under the floorboards, all ready and oiled up to whip her unwilling body with. She now shuddered a little bit. Just a little bit mind you, whenever Charlie even gave her as much as a smile. They had already consummated their marriage the night after the ceremony, and that was when the strange vibes began. He was extremely rough in his lovemaking. Almost to the point of being brutal- favouring hickeys, the occasional body check, and....
‘I could have sworn he slapped me once or twice during that.’ Alicia deliberated as she closed a book containing the statistics of blue whale mating, ‘I had some bloody lips after that, but I think that’s dryness.’ Alice rubbed her neck and remembered the red and sore bite marks that checkered the area, ‘I faked my orgasm that night too.’ Alicia thought furtively. It was funny how she did not get turned on even once in the whole affair. She basically turned into a mannequin for him to fuck, which he didn’t really seem to mind. Perhaps he was closet domination fetishist? Alicia shivered at the thought. Those thin brows and slightly beady eyes would be distorted and scrunched up together in a cubist parody if he were to give into one of his fantasies. He would tie her to the bed and scream in a face that was tomato red, ‘CALL ME MASTER!!’
If it were a manga, Alicia would have had a huge sweat drop going down her head, but unfortunately....
‘This is NOT a manga. Real life does not work like fairy tales or slice of life stories.’ Alice winced a little bit when she saw the immense amount of research she would have to do for the next day. She would have to attend a conference on the unstable nature of the floating islands. (Sonic Islands, she liked to call them. That ancient franchise was a huge part of her childhood.) and then present her theories on the gravitation distortion the weather stabilizers were wreaking on the tectonic plates.
So far, she had come up with the following main thesis: It was like the after math of a facial reconstruction and shoving your face near a high powered magnet. It just didn’t work. To her utter dismay, her research dug out the cruel and undeniable fact that if Mars were to keep up the Terraformed state for another hundred or so years, the core would de-stabilize and Kaboom. That meant that the planet would have to be dried up, cleaned up, and be left behind.
‘I guess mother nature wins in the end.’ Alicia thought ruefully, ‘Mankind will just never learn to leave their surroundings alone....’
Her thoughts shifted back to the pink haired apprentice she left behind, and the thoughts were unsettling. She tried to deny it, but it was quite clear.
She was in love with Akari, and she had thrown all that away for a higher position in society.
‘Don’t forget my parents disowning me if I disobeyed their wishes.’ Alicia thought sadly as she pictured Akari madly scribbling down her gondola passages over an immense blueprint.
She probably forgot all about her now, since all of her attention was mostly focused on training Ai and the other daily burdens of being an undine.
Alicia gave a deep and melancholy sigh. She was rather disgusted with herself, choosing a high seat in life rather than staying with the love of her life. She mentally slapped herself again and again for choosing such a mundane and (potentially) perverted husband who never really shaved and masked up his body odour with excessive amounts of cologne over lovely and graceful Akari.
Alicia had been over to Aria company several times during the year, and she witnessed a woman standing in the place of her once ungainly and nervous student. The visits had been brief, pleasant, and almost detached in a way, since there was not much to talk about besides business and other superficial matters. Not one of them dared touch on the subject of their separation, for fear that it would open up new and exotic wounds.
‘I could have sworn I saw some pain in her eyes. I know....’ Alicia thought desperately, ‘Could it be that she misses me in THAT way?’
Alicia’s thoughts then turned to the things that her husband would do if he found that they were eloping outside of his stuffy little world full of suits and formal papers. He would probably give that scrunched up paper bag look with two non-existent eyebrows pointing downwards at an unhealthy angle. He would also probably beat the living shit out of her and then use his reputation to destroy Aria company.
No. She couldn’t risk it. Too much was at stake. What if Akari laughed at her confession? What if she was imagining Akari’s subtle affections the whole time?
Alicia’s stomach gave a sick lurch as thought of her husband with a bullwhip invaded once again, ‘This isn’t the life I wanted.’ She thought desperately, ‘The life I wanted was to snuggle up with Akari every night and live together in marital bliss. What was I thinking!?’ Biting the insides of her cheek in anger, she lamented the way she had complacently brushed away her lesbianism through the years she was with Akari. She had denied it until the very last moment, and when she accepted it-
‘I accepted it when I found myself in Charlie’s bed- bruised and battered from the wrong choice that I made.’
The gondola society would probably piss their pants at the notion that she was going into the undine business again, since they already mounted a huge monumental tribute to her in the form of a barely clothed golden statue in the middle of the gondola society foyer. Then again, it would be quite impossible for her to suddenly reappear at Aria company. The papers were signed and the names were written in stone. There was no turning back from her stupid STUPID choice.
Alicia took off her glasses and looked at her watch. Charlie would be back around 9 pm. He said something about a mass deal of gondolas being shipped from earth. Michigan of all places. Nobody really made cars anymore if they valued their lives.
It was three in the afternoon. There was six hours to kill.
Enough time for her to go over to Aria company and talk to Akari.....
Aabout what?’
‘Why....about you true feelings of course.’ The sly devil Alicia hissed, ‘Why don’t you hurry a little? The clock’s ticking. I don’t think your husband’s going to get another meeting anytime soon.’
Alicia had been married to Charlie for three years, and to say that there wasn’t much warmth between them was an understatement.
‘More like a day in Antarctica with a popsicle pressed to your cheek.’ Sly devil Alicia hissed once again, ‘Aren’t you tired of living this life? Don’t you want to get your true feelings into the open?’
Timid Alicia moaned and groaned about how ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’
‘I know, but can you STAND not breaking an obnoxious looking vase? I know you want to.’
The poor blonde’s palms were sweating profusely now. Just how did this come out of the blue? A desire to waltz over to her former student’s house and announce an earth shattering love confession on a random week in the summer wasn’t really the smartest thinking. What would the repercussions be?
Alicia clenched her fists and gritted her teeth. She was tired of hiding her sexual orientation from Akari, her parents, and the whole world. She would call her hoity toity mom right after she marched out of Aria Company and make her smell the roses. Afterwards, she would divorce the creepy bastard known as ‘thin-brow Charlie’. It would all work out eventually.
‘But of course, nothing ever goes according to plan.’ Alicia thought about the simulated feeling of intense G-force pressing on her insides if her husband were to come back from work early and found her missing. Yup. The baseball bat and the bullwhip would surely come after.
‘You betcha he’s going to thrash you into a pulp!’ Timid Alicia squeaked, ‘He’s going to break all the bones in your body-
‘Shut up.’ Alicia said aloud to herself. She found herself getting her purse and all dolled up to go over to Akari’s place. Had Sly Devil Alicia been controlling her the whole time her inner dialogue was going on? Her lipstick was on, her eye shadow was immaculately applied.
‘It’s destiny. That’s what it is.’ She thought, ‘ Destiny, pure and simple. I was fated to be with Akari, and through my own piggish decisions, I threw it all away.’ Unbeknownst to herself, she was crying a little. Several tear droplets slid lazily down her cheek before she wiped them away in surprise, ‘Don’t want to get your mascara smeared before this first step out the door, would you?’ Sly Devil Alicia said smarmily.
‘I’ll do it then. I must be out of my mind, but I’ll fucking DO IT.’ With two tentative steps, she took one last look at the Victorian styled austere mansion and exhaled deeply, ‘I must be out of my mind.’ The broken phonograph in her mind played again and again as she numbly headed towards the canal that led to Aria Company.