Grey Clouds On The Horizon

Sweet Relief

At long last, I am going to give you a very rare insight into the dark and twisting labyrinth that is Emilia's Stewart's mind. Enjoy.

Emilia's POV

I stood in the mirror after dinner and wiped the day off of my face with a warm wet cloth. The powder I'd applied to reduce shine clumped in the puckered scars of Mr Grey's sprawling script atop my eye. My fingers froze above it for a moment, remembering the way it sent fire through every vein in my body and set my cold still heart ablaze.

"Jesus forgive me." I murmured to myself, exasperated.

"What?" Anastasia called to me, stepping into the doorway with Delilah on her hip despite the way Ana protruded with the glow of pregnancy. Pregnancy with His son. A son I'd failed to give him.

I shook my head and smiled a bit to myself. Anastasia was stunning and Mr Grey was a very lucky man to have found her unconditional love. "Nothing, Mrs Grey."

I watched the way her doe eyes followed my movements in the mirror while I applied moisturizer and pinned up my hair. There was a question that had been on her mind and was dancing upon her lips. It was a question I'd heard many times before and tended not to give an honest answer to. But I wouldn't lie to her. Unlike every nosy reporter , I wanted her to ask me. She was bright and strong. Anastasia needed to understand. Come on, beautiful. Let your curiosity have you.

Almost on cue, Ana set Delilah down and let her run off to play. Then she straightened up and took a few steps towards me, pausing after as if she thought better of it, then two more. "Emilia, please forgive me if this is intruding. I was just wondering, how have you forgiven Christian so easily? After everything he's done to you, how do you not think about it every time you look in the mirror or at Delilah or..."

I held up a hand. "Stop. There's no need to be so nervous. Are you struggling to forgive Mr Grey?" Her head bobbed twice and she flushed with shame. I placed my hand upon hers and looked to her, trying to convey the love and devotion I felt to her as the woman I hoped to grow old with. "First of all, you don't owe him forgiveness. If you left right now or were angry with him for the rest of your life there is absolutely no one that would blame you. But why don't you sit down? I'm going to tell you a story."

Ana flushed and bit her lip. "Okay." It was a simple word that meant she trusted me. I had one shot at this.

"I don't know what Mr Grey has told you about me so I guess I'll start from the beginning." I chuckled and tried to prevent my voice from cracking. "When I was eight, I was in a car accident. While time gas robbed me of most, if not all, of my childhood memories I can remember that day as clearly as world in front of me. Truth be told, even complex events such as this can be broken up into their parts and boiled down for easy consumption. Like even the most simple moments, car accidents have a beginning, a middle and an end. In the beginning, everything is fine. The world is right, every blade of grass blowing in the wind as it's own part of a uniform wave. All is good. Then the middle comes, and a choice is made. A choice to not press the brake or to check their phone instead of the road. Independent of those circumstances, it's simply a choice with no foreseeable consequences. If those at fault knew what their future had in store it wouldn't have happened in the first place. Unfortunately, the end has something entirely different in mind. The end is where everything goes horribly wrong. Glass shatters. Metal meets metal. Rubber scrapes and grinds into the texture of the road that otherwise only skin children's knees. It's that pesky end we all have to look out for. What no one ever tells you about car accidents is that they are impossible to look away from, so we just watch something we have no power to rectify.

"I can't recall the exact day I became like a car accident. I doubt that it happened in a day. There was simply a time before I enchanted and intrigued men with my movements, and a time after. That time began with the swell of my bosom, the widening of my hips and the sharpening of my features on a heart shaped canvas." I gestured to my face and snickered, remembering the first time a man had said that to me trying to make me love him back.

"Truth be told, I didn't even know I was different until my eighth grade teacher kept me after class one day to talk and slunk his hand up the brim of my skirt. It was only the first of many times a man would try that against my wishes, and the only fortune bit being that it was the last time a man would ever succeed.

"When I went home that night, I saw myself for the first time. My cheeks were puffy with tears, my hair matted from the struggle and blood specs stained my white uniform blouse from there his nails cut into my skin, and I knew that even if the rest of the world thought I was beautiful, they were wrong. The development into a woman didn't make me beautiful, it made me desirable.  They didn't want to admire me, they wanted to possess me. So when Mr Grey burned his his initials into my skin, he relieved me of that burden to be desired. I'm setting me free, he gave me beauty beyond my wildest dreams in the form of sweet relief." I swallowed back the bike that rose in my throat and watched Ana's expression, hoping for some glimpse of understanding to make this all worth while.

"I could have hid myself away after your Christian did this to me." My trembling hand ran over my scar and I embraced the memory of its searing edges. "But I chose to embrace what he made of me. What could have been a mess at his hands became my salvation."

Anastasia's mouth opened and shut a couple of times before she could grab hold of her own thoughts and put them into words. "What do you suggest I do to turn all of this around into a good thing? Especially since I'm so angry with him." She shook with a sob and I wrapped my arms around her, whispering into the top of her head and rubbing her back.

"You have the choice of what to do." I reminded her, knowing that the path I'd picked was not for most. "But you can be happier than ever before just to spite him, my darling. He dropped Delilah and I in your lap and that isn't fair for you at all. You don't even know us. Just know that Delilah is pure love and there's no one on this earth that couldn't use more of that." I felt her laugh to herself before tears. "And Anastasia, I don't mind if all I am to you is your sweet relief."

Ana pulled back and stared at me for a moment. "Relief from what?"

My fingers rang through her beautiful brown hair and I smiled as kindly as I could while delivering such a brutal truth. "I can be your sweet relief from the darkness inside that man that we both love so much."

Her stare went past me and through the walls for a thousand miles. "Okay," she sighed out the word again "Okay."

"You don't have to do things the way I did, Mrs Grey." I reminded her sharply. "I'll understand if you chose differently and you don't have to decide tonight. This is one of those choices that lasts a lifetime."

"No." The woman in front of me swallowed, and set her jaw. In those movements she picked herself back up off the ground and straightened her spine. Ana was again a woman in control. "No, you're right. It's time to accept that this is my new life. I can either have a happy marriage with you here or a sham of a marriage after making him send you away."

I pushed a lock of her hair behind her ear and shook my head. "Look, you don't have to love me. Just know I'm on your side, okay? Because I love you. Anastasia Grey. As a mother of my child and the wife of my leader, I have a love for you and I will put your life and your needs and your happiness before my own according to the best judgment I have." I so solemnly swear.

Her cheeks grew rosy and I smiled. "What does this mean? Where do we go from here?"

I chuckled. "You're going to go put on your pajamas and relax in the theatre while I go make us come popcorn and grab blankets. Sound alright with you?"

Anastasia stood and turned slightly towards the door. "It sounds like there's nowhere I'd rather be." I followed her line of vision to Delilah playing on the floor and laughing. We both had a lot to learn from her joy.