Adriano squeezed my hand.
No.
Sicilyput her hand in mine, threading her small fingers between mine that were wringing painfully over my wrists.
She interrupted my mother’s repetitive voice in my head, stopped the obsessive words that never left unless I acknowledged them.Sicilyhad taken them this time, and I doubted she knew what she had done for me.
My gaze traveled the length of her body as she situated herself beside me, facing the priest with the guests at our backs. It was then that I truly noted the details of her dress. Her spine was unnecessarily exposed; it had unconventional sleeves that were too long and reached her fingers, there were lace fixtures of flowers sprouting across the uncovered skin, and small white buttons were dotted to the very end of the long white fabric. It was all inadequate coverage of her body, and the part thatdidcover her was tight and clung to the outline of her figure.
That part did not cause me the expected visual disruption.
“Do you like it?” Sicily whispered under her breath, leaning closer to my shoulder as the elderly Italian priest began to speak.
I looked at her face this time, noting the sparkly makeup she was covered in and how her blonde mess of curls had been pinned up as tightly as her dress was.
She did not even have a veil; that was against the rules.
My hands began clenching and unclenching at my side, around hers, as I said quietly, “You do not follow the rules.”
She scoffed. “That doesn’t answer my question.”
“I do not possess the capacity to like or dislike.”
Sicily made that sound that Adriano always did. Asnort. “You can just say if you don’t like it. I don’t really give a fuck what you think anyway.”
My face was uncomfortable. I must have frowned. “Stop using that word.”
“What word?” She smirked. “Fuck?”
I tried hard to focus on the Catholic priest’s Italian introduction of a happily marrying couple instead of Sicily’s pink painted nails hurting my hand and her sinful attitude disrupting my state of mind, but she was very present and still verbalizing her rebellion aloud.
She shuffled closer to my body, her strong, synthetic, flowery scent causing my eye to twitch, her nearness unacceptable. I could tolerate the handholding for a limited period of time, but it was not a requirement for her shoulder to be touching mine.
“Fuck,” she whispered.
I recognized that as the deliberate attempt to disobey rules that it was, and I realized then that I was about to marry a logistical anomaly. My hand slipped out of hers, and I was aware this time of the need to wring my fingers, to bind them together so nobody else could touch me.
My chest ached. My shoulders heaved. I required stabilization, but the only being nearby was the onecausingthe destabilization. Adriano was not near me. Where was he?
Today, I had told Dad he must not hit Mommy anymore because she was going to have a baby soon, but he did not like me when I said that, so he hit me instead. He had put me here, in the yard, because I was defective and had not looked him in the eye when he shouted at me.
I just found it hard sometimes.
“Hey!” I looked behind me, frowning as the wet fence suddenly had an eye. “Were you bad? Is that why you’re in the rain too?”
I nodded at the fence. “I am defective.”
The fence laughed, and a finger poked through another hole. “That’s a silly name.”
“My name is Milan, not defective!”
Then, the eye was replaced with a mouth. “Oh, I like that name better! My name’s Adrian.”
“Milan.”
I blinked, returning to the cathedral and the priest and this problematic woman who was to be my wife. Her voice was loud enough to be heard over the priest’s talking, but also to replace the voices I heard in my head when things got overwhelming, and that word came to mind.
Defective.
