AllFreeNovel
Share Us
ChapterOne
It was August in Savannah, Georgia, a sweltering, sweaty month that slowed the entire city to a near-stop. Aria Baldwin, a senior at the Savannah College of Art and Design, sat beneath a ponderous oak with a sketchbook open on her lap, as, above her, the limbs of the tree wound through the thick air, draped with moss. All morning, she’d dreamt of sketching out the first ideas for her senior year blueprints, hoping to secure a top grade and her dream job after this year’s architecture classes. But her pencil remained dull in her hand, her thoughts hazy.
“There she is.” A figure appeared on the other side of the moss, peering through the shadows to find her. Aria’s stomach twisted. She hadn’t wanted to be found.
“Benjamin,” she said with a sigh. “How did you find me?”
Benjamin breezed through the moss happily and bounced to the ground beside her, wearing his very expensive Crest smile. His polo shirt, which had no sweat patches despite the humidity, spoke of his rich parents, lavish life, and his haircut, flouncy, like a show pony’s, was his only way of living outside of his parents’ desires for his appearance and his future. Surely after graduation, Benjamin would cut it.
“You’re always here,” Ben said. “Always deep in thought under this tree.”
Ben pressed his face through the air between them and kissed her on the lips. She kept her eyes half-open, feeling dull and somewhere far outside of herself. When the kiss broke, Ben continued to smile at her like a lobotomized zoo animal.
“I can’t stay long,” Aria explained. “I have a meeting with Professor Heskew.”
“Always running off to Heskew,” Ben said.
Aria raised her shoulder. “I told you, he’s the only one who gets what I’m trying to do.”
“Right. Because the other people in the program just can’t understand you,” Ben said, half-sarcastically.
It was true that Aria often felt like an outsider within the architecture program. However, this wasn’t such a hard situation for her to swallow, as she’d felt like an outsider since she was a girl. She was the youngest child of Kenny and Bethany Baldwin, a couple of Texan socialites with more money than they knew what to do with and two children (not including Aria) who upheld the Baldwins’ mission in the world. When Aria had said she wanted to attend architecture school, her father had flipped his lid and demanded,“Don’t you know that as a Baldwin, there are duties you must uphold and attend to?”Aria hadn’t fully understood what he’d meant but had decided she would do everything on her own anyway, taking out loans and getting herself to Savannah. Her mother hadn’t said a word.
“I have to go,” Aria said, snapping her sketchbook closed. She stood, annoyed at Ben and his constant attempts to be in her orbit, to be near. In truth, he was also a link to her parents, the son of her father’s business associate and someone Kenny Baldwin had professed to “loving like a son.” When Ben had asked Aria to marry him in July, Aria had stuttered and spat with nerves, genuinely unsure about her allegiances. The “yes” she’d gotten out had sounded like a dying bird.
“I was just texting with your father about the sailing trip,” Ben said, walking alongside Aria, toward the architecture school. “It’s wild that we’re both going to get out of an entire month of classes to travel around the Caribbean.”
“What Kenny Baldwin wants, he gets,” Aria said softly, quivering with fear at the idea of spending twenty-eight days on a sailboat with Kenny, Bethany, her sister, Natalie, her brother, Gregory, their spouses, and, of course, her nephew, Roger. Partially, her father had wanted to arrange the trip to celebrate Ben and Aria’s engagement, which thrilled Ben and destroyed Aria’s psyche.
Aria stopped outside the architecture building and gave Ben a hard look.
“What?” Ben asked, never once abandoning that smile.
“I just want to make sure you know something,” Aria replied.
“Yeah?”
Aria swallowed. “I’m going to work as an architect. I fought hard to come to this school, to work alongside Professor Heskew, and to become the kind of artist I can respect. My father has always imagined I’ll marry someone like you, settle down in Texas, and I don’t know… plan charity functions and parties the way my mother does. But it just isn’t going to happen like that.”
Ben frowned nervously. He’d sensed that Aria had just described not only her mother’s life, but also his mother’s.
“I know you have big dreams, Aria,” Ben said softly, with love in his eyes. “We’ll make it work.”
Aria said goodbye to Ben and walked up the steps of the main architectural building. When she reached the second floor of the old building, with its regal paintings and its ornate brickwork, she remembered with a funny flip in her stomach that she didn’t have a meeting with Professor Heskew— that she’d made up the lie so she could get out of talking with Ben.
Why had she agreed to marry him again?Did a part of her still want to please her father, even after all he’d done?It was pathetic.
Aria sat on a cushioned maroon couch in the dark shadow of the old building, sketching in her book and dreaming about the next semester. Although she’d agreed to go on this sailing expedition, against her better judgment, she still hoped it would be an invigorating time of creativity, with the potential to unlock the blueprints she needed for graduation. She’d felt blocked lately, as though everything she drew was basic and boring.
To Aria’s surprise, her phone pinged with a text from her mother.
MOM: Hi, honey! How is Savannah?
Aria raised both of her eyebrows. For years, her mother had seemed to exist as a puppet for her father’s use, which meant that this text message was probably a gateway to Bethany and Kenny demanding something of Aria.
ARIA: It’s fine? What’s up?
MOM: I know you said you have a lot of work to do before we leave for our sailing adventure. Just wanted to check-in. :)
