It Is What It Is | Ares

[attr="class","cbgtop"]

[attr="class","cbody"]Constance really didn’t know what to do. That was what this all boiled down to. She had absolutely no idea what she was going to do. Life had been sort of difficult lately, there was no denying that. She felt more detached from her family than she ever had. Maybe not as bad as it had been after her strýc had died, after she had run off… but in some ways, it didn’t feel much better. She felt the distance growing by the day, and she didn’t necessarily feel like there was anything that she could do about it. Her matka, Ella, and Temperance had all grown closer in passing months, Thea had always felt comfortable doing her own thing, and Philip was… Philip. That just left her on her own, and she had been very, very aware of it recently.
[break][break]
She knew that it probably wasn’t fair to feel that way, when she had a fiancé that loved her, but her opinions on him had been complicated recently too. She didn’t like it—at all, actually. Constance was entirely confused about the situation. Liam had not done anything wrong. She loved him. She was sure that she did. There was no huge flaw in their relationship, no fight that they had gotten into, or anything at all that should have her second-guessing their relationship. She should be happy. That was the kicker, that was the problem with all of this. She knew that she should one hundred percent be happy, and instead, she spent most of the time next to miserable.
[break][break]
Maybe that was pushing it or being dramatic. It wasn’t that she was completely miserable. But she wasn’t happy either and she knew she had no reason for that to be the case. She had Liam, she was the prima ballerina at the most prestigious company in the United Kingdom. She was well on her way to her law degree and had almost finished her schoolwork for her political science degree. Yes, there were some complications—the epidemic that had impacted so many people in her family, the guards assigned to their family. Life wasn’t perfect but, generally speaking, it was good. She had no reason to feel the way that she did, and she didn’t necessarily think that anybody would understand if she tried to talk about it.
[break][break]
So, for the most part, she wasn’t. She was trying not to talk about it, she was trying not to think about it, in hopes that she would eventually stop feeling this way entirely.
[break][break]
But, somehow, despite those hopes, everything had gotten significantly more complicated. Constance had not thought that meeting Jarred was going to change anything. They had met at one of Temperance’s performances and had gone out for drinks afterwards. Being with him had been different. It had been good. Simple. He’d been easy to talk to, and he had made her forget her problems for a while. But when that night had been over, she had thought that had been it. There was no reason for it to be anything more than that, but then he had owled her and they had gone out for drinks again.
[break][break]
He wanted her to end her engagement with Liam. Who asked someone for something like that? Someone that they had only just met? Who just came out and said that out loud? Constance didn’t know. But she knew that she should have said no. She should have said she was flattered, but she was happily engaged and she was sorry that their last meeting had given him the wrong idea. That was the reaction that she should have had. But she had been second-guessing their engagement already. Not in any serious way. But she had been wondering if she should be happier, if she should be more excited—if she should be happy wedding planning, instead of just mostly dreading it. She had put some space between them since then, as much as she could while living with him anyway, and she’d gone to the Travers wedding with Temperance instead of him. She was trying to figure things out, she just didn’t know what she was going to do.
[break][break]
Today, she’d wanted her mind off of it. She wanted to think about something else, so she’d decided to head into Knockturn Alley and see if her strýc was working. He was amongst the many in her family that she’d been feeling some distance from as of late. As much as she told herself she was going to stop being the one to always seek people out, she’d needed a distance. She could only hope that he wasn’t too busy to see her. She figured she’d just sit at the bar and have a drink or two until he was free.
[break][break]
Once she’d sat down at the bar, she ordered a double scotch neat and told the bartender to tell her strýc that she was there. She didn’t really know if he would be busy or not, but she figured it was worth a shot.
[break][break]