Chapter 4 Marry Bigail

PRINCE VAUGHN

"Faster, beast!"

Bigail knocks her heels against the belly of our brown horse, urging it to hasten up.

It doubles its speed.

"Good!" she says and rubs its mane. "Good, good horse."

I'm seated behind her on the horse, enduring her hair flying towards me in the wind and wondering why she's in such a hurry.

We have absolutely nothing serious to do at the palace. We'll end up eating dates, apples and avocadoes and probably have sex and sleep and snore. It is tiring, to say the least. Then in the evening, she'll show me her paintings. Without mincing words, her paintings are horrible. She paints like a chicken scratching a surface and forces me to admire them because I'm her boyfriend. If I were to give her my honest opinion on those paintings, she'll never pick up a brush ever again. So I keep my views to myself and end up telling her, "Wow, you're doing great. Keep it up." And when she asks in what way the painting needs improvement, I'll tell her it doesn't. It's perfect. Because honestly, it's not like I'm an artist myself, and how do I say it, where do I begin correcting something so horrible?

As we keep riding under the sun, every gallop the horse takes towards the palace breaks my heart.

We soon reach and both step off the horse as a guard approaches, bowing down to us before leading the horse away.

Bigail holds my hand and ushers me to the palace, so that I start feeling like her personal horse, without a control of my own freewill.

I might be the fox prince, but actually Bigail calls the shots in our relationship. She tells me when it is okay to leave the palace and when it is time to be back home. I absolutely loathe it. I hate it. But I blame my mother for everything.

The queen was the one who asked me to date Bigail in the first place. She even advised me to marry her someday soon.

"Marry her?"

"Yes. For the realm's sake," she replied.

"This is my life, " I said. "How about what's good for me? I won't be happy with Bigail obviously and at the end of the day the realm needs me, their prince, to be happy." I stood up from my bed where I had been sitting with my mother and walked straight towards my royal room's window to breathe in great gusts of clean city air. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. "I'll not marry the girl," I said. "I'm not ready for a relationship. Not now. Not in fifty years. Not to her.

My mother sat up on the bed so that her weight sank it a little. "You're not ready for marriage? I think I know what's wrong with you."

"What's wrong with me, Mother?"

"Those girls you bathe with," said the queen. "I'll have to withdraw them."

"Oh no, mother," I said. "Don't go there."

It's my right as a prince to bathe with the girls. They're the prettiest foxes in the realm. They pull off their clothes and step naked into my pool when I want to have my bath. They step in like mermaids in twos and threes and begin to wash me up carefully like I'm a precious artifact dug out from the ground. Sex doesn't happen all the time, of course. Although when it does, it is like an icing on the cake, a natural end to my bathing experience. I end up releasing semen like condensed milk into my clear blue pool and fck one or two of them lovelies, releasing again and again and...

"You can't take the girls away, mother," I said. They've done nothing wrong. This isn't about them."

"It's about them. And the only reason you think you don't need a relationship is because of the nonsense they do to you. I'm stopping them henceforth. You're four hundred years old, Vaughn. For fck's sake, you're ripe for marriage. You're marrying Bigail."

In truth, I'm four hundred years old, and I've only seen few foxes as beautiful as Bigail. On a good day, I should have no problem dating her. I mean she's tall and angular yet shapely. When she moves, her onion-shaped booty shakes beneath those tight royal robes. She has got a moon-shaped face and legs that are separated at the thighs. Her dark hair coils round her head like an angel's halo, and then on bed, she's a beast. The ultimate sex machine. Bigail comes at you from the different angles to offer you the coochie, so that at the end of the day, I'm not really missing my bath girls.

But then the motivation for dating Bigail is entirely wrong.

"Let me get this straight, mother," I retorted to the queen, turning around to face her on my bed. "I'll be marrying someone just to please her father and you're fine with this?" I walked towards the queen and looked at her eyeball to eyeball. "That's wicked."

"Life is wicked, Vaughn," she said. "But do it for me. Do it for the realm's sake."

Actually, I understand my mother. Everyone knows who Bigail's father is. A dumb brute. A master troublemaker. I have to marry Bigail because of the damages her father is capable of wrecking on the realm.

You only need to look at the dude's face to judge the book by its cover and you'll be hundred percent right. His name is Sa Barel. He begins fights for the sake of beginning fights, acquiring scars in the process, the most prominent of which is the scar running from his left ear to the corner of his mouth.

He once tried to woo my mother by bringing gifts of flowers and hunted deers and even presenting the skulls of some of our most wanted werewolves. Yet my mother saw through Sa Barel's foxery. It was as clear as daylight. He wanted to wife the queen to become king.

But following years of unending failure, he gave up and found himself a younger female fox and has since devoted himself to convincing half the entire fox realm that a woman shouldn't lead us. My mother shouldn't be queen.

Sa Barel is a good orator. If you sit under his barbaric teachings, he'll convert you to the dark side. At the moment a great amount of good-natured foxes have joined in his patriarchal course. No matter their numbers, however, these clowns can't stand my mothers mammoth strength when the chips are down. The fox queen is the ultimate fox warrior yet she seeks peace. It's why she needs me to marry Sa Barel's daughter Bigail to, you know, avoid a civil bloodbath. It appears this is all he ever wanted, seeing his bloodline become royalty. it has since worked like magic; we no longer see Sa Barel in public places instigating rebellion.

After Bigail and I get down from the horse, we stroll into the palace through the wide corridor, walking majestically on tiles and red rugs towards my room. The air is crispy and cool as if sprayed with peppermint. Out of the blues I see one of the girls that used to bath with me. She's shy and bows her head while walking past us. She's now a waitress. Bigail catches me staring and I break my line of gaze to smile a fake smile at Bigail, reassuring and massaging her ego.

Next, Bigail leads me to my royal chamber and next thing I know, she orders for... avocadoes.

And apples.

And more and more apples.

Ever since her designated physician recommended fruits for a healthy skin, she has been obsessively snacking on those.

I sigh and take off my robe. It is going to be a long, boring day.

Bigail is munching on an apple as I walk towards my balcony and tighten my palms around the railing, staring at the distant sun in the horizon.

Bigail clears throat behind me on the balcony. "So" she says. "Are you ready to see one of my paints?"

I turn around to look at her.

And something snaps inside my stomach