The Housemaid’s Wedding: A Short Story

“I’m going to cut your throat, Millie Calloway.”

Those words are not how you want to be woken up first thing in the morning.

But here I am, groggy from the deep, dream-filled sleep that I was wrenched from by this early-morning phone call. I’m holding the phone to my ear, wondering if the harsh whispered threat I just heard was part of a dream I was still having. After all, who gets woken up by somebody promising to cut their throat?

Well, me, apparently.

“Excuse me?” I say into the phone, my voice still scratchy with sleep.

I roll over in bed to prop myself on my side, rubbing my eyes to wake myself up. Maybe I heard them wrong. Maybe instead of cutting my throat, the stranger on the other end of the line actually wants to cut the costs of my car insurance.

“You heard me,” the male voice growls, his voice low and ominous. “You stuck your nose in the wrong place, and now you’re going to pay the price.” A brief pause follows for me to absorb this new piece of information, and then:

“I’m going to kill you slowly and painfully, Millie Calloway.”

Nope, not a dream. This is most definitely real and clearly meant for me, as evidenced by the repeated use of my full name. I can’t pretend this is some sort of wrong number or spam call. But it’s not the first death threat I have received, and it won’t be the last.

I’m not thrilled about the fact that it arrived on my wedding day, though.

They say rain on your wedding day is good luck. Death threats on your wedding day? Probably not so much. Still, I know exactly how to deal with this asshole.

“Go to hell,” I reply calmly, then I jam my thumb into the red button on the screen to end the call.

I toss my phone back onto the nightstand, where it has spent the evening charging, next to the mouth guard that is supposed to keep me from grinding my teeth at night, if I could ever remember to pop it in before bedtime. I refuse to let that call get to me. I have a tendency to do things that piss people off, and occasional death threats are to be expected, but they have never proven to be more than empty words. It’s something I’ve grown used to.

I will not let it ruin this day.

I roll my head to look over at my fiancé, who is stirring beside me. Enzo might have been awakened by the ringing of my phone, but thank God, he did not hear what that jerk said to me. If he got any inkling that somebody was threatening me, he would’ve been furious. He would have tried to make a big deal out of it—maybe even suggested going to the police—and that’s the last thing I want today. Like I said, it was surely just empty words.

Today will not be about some insecure asshole. Today is going to be about me and Enzo becoming husband and wife.

“Millie?” he murmurs, his Italian-accented voice thick with sleep. “Who was on the phone?”

“Telemarketer,” I lie.

He grimaces because he hates calls from telemarketers. He would’ve hated the actual call even more, but he’s never going to find out about it. If it happens again, I’ll have to tell him eventually, but not today.

Enzo rubs his eyes as he struggles into a sitting position. His black hair is sticking up, and he’s got a day’s worth of stubble on his jaw, but my fiancé is at his sexiest first thing in the morning. And that’s saying a lot because his baseline level of sexiness is quite high. Then the covers fall away to reveal the taut muscles in his chest, and I forget all about that stupid call.

In only four short hours, this man is going to be my husband. My husband. We’re going to be married, with rings and everything. Despite the fact that we’ve been a couple for a long time and been through hell together, I never entirely believed this day would ever come.

I place a hand gently on the swell of my abdomen. Try as I might, I can’t forget that this is why we’re getting married. When he popped the question, Enzo made a whole speech about how he knew from the second he met me that I was the one and how he wanted to spend his whole life devoted to me, but he proposed one week after I told him I was pregnant. The timing was unmistakable.

“How are you feeling?” He has noticed me touching my belly, and his brow creases in concern. “Still with the nausea?”

Enzo was a rock star during my horrific bout of first-trimester nausea. He bought me three forms of ginger, which sadly only confirmed three times that I hate ginger. He bought a diffuser because he read aromatherapy can work, but it did not. He even read a book about acupressure and gave me a personal session, which resulted in a sexy outcome that admittedly did help me forget about my nausea for a little while. But nothing worked. Until about a month ago, I was throwing up every day. Sometimes multiple times a day. It wasn’t fun.

But it’s like they say—what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. If I can deal with twice-daily vomiting, I can deal with some chickenshit asshole threatening me on the phone.

Besides, I know who that guy is. Okay, I might not know his name, but over the last several years, I have helped quite a few women escape their abusive husbands. In the process, I have gained some enemies in the form of angry husbands. I don’t know which of those husbands was threatening to slit my throat, but it was almost certainly one of them.

“I’m fine.” I manage a smile that initially feels forced, but when I see the smile on his own lips, it becomes genuine. “I’m just excited about today.”

“Me too.” He reaches for me, pulling me into his bare arms and drawing me close. “I can’t wait to marry you.”

When he says those words, I feel—dare I say it?—lucky. I’ve never felt lucky in my whole life—it’s not a word I’d ever have used to describe myself. But at this moment, I feel like the luckiest woman in the world.

Okay, nothing about this wedding is conventional. It’s not going to be a big ceremony—we will get married at Manhattan’s City Hall in a tiny chapel that I’ve read is more like a conference room with a few decorations. Also, there’s that whole part about me being knocked up. But who cares? What matters is that the two of us are going to spend the rest of our lives together, and there’s no one else I would rather share that journey with.

Also, there’s one more thing that will make this day special.