He could feel her looking at him as he mopped up the last of his gravy. I stayed up past my bedtime picking your flowers and making inkblot butterflies in your copy of Euclid’s Elements. They continued to eat in silence. He sat on the reinforced trunk that served as his chair. The soft curves of face, her dark, elegantly tangled hair, the subtle movement of her neck when she swallowed, her slim shoulders and pale sculpted collarbones, her tiny breasts… Rose looked up from her food and directly into The Beasts eyes. After some deliberation, he also opened a bottle of wine to breathe. “There’s… syllabub,” he managed. He bared his slavering fangs and stared down at her with unconcealed madness in the slit pupils of his shining green eyes. “You stupid idiot bitch!” he shouted. The moral of the story was not lost on Rose – Moll, like Betsy Thoughtless, found love after a long trial and finally overcame the flaws that had undermined her. Once she got over her initial vexation at choosing yet another morality tale – she was beginning to doubt that modern authors other than Austen actually knew it was possible to just write a good story – she found the work quite agreeable.
