Soulmates

Chapter One

Since the day Elizabeth Greene was born, she had puckered pink and white lashes splayed across her back. In fact, for the entirety of her twenty years of life, her body was a canvas of deep purple bruises and other particular cuts and breaks. When the soul marks appeared on Beth's body, usually every day a new one, a tingling warmth would pour out over her skin, indicating that her soulmate had just taken another injury.

Momma used to tell Beth, "Let's hope your prince charming has good health insurance. For his sake and ours," she'd tease in a soft voice, trying to relieve Beth's tension when a particularly awful mark showed up. "If he's a proper gentleman, he'll offer to pay off all these hospital visits."

Beth would just give her mother a small, sad smile. The constant soul markings that showed up on Beth's body worried her to no end. Not knowing where, how, or why her soulmate was getting hurt so often, so vigorously, kept her awake at night in bewilderment. Every night, she prayed for the stranger that branded her body. She'd wrap her arm around herself, tracing the scar tissue of her soulmates old wound gently.

Her parents and siblings were always trying to reassure Beth when she'd get a soul mark. They'd laugh and tease, taking guesses at what he did for a living, always coming up with answers like professional fighter of some sort, or a soldier serving his country.

But she knew better. She knew exactly what they said about her constant markings, what they thought it really meant. That her soulmate, whoever they were out in the world, was either the kind of man a young woman like Beth shouldn't associate herself with, or a man who was in trouble. Her daddy and older brother Shawn had a tendency to lean towards the former.

The kids at school talked, too. The first few times Beth had awoke in the middle of the night to a pair of fresh black eyes and a bloody nose, she stayed home from school for a week until her eyes could be concealed with makeup. But, she could only miss school so many times, and well.. Her soulmate seemed to get hit in the face quite a bit more than anticipated. And kids talked, asking her all sorts of bizarre questions about someone and she never knew the answers.

In grade school, her constant battered appearance scared the other kids away, but as they got older and had their own soul markings, they understood and saw past it. But by high school, when the boys started coming' 'round Beth like a bear to honey, the boys started to get pushy.

"Beth, why are you gonna wait around for some pussy who can't even protect himself?" Was the usual jist of their attempts to get her to go out with them. "Why wait around forever that when I can just take you out tonight instead?"

Beth, being raised to always be kind to others, would politely decline, choosing to ignore the crude words that always followed. Prude. Cock tease. Lesbo. Virgin Mary. After going four years of high school without dating anybody, in a small town in Georgia, people finally caught on that she had already taken.

Traditionally, in most cultures, letting others see your soul markings meant that you were committing yourself to your soulmate, whether or not they were directly in your life. Beth, obviously, was the latter. They said that a soul bond tied two people together, fate inventably drawing them into each others lives.

Beth had been raised on promises of one day meeting her prince charming, her true love. Of a fairy tail wedding, right here on her family's farm. Hopeless romantics. And for a long time, Beth believed that could be her future, if she just waited long enough.

By the time she had turned twenty, she was starting to resent her never ending soul marks. Resent her soulmate, even. She wanted something to happen already. She wanted the worrying, the wondering, hopefully the broken bones and scars to stop being so frequent. She started to second guess just how strictly she should be following tradition. She was only human and she intimacy and affection. She started to think, y'know, what if her soul mate wasn't as committed as she had been? It seemed like everyone, heck, even momma and daddy, went on dates and went steady before finding their soulmate. It took her parents forty-five years to find each other—how long would Beth be waiting?