Yours, Aphrodite

Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO:
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'You have been engaged,' what could that even mean?! How could she be engaged? Aphrodite was meddling with people's lives, betrothing them to people? Aphrodite couldn't be real; Clara's life was not a romantic comedy in which Cupid would come and shoot two protagonists with his arrow and make them fall in love. Actually, it definitely wasn't, it was, however, a romantic novella in which Aphrodite did something similar.

Half an hour had passed with Clara standing motionless on the spot. She stared down at the short note and began to reread it, hoping that, somehow, the next time she read it, she would realise that she had read it wrong and she wasn't engaged to someone. Nope, as she reread it again, it remained the same as it had been the previous 224 times that she read it. 

Clara tried pinching herself, but that didn't work either. Okay, so she had read the note correctly, but it was bound to be the kids next door playing a prank on her right? Continuing with that thought and planning to ignore the letter and the ring, she placed them back inside the envelope and left it on the side in her hall. 

After spending too long in her hallway, Clara moved from her spot by the front door and proceeded with her usual after-work routine, pretending that she had never read the note. She started by making herself a cup of tea, adding milk but no sugar, and headed over to the sofa to put her feet up and relax. Much to the relief of her sore scalp, she let her blonde hair down from the tight high ponytail that it had been in all day.

As was the norm, Clara began to contemplate her life, concluding that, minus a prank by the neighbours' kids, her life was just where she wanted it to be. After about eight years of writing a newspaper as a hobby and a further ten years more seriously, the time came for her to publish her first copy. Two years on, she admitted that 'The Universal Chronicle' was not as established as newspapers such as 'The Times' or 'The Telegraph,' however, it was doing well for its age.

You may be imagining Clara sitting alone, typing for hours to fill her newspaper with content, but that wasn't the case; she rented a building within walking distance of her house and hired a team of people to work as writers, fact-checkers, printers and so on. As the newspaper was still rather small, she didn't have to hire hundreds of people, and, as a result, they were a perfect little community, making any of their interactions more personal than they would be in a larger company.

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Clara was broken out of her thoughts by an enthusiastic knock at her door. Groaning, she pulled herself up, expecting to find little resistance. Instead, she found herself on the floor; she was still cocooned in a fluffy blanket that she had acquired after settling down.

"Ouch," she complained while dragging herself from the floor and rubbing her arm. 

When she reached the door and pulled it open, she was shocked to see a tall, elegant woman sucking on a lollipop; her attire and appearance contrasting with her behaviour.