Page 1 of Unstitch

PROLOGUE - DEX

Apparently, God is love.

Apparently, His love is boundless.

Call me crazy, but that sounds a lot like the love is love movement to me.

Except it’s not.

It turns out, when God’s love is filtered through endless rulemakers and gatekeepers and fearmongers, from those who penned the blood-curdling cautionary tales of the Old Testament to every fearful, dogmatic parish priest I’ve ever met, it emerges beyond recognition.

A love of bounds.

Of conditions.

Of expected conformity.

According to my parents, and to the priests and monks who taught me all through my formative years, God’s love is straight and cisgendered and exclusionist. He may love a sinner, but our only chance of salvation, of basking in the unparalleled warmth of His love, is to repent. To promise not to sin.

Which comes to the crux of my problem.

The realest, most visceral, most pressing emotions, desires, I’ve ever experienced in my thirty years can all be classified as one neat category.

Sins.

So I suppress them. I deny them, even to myself, even knowing as a person of decent intelligence that there cannot truly be anything wicked about them.

And, every day of my existence, I attempt to make peace with knowing that this straight, bounded thing—the thing I’ve been taught exemplifies love—is as close as I’ll come to the true experience of it.

But it’s an uneasy peace, because this limited type of love cannot, surely, be the reason we’ve all been put on this earth.

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DARCY

You know that part in Pretty Woman when Edward is taking in the sight of Vivian lying in his bed on that first morning, and her hideous blonde wig is nowhere to be seen, and her hair is the kind of gorgeous, glossy auburn that Julia Roberts pulls off so well, and it’s so much better than the wig? Like, not even comparable?

Well, not to toot my own horn too much, but that’s basically the level of transformation my sister Gen’s genius hair stylist, Giorgio, has pulled off for me today in his swanky Chelsea salon.

It’s weird. I was so morbidly obsessed with the prospect of skin damage when I was living in Australia that I wore sun cream obsessively. I literally slathered myself in the stuff. So my skin is actually pale and creamy and pretty fucking luscious, I would say.

Not so my hair.

Apparently, all those times I wore sun screen and a baseball cap did bugger all for my hair, which I totally neglected. The entire time, my poor hair was being nuked by good old Aussie sunlight and dried out by long days of surfing, which meant that the ponytail I left hanging out the back of my cap ended up nothing short of bleached and stringy.

Maybe it wasn’t as helmet-y as Julia Roberts’ blonde wig, but it was definitely as skanky. Let it be said, in a moment of humility, that until this afternoon, I had, as my sister put it, the hair of a skanky ho.

Nice.

This is where having an older sister who’s not only obsessive about grooming and extremely generous but on the verge of marrying an actual billionaire comes in very handy indeed. Gen took one look at me after I turned up at her old flat last week and shuddered before speed-dialling her darling Giorgio and begging him to take me on.

I have to admit, he’s as fun as he is talented. His initial judgy bitch face when he saw me has given way to some excellent gossip-sharing over the past two hours. Boy, does he have some famous clients. I could chat to him all day long. And now, as I gaze at myself in the mirror, I am fucking gobsmacked, which is no mean feat.

Given the way I began this story, it may not surprise you to hear that I’ve traded the skanky bleached blonde in for…

Red!

I know. Shocker, right?

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