Eden woke up with a pounding headache and kind of wishing that she was dead so that the pain would stop. That was the last time that she let Angel mic the drinks on girl’s night. There was always more Jack than Coke in her kid sister’s Jack and Cokes. She rolled over and looked at the alarm clock. 11:55 AM.
Eden was suddenly wide awake. She quickly threw back her rose-patterned comforter and jumped out of bed. Her mother was going to murder her. She had already missed Sunday Mass, and in five minutes, she was going to be late for Sunday brunch with her parents. Why the hell hadn’t Angel woken her up?
Eden was pulling a blue lace sundress over her head as she made her way into the living room of the house that she shared with her 20-year-old sister. Said sister was lounging on the couch in sweatpants and a tank top and giving her a bizarre look…not that Eden noticed. She was still too annoyed and incredibly hungover.
“Why the hell didn’t you wake me up?!” Eden snapped as she struggled to zip up the side of her dress. “And why aren’t you dressed? Mother is going to kill us if we’re late for brunch after we’ve already missed church.”
“Because it’s Saturday, dumbass, not Sunday.” Angel started laughing.
Eden stopped her rush to get dressed and glared at her hysterically laughing sister. “I really hate you right now.” She walked back into her room and slammed the door shut. She stripped out of the dress and pulled on her favorite pair of sweatpants with the Stark Industries logo on the leg and a white tank top. Grabbing her laptop off her desk, she climbed back in her bed. As she booted the computer up, her bedroom door opened, and Angel entered carrying a tray bearing coffee, orange juice, aspirin, and a plain bagel.
“Peace offering?” Angel smirked.
“Thanks,” Eden grumbled. She still wasn’t in much of a good mood. In fact, she was barely ever in a good mood anymore.
“You know that I’m not the bad guy here, right?” Angel took a seat on the bed beside her after depositing the tray on the nightstand. “I’m totally on your side. The spotlight Mother and Dad put on us gets to me too.”
Eden softened up a bit at that. Angel had a good point. “I know.” She grabbed the orange juice off the tray and took a sip. Turning her attention back to her laptop, she logged into her Wattpad account.
“You know the way you obsess over him is the same way you hate people obsessing over you, right?” Angel asked sagely as she pointed to the picture of Tony Stark that Eden used as her avatar.
Eden didn’t respond. Her sister was right, of course. But, at least, Tony Stark chose to be famous. Eden most certainly had not chosen her fame. It had been thrust upon her at birth. She had been born to a first-term Democratic senator from North Carolina. Her father had then spent the next twenty-five years steadily climbing the political ranks…until her for President of the United States when Eden was twenty-five and Angel, seventeen...and he had won.
Eden’s father was President John Cooper. In her third year of his first term in office, he was highly rated in the opinion polls and looked like a shoo-in for reelection.
Most people would feel proud and privileged to live the life that she led. She was the daughter of a well-respected president, had grown up in the lap of luxury, had attended the best schools in the country, and was in her second year working as the head of the family’s charitable foundation. It was a position that paid her six figures.
Eden was proud of her father, and she knew she had a good life. She was thankful for that. What she wasn’t grateful for was the press intrusion into her life. From the first days of her father’s first run for president, cameras had followed Eden’s every move. Angel had been spared in those early days because she was still a minor, and that meant that she was given a Secret Service detail of her own until she turned eighteen. Eden had been too old at twenty-five to legally qualify for Secret Service protection. The press coverage only increased after her father’s landslide win. It felt like she couldn’t go anywhere without a photographer following her. At first, she had tried to live as normal a life as possible. She had stayed in her hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina. She worked as a fundraiser for the North Carolina Public School System. She avoided moving until the press intrusion became too much to bear. Her mother, in a rare moment of parental warmth, had taken pity on her and offered her the job of running the family charity foundation that her parents had set up after the Battle of New York. Eden had jumped at the offer and moved into the elite and private Georgetown area of Washington, D.C.
Life was about as normal as it was going to get until her father finally retired from public life, and the American public finally figured out that Eden and Angel weren’t the second comings of Jackie and Ethel Kennedy.
To cope with her stress level, Eden had developed a fascination – obsession, if you believed Angel – with Tony Stark, the uber-wealthy, slightly narcissistic businessman who fought with the Avengers as Iron Man. An amateur writer since elementary school, Eden had joined the ranks of online writers who wrote and posted stories commonly referred to as fanfiction. All of her stories were centered around Tony Stark, and Eden didn’t care if some people found it strange. Sometimes her stories were the only thing that kept her sane in a world that she felt that she had no control in.
Noticing that her inbox had a red dot over it, indicating that she a private message, Eden clicked on it. No one ever private messaged her…because she kind of had a reputation online as being cold and short-tempered even though she didn’t mean to be. She was just incredibly socially awkward. The message was kind of weird, the sender (StarkIndustriesCEO) speaking as though he or she actually knew what kind of woman Tony Stark would be into to.
Eden sent a polite (she hoped) and short ‘Thank you so much.’ and signed out of her account. Grabbing the aspirin off the tray that Angel had delivered, she popped three into her mouth, washing them down with the rest of her orange juice. “I still hate you for this hangover,” she jokingly glared at Angel.
Angel laughed. “Hey, I just mixed the drinks. You’re the one who drank them.”
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