by Tiffany Sala
She said one of those services like she was talking about a laundromat picking your linen up at your door. “How would he have worked it out, if he had nothing to do with it to begin with?”
She wafted her fingers at me over her cup like she was driving away steam that was no longer there. “Figure that one out for yourself.”
“And I’m supposed to believe you’re just screwing over your son here… for what, to help me? I don’t believe for a second you like me that much.”
“You shouldn’t believe I care for you at all,” said Angel. “That’s why I had to do it. It’s worth more to me to get you the hell out of our family than the nuisance of having my kid be shitty at me for a year or two.” Her smile was gracious even as her words were vicious. “Call it a technicality if you like, but he never specifically asked me to keep it quiet from you. It was assumed as part of our existing deal, I suppose, but Devin has been around the block long enough to know better than to lean on assumptions.”
My thoughts swirled around and around like the coffee in my cup. Everything was different if it wasn’t chance that had brought our paths together. Devin was no longer acting with the hand he’d been given, no longer giving anyone a chance, however minimal. The cards had already fallen, and he’d come after us for reasons… I couldn’t even imagine why he might have done it.
How had I ever thought I would be safe to engage myself to this man when I didn’t know the first thing about why he behaved the way he did? It was like arranging to marry someone when you didn’t speak a word of the same language. I’d been so stupid to think the slight hint of a connection we seemed to be making mattered.
“Well, I had best be going.” Angel tipped her coffee cup to her lips at a draining angle and dropped it down on the table with a ringing clatter that made me jump. I just bet she was perfect at timing the drinking of her coffees to leave the area at the absolute most devastating moment. “You need to be really careful, Julia. You don’t fit into this world. Maybe you would be better just going back to your parents’ property, and… enjoying the view.”
I saw red so hard I didn’t come back to myself until the door clicked behind her. I snatched the cup she had emptied and hurled it at the door, ducking behind the table at the smash and flying shards of porcelain. When I peeked back over the edge of the table, there was a clear dent in the door at around head-level, where I’d found my mark.
There was nothing for me to fear from that sight, but I wanted to hide from it just the same. It was dragging me right back to the last time I’d become so helplessly angry I smashed things. It was the day I had met with the new girlfriend of the boy who kidnapped me, and she’d told me in her sweet little voice that she was not going to let me mess around with her man any more.
Well, and I didn’t want him, did I? He’d always been expendable, easily replaced by any number of other boys like him. He was not special to me.
But in that moment, I’d wished he could have been. I’d wanted something I played at wanting all those times to make boys who didn’t know any better think they wanted it with me. All those other boys who had been wrong for me.
It didn’t matter what I wanted back then. I’d had my frustration and nowhere to direct it except at my walls and my door and the old trinkets my parents used to gift me for birthdays that I was never terribly attached to anyway.
Devin… felt different. He had all along, and that had led me to make a fool of myself the way boys had made a fool of themselves over me.
They had never been equal to me, though. Was I equal to Devin? Could I be? …Did I want to be?
I wasn’t going to get anything out of my own brain like this. I had to confront him with this new information.
I got up and paced around the house, looking for my phone. Eventually I found it on the coffee table, half-hidden under three disorderly magazines. I was used to scrolling to find Devin’s number after all this time, but this was the first time I had made a call.
“Julia.” Of course he had to let me know he was aware it was me. “How are you?”
“I need to see you.” I hadn’t realised I was going to make that request, but now that I’d spoken it was clear: this was the only way forward. “As soon as possible. Today.”
“Of course I’m happy to arrange to see you again.” He didn’t sound happy, though: I was pretty sure he was squirming. “But as you understand I’m very busy, I can’t just drop—”
The old, scheming Julia was coming back to the fore. “Of course you can just drop if the reason matters enough to you. Let me make it easier for you. If you don’t find a way to show up today—” I was about to add ‘or have a convincing explanation for why not’, but I realised someone like Devin would just work that loophole for all it was worth. “I won’t have anything more to do with you. I’ll move out of your mother’s place… you won’t know where I am.”
“I think I’d figure it out pretty quickly,” said Devin. I heard papers shuffling. “If it’s that important, Julia, I’ll see you after lunch.”
He disconnected on me. I was left there staring at my silent phone, thinking of what must have gone through his mind. I was sure he’d chosen that exact meeting time carefully, playing the game as it was offered to him. He knew I’d be left waiting, nervous, until he arrived: it was not long enough for me to go anywhere, but still long enough to drag.
Did I really have any reason to be surprised that Devin’s own mother was accusing him of being calculating?
Well, I could tell I’d already made a mistake with this. I’d let Devin take control of the situation again, completely overwhelm me.
The only thing I could do was decline to allow him to keep control. I got myself up and picked up the bits of mug, cleaned up the damage to the door as best I could, and sat myself down to binge on my favourite episodes of all my favourite shows while I waited. At first my enjoyment was completely forced, but as I rediscovered the jokes and crazy situations that had made me rank this or that episode number one, I found that mindset that I think motivates everyone who likes to get lost in shows. That conviction that nothing happening in your real life could really be anywhere near as insane as what was happening on the screen.
For me, that didn’t quite check out any more. But it didn’t stop me from feeling the usual comfort.
He didn’t knock, of course. Having an approximate range of hours in which to expect a visit was being well-prepared when it came to him and his family. I was even fully-dressed.
I paused my show when he made his way over to the lounge area, but I just tilted my head up at him, not standing. There he was in one of those gorgeous suits that seemed to be a part of him, no trace of dust or any blemish from the outside world to be seen. I knew he could be physical: this man in front of me had made love to me in a way that still made me want to curl my knees up to my chest when I thought about it, but at the same time I couldn’t comprehend it. I couldn’t believe what I had experienced for myself.
And now, I was wondering seriously what his secret was. There had to be something he was hiding, to contort himself so stubbornly away from something that felt like it could be so good.
“Julia.” I realised I’d just been staring at him, my jaw probably idiotically slack. “Did you really need me to set aside everything I was doing so you could confirm that I exist?”
I dragged my mind back to the question I was supposed to be answering here. “I—” I had been about to say straight-out that his mother had broken her promise to him, but I decided he didn’t need to know that. If he was not going to give anything to me easily, then I did not need to hand over everything he might want to know. “I heard an interesting rumour that needed confirmation. That the debt my parents have to you was never your debt in the first place: that you inserted yourself into their situation by choice.”
“My mother,” said Devin at once. So much for holding anything to me. “Interesting that you should try to keep her confidence.”
“Well it s
eems you will try to keep everything you know and feel to yourself and offer nothing to me… fair is fair, no?” I resented myself for failing so quickly to keep my real thoughts from him… but I already knew I was hopeless where he was concerned, so why not finish this up in the same style?
“She should not have told you I bought the debt,” Devin said. “You are not ready to hear the details of that situation.”
“Not ready?” I was out of my seat. I had wanted to stay calm, queenly… but there he was, pushing the buttons he knew worked best once again. “Am I a child, Devin? Am I five years old, to be constantly talked down to like this?”
He just stood there, refusing to give me anything even when the stakes were this high. But his silence suggested to me that he didn’t have a plan, either, couldn’t think what to do. That gave me an opening to lead.
Scheming, inflexible Julia had only ever gotten me so far. Hiding, sulky Julia an even shorter distance. I needed to tap into what was supposed to be in the middle.
“I suppose it’s not much more than what I deserve,” I admitted. “I spent so much time keeping guys in the dark about what was really going on with me. But all that time, I never realised I was a victim of the same thing. So I wish you would take a risk now, Devin. Be honest with me. Even if you think I am not ready for it, give me the chance to extend myself.”
Devin stared at the polished floor of his mother’s apartment.
“What is it you think you need to know, now that you have this additional information?” he asked.
“I feel like maybe this is more personal than you’ve admitted,” I said. “It’s not like, well, you were involved from the start, so you just had to make the best of it. You chose to get involved. According to your mother, you put yourself in a difficult financial position to get involved. That seems personal on a really major level. Like, you wanted to hurt my parents. Or…” I hated the stupid little thrill my body offered me at the thought that I had been his target all along. I really was messed-up, wasn’t I? “Or you wanted to have an excuse to take me. Maybe even to make this marriage offer.”
“I don’t hurt people who are innocent, Julia,” Devin snapped. “I don’t give anyone more than they can take.”
And that was the crux of it, the detail that would help me understand him perfectly, if I could only unpack it. I was sure of this, and yet I couldn’t make the pieces come together in my head. The only thing that was fitting for me was that this must be why he’d had that ridiculous extreme reaction to my virginity revelation. He felt like I’d manipulated him into doing something to me he wouldn’t have, if he’d known.
My disgust at that realisation made my first response an aggressive one. “Are you saying… I deserved to be kidnapped, somehow? To be scared like that? Is that something you did to me to make a point?”
“Why would you draw such a conclusion, Julia?” He was pacing in front of me, more discomfited than ever before, and I couldn’t feel pleased about it. Devin’s distress was the last thing I wanted right now. I wanted him to be calm, honest. On my team, the way he’d claimed we would be if we arranged to marry. “Did I not give you the respect of taking you on as an equal partner in this scheme as soon as I judged you were worthy of it? Perhaps you do not like my judging you at all… but if I gave you everything at once, with no filter, it would be worse for you. You should be honoured that I care enough to protect you—”
“Protect me, yes! Thank you,” I told him, “even though you haven’t always gotten that protection right. But what bothers me is not that you seem to want to protect me… it’s that you seem to want to do it by keeping me in the dark. If you really want us to ever be a team, you have to let me in sometimes. Not all the time maybe, but sometimes!”
“You’re asking a lot of someone who only met you a few days ago,” Devin started, but I wasn’t having any of that.
“You’re asking a lot of me to trust you when you’ve started out deceiving me like this. I’ll accept that some things, some omissions or evasions, might be for my own good in the short term, but not this. Not the whole reason I’m here in the first place. I need to know why you took on my parents’ debt, Devin… whether your plan all along was to make me marry you. And if so, you need to make me understand why if you want me to continue with this charade.”
I sank back onto the couch, suddenly exhausted, and to my surprise Devin crossed the floor and sat down next to me.
He took hold of my hand still wearing that stupid ring—it was a pretty damn gorgeous ring, as if I’d want to take it off—and squeezed it. “I had no plans to make the marriage offer long before I made it.”
“But you were planning to take on that debt so you had an excuse to take me.”
Devin shook his head, but he wasn’t rushing to give me an alternative understanding of the situation.
“Devin, this isn’t enough. I…” The thing was, I was on the edge of declaring it enough.
Not forever—I would have to get what I needed from him sooner or later. But with him here right now, knowing how it had felt to be about as close to him as anyone could be and then to have that snatched away for reasons I could not quite understand, I wanted to be softer about it. Try to leave open some chance that we could continue exploring this thing that was happening between us.
Exploring my possible future with a man who smashed kneecaps and took women from their beds. But maybe I had to be done with trying to make sense of it for the moment. Apparently I had been born into this life, the same as he had. We both had to learn to live with that.
“If you won’t be honest about that situation right now…” I was not going to give him any reason to believe I would accept that, but we could wave it aside for a moment. “Can you at least tell me whether I’m going crazy?”
“Excuse me?” He studied me with the look of someone rather inclined to reply in the affirmative.
“I didn’t just imagine it all, did I? There was something between us that got us to this point. That made you go, oh, maybe I could marry her. That made you decide to…” I was blushing, and he’d looked away, though he was still squeezing my hand as hard as if I was supposed to be supporting him in childbirth. “I’m more of a pathetic idiot around you than I’ve ever been with anyone else, but I’m not being a complete idiot, am I.”
Not looking at me, he shook his head. “I shouldn’t have allowed things to get to where they did.”
“But you wanted it.”
“It doesn’t matter what I wanted,” said Devin, which wasn’t a denial.
I let the tears that were starting to fill my eyes do whatever they wanted. It wasn’t like he needed my body to tell him I was frustrated. “Devin… you need to pay attention to this. I have to know more about this situation. What made you target my parents out of all the losers in debt in this world. If I can’t get my head in a place where I’m okay with you lying to me about this in the first instance… I don’t know if I can keep going with the wedding plan. With anything.”
Devin scrambled for my other hand then, his eyes wide as usual when he turned to me, but blazing. “Julia, you need to make sure you sign the documents. I had them updated, there’s no condition that you stick around to organise a wedding. So you can get paid even—”
“I don’t care about that money you promised me, Devin.”
I felt like shock started radiating through my body as I said it. Of course I cared about that damn money. What was I going to do otherwise, if I walked away from him now? The whole point of that money was to give me that choice.
Well, maybe when it came to men like Devin, there was no choice once you’d taken the money. Maybe there was no way to accept that allowance from him and still keep my dignity. My sanity. My heart.
Of course I’d set Devin off. “Don’t be stupid, Julia. You’ve more than earned that money already as far as I’m concerned. The necessary point has been made. You—”
“Which takes me back to the question that keeps you here, Devin. Why w
as that point so necessary to you?”
His eyes on me were intense, but I could tell they were the only answer I was going to get that night. I chewed on my own lip, in part to stifle the ongoing urge to give up on it for now. To just set it aside and kiss him—there was something in the way he was staring at me that told me he would allow it, even welcome it—
And that was a point I should care about. He was just handing over the bare minimum confession so he could wriggle out of telling me what I really needed to hear now. Was this how it would always be, trying to be with him? One deflection traded off for the next?
I took my lip out from between my teeth. That suddenly seemed like such a little-kid way of dealing with the situation, and right now I needed to be a big girl.
“Okay, Devin, well… if you’re not ready to talk, I think you need to go now, please.”
“Is this your way of telling me you’re dropping out of the engagement?” Devin’s eyes went all over my face in a way that left me pretty unsure if he was hoping the answer was yes or no.
I took my hands from his. “If I’m going to end the engagement, I’ll tell you in clear language. This is just me needing a break from this for today. For as long as you can’t give me the answers I need and that matters to me.”
For a moment he didn’t move. I clutched onto a little hope that this would push him to extend himself, say some of the things he apparently really didn’t want to…
Finally, he got to his feet. “You have my number if you need to talk again.”
My jaw was just about dragging on the floor as I watched his very straight, suited back disappearing through the door. I would have liked to throw something after him, but I had a feeling I wasn’t going to get away with damaging the apartment more than I already had.
Maybe Angel would come after me for the cost of the repairs if I walked out on Devin. I had a feeling she’d see it as a case of good riddance, though. If she really wanted me gone, she was getting that pretty cheap.