An Unexpected Debt

by S. J. Pajonas

  “I have seen a lot today, Skylar,” he says, a note of weariness to his words. “You might as well be completely honest with me.”

  “You want complete honesty?”

  “That’s why I’m here,” he reminds me.

  “Because I am not this independent, kick-ass woman you told Marcelo you wanted.”

  He lifts his eyebrows.

  “Fair enough.” I clear my throat. “So, I had this cat, growing up. Whiskers. And I loved him to death. He would sleep on my bed and follow me around constantly. He was the only thing in my life that was truly mine because I wanted him to be there. He gave me the unconditional love that no one else did. But every time I left, the dads would have to take care of him. Like, the most basic of stuff.” I roll my eyes.

  “Feed him, change the litter?” Saif fills in.

  “Right. Nothing awful. Sometimes Ana would do it for me if she felt okay, but often, she did not. Jukia would fill in too if she was around, but… Anyway, when I was leaving for that last far-school trip, the only adult who could take me was Dominic. And he was pissed I was leaving again because it meant he’d have to help Jukia with school. So, he crated up Whiskers and brought him with us on the shuttle. When I asked why Whiskers was coming with us, Dom said it was time for Whiskers to live on a planet instead of a ship. I begged to keep him, but Dom was Dom. Any way he could find to hurt me, he would. Any way he could punish me was fair game. So, I lost my cat, not but a few hours before going to far-school for the last time.” I shrug. “I never saw him again.”

  Saif breathes slowly, his eyebrows pulled together. “Wait. Who takes someone’s, some sixteen-year-old girl’s, cat away from them?”

  I shrug again, but fiery rage bubbles up, replacing my overwhelming sadness.

  “I remember that Juan and Miguel had been arguing with him before he did it. My father was already gone by then, or he would have argued too. I could hear their raised voices from the other room. But no one ever stood up to Dom because why the fuck would they? The dads had an awesome thing going. They didn’t have to do shit because I did it all. They weren’t cruel like Dominic was, but they let it happen all the same.”

  Saif’s mouth is open in an O.

  My mouth is a runaway train now, and every word, every sentence, is searing, red hot.

  “You never saw me outside of far-school because I wasn’t allowed out. All I was allowed to do was to stay on the ship and be a good girl and take care of everyone because that was my job. I fucking suffered, and slaved, and was taken advantage of, over and over, for my entire fucking childhood. And then they convinced my mom that I was just some spoiled brat who never deserved the business to begin with. So why bother saving it for me?”

  My chest rises and falls with heavy breaths, and my scalp is burning up.

  “So, I fuck sexbots because they don’t take advantage, they don’t tell me what to do, and they don’t care that I’m fucked up beyond all belief about men. Men who take and take and take, and leave me with nothing. Nothing.”

  I stand up and chuck the last of my ice cream in the nearby garbage can. “Fuck this,” I spit out.

  “I fucking hate everything about my life. Everything,” I growl under my breath.

  I stalk away but then immediately stalk back.

  “Dominic wants me to pay back my tuition. He wants his life back? He can go space himself. I’m sick of his shit. Sick of my brothers whining to me for money. Sick of Ana’s relapses. Sick of Jukia’s laissez-faire attitude. Sick. Of. It. All.”

  My stalking turns to pacing the sidewalk next to Saif, over and over, until my heated anger runs out. When I finally stop, I’m drained. So tired I could fall over dead.

  Saif stands up, gently takes my face in his hands, and leans down to kiss me.

  I almost pull away, but instead, the moment freezes, and time grinds to a halt.

  In general, I don’t kiss. I don’t let the sexbots kiss me, and when I’ve slept with other men, I haven’t let them kiss me either. But I kissed Kalvin because I felt… something for him. And this is Saif. I’ve wanted to kiss him for years.

  Maybe I can start kissing again.

  His lips meet mine, and I melt into him. I draw a deep breath through my nose and let him take the lead. His lips are practiced and strong as he pulls me close and tilts my head to the side. I open my mouth to him and let his kiss claim me. My knees weaken, and the contact with him reignites a different heat this time. Desire and need flow down my body, spreading out, replacing the anger with lust and longing. He nips my lower lip before pulling away, and I gasp for air.

  Our breathing is labored and out of sync, but slowly, they meet across the divide.

  He rests his forehead against mine. “There,” he whispers. “I hope that was something, not nothing.”

  He takes my face in his hands again and pulls away to look at me. “You okay?”

  I nod, even though I can barely stand.

  “Better now?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I am,” I say. “Thanks.”

  “Good.” He turns and pulls me to his side by my waist. “We’ll get an autocab, and I’m going to take you to your hotel, and then I’m going back to my place.” He leans over and kisses my temple. “And we’ll pick this up again soon. I promise.”

  As we walk towards the main street, I realize I believe him. When Saif makes a promise, he keeps it.

  17

  Ice cream, funnily enough, reminds me of Bridge.

  I was fourteen years old, and it was the last year my father was a regular member of the Mikasa crew. By this time, he was weary of always being on the go, and he was spending more and more weeks on Ossun. Mom was working around the clock, and only Miguel saw her regularly because he handled the business. My older brothers, Oliver and Raphael, were still on the ship occasionally, but they were attending secondary school on Ossun. And, of course, I was holding down the fort for everyone else.

  As per usual.

  I was in bed studying when my door chimed.

  “Come in,” I said, raising my voice. My father appeared in the doorway.

  “Hey, Bug.”

  I didn’t lift my head from the book I was reading on my datapad. Studying was all I ever did outside of the caretaking, cleaning, and everything else.

  “Are you busy?” he asked.

  “Kinda.” I touched my finger to the screen to mark my place and looked up. That was around the time I was studying inorganic chemistry, balancing equations, and understanding the difference between molarity and molality. “What do you need?”

  I asked this question at least a hundred times per day. Whatever they needed, I was expected to get it, find it, make it, conjure it out of thin air.

  “Well…” Dad fidgeted. He wrung his hands until they were white. It was his way of showing me he felt terrible for asking anything of me when he knew I was knee-deep in everyone else’s shit. “I have a slight problem. Miguel just bowed out of our Bridge match tonight, and I’m on the line for six hundred credits.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Six hundred credits? How did it get this bad?”

  The dads played Bridge for money because Mom was notoriously stingy with the discretionary funds. If the dads wanted toys, good booze, or tickets to the New Angeles Fires or Concord City FC football matches, then they had to find other ways to get the credits. Mostly, they took it out of each other’s wallets. Now, there’s nothing wrong with some healthy competition and good-natured card games. I played a lot of cards at that age and still do. But, once again, Dominic had taken the games too far, and if Dad was going to get anything back, he would have to play to win.

  Dad shrugged. “I kept making poor decisions in the last game. I lost our contracts several times. Terrible bidding strategies.”

  This shouldn’t make any sense to most fourteen-year-olds. What fourteen-year-old learns Bridge? But I had learned quite a lot sitting in the same room with them all my life. Watching games when I was supposed to be studying or taking care of my b
rothers and sisters.

  “You always bid too aggressively,” I said, and he blinked a few times.

  “I didn’t think you knew how to play,” he replied, a hand on his hip.

  “I know enough.” I turned my head back to my datapad, but Dad cleared his throat. I sighed and shut it off. “What?”

  “I need you to play with me tonight as my partner. Maybe we’ll lose, but I can’t let the game go to forfeit.”

  “Why can’t you just wait until Miguel can play?” I asked, annoyed that I had to bail someone out again.

  “Because it’s Dom, and he insists on sticking to the rules we set years ago. Come on,” he pleaded. “Please?”

  I sighed in that dramatic fourteen-year-old way. “Fine. But you owe me.”

  “Thanks, Skylar,” he said, smiling. “Eight o’clock tonight. After dinner.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” I shooed him from my room and fell back on the bed once the door was closed.

  Another night wasted on something stupid when I could be reading or relaxing. And now I really had to learn to play Bridge, not just guess at it like I had been doing for the last few years. I called up a Bridge tutorial on the duonet and sighed as I flipped through it. There were twelve lessons with practice hands for each. It was already one in the afternoon, and I would still need to finish studying and make dinner for everyone. Could I learn Bridge in less than seven hours with everything else left to do?

  Turns out I could, and I still had time to spare to make dinner. Bridge was easy enough, I supposed. Take as many tricks as possible, make the contracts, and work with my partner to keep the other team from taking tricks. I memorized the basic strategies and a few of the more advanced tips, then I played every practice hand at least twice until I got them all correct. I also knew Dominic and Juan well enough to know when they were lying. That would come in handy.

  Everything was going well until dinner.

  Ana was at the end of a rough day. She was studying for entrance exams at a specialty secondary school back when she thought she would be a teacher someday, and she couldn’t get the course material right in her head. She was hard on herself and hadn’t eaten for two days. I saw the warning signs, but I told myself she would snap out of it. People had fasted longer for religious reasons. No big deal.

  I was a stupid teenager. So damned stupid.

  Throughout dinner, Juan had tried to get Ana to eat, and I kept shooting him glares that could kill, hoping he would stop and take the spotlight off of her. If he had left her alone, she would’ve been fine, but his needling made things worse because then Dominic joined in. This was a year before Nolan was born, and I still didn’t believe that I was taking care of everyone to the extent that parents did. I was in denial. But not for much longer.

  “Come on. Just have a bite. One noodle,” Dominic said, picking up a pan-fried noodle with his chopsticks and slurping it up.

  “Leave her alone. She’ll eat if she wants to,” I said. Jukia tapped my foot under the table. She hated it when I fought with her father.

  “You stay out of this,” he said, poking his finger at me across the table. He turned to Ana and screamed, “Eat!”

  We all jumped. Ana closed her eyes like she’d been slapped. Juan knocked over his glass of water, and Dominic jumped up from the table.

  “Now look what’s happened.” He backed away from the table as water spilled over and onto the floor where he was just sitting. He pointed at Ana. “Clean it up.”

  I set my chopsticks down and stood up. “I’ll clean it. Ana, why don’t you go to your room for a bit?”

  “No,” Dominic said. “She’s going to sit and eat until her bowl is empty.”

  Ana sat utterly still, so stiff that I wondered if she was having a seizure. She became non-verbal during arguments, unable to do anything but nod or shake her head. She was scared shitless of Dominic at all times. Of course, he only ever acted like this when Mom wasn’t around. I used to wish I was good enough with computers to hack our security system and send Mom the videos on the sly. But then, I wasn’t sure who she would side with.

  “Go,” I said to Ana as I lifted her from her chair and ushered her to the door.

  I grabbed a towel from the kitchen and returned to a quiet dining room. Dominic glowered over Juan and Miguel. My father stood back from the table, watching the hallway Ana had disappeared down. My father was good with Ana, and he often calmed her when she was on the verge of a panic attack. But tonight, he didn’t want to anger Dom any further.

  Dom hovered over the puddle of water on the floor. I eyed him. “Excuse me,” I said, my tone of voice annoyed. He hated that.

  He stepped aside a few centimeters, and I had to squat down under his glare to clean up the floor. When I stood up to handle the table, too, Dom grabbed my arm, his grip firm and painful.

  “Listen here,” he started.

  I saw red. I dropped the towel, twisted, and slipped my arm from his grip, swiping down with my right hand and hitting his wrist with a swift chop.

  He cried out and stepped back, and I fell into a ready position, my fists up. I had learned self defense in far-school and kicked the butts of everyone else in the class.

  “Don’t touch me,” I said, raising my voice. I wish I could have screamed loud enough for my mother to hear me from a ship away. “If you ever, ever, lay your hands on me again, I will kill you.”

  I was deathly serious, and Dominic knew it. His eyes widened, and he stepped back one pace. He raised his hands, palms out, and stepped back again. He wasn’t afraid, so much as unable to try again with everyone watching. He turned on his heel and stalked off.

  “I’ll see you for Bridge in twenty minutes!” he called over his shoulder.

  I swore and picked the towel up, determined to mop up the mess. Jukia, though, took the towel from my hand gently and finished up for me. “You should finish your dinner,” she said. “I’m sure you want to eat before cards.”

  I glared at my father. “Why don’t you ever stick up for Ana?”

  He looked chastened but shrugged his shoulders. “Sometimes Dominic’s temper is too hot. I don’t want to cross him.”

  “Me neither,” Juan said.

  We all knew Dom had had a rough childhood. His own father beat him, and his mother was powerless to stop it.

  The sins of the father…

  I wouldn’t let my own father’s lack of action become my downfall.

  No. I was going to win. Win at life.

  Win at Bridge.

  I sat down at that table and won every trick I set out to win. I played every single hand to win, even when the cards were against me. I didn’t smile while I demolished them. I didn’t gloat. I didn’t laugh. I barely blinked. After a while, Dad let me take the lead, and we destroyed Dominic and Juan.

  Dom was quiet, his chest rising and falling in measured breaths, as Dad collected his winnings.

  Dom stood up from the table and left to cross the hall to the kitchen. I thought he was going to get a drink, but instead, he grabbed one of our grocery bags and snapped it open. He jerked the fridge door open and took out all the little treats I had purchased the last time we were in port. Fresh cherries, tubs of yogurt, chocolate bars — they all went into the bag. He slammed the door shut, and I thought he was done, but no. He was far from done. He then emptied the cupboards of the only things Ana ate — crackers, cheese snacks, dehydrated fruits. He was ruthless. He searched and found everything, pushing aside boring snacks for the good ones we hid in the back. The bag began to bulge and overflow.

  “What the hell?” Juan said under his breath.

  I closed my eyes and hoped he was done.

  Then he opened the freezer and took out my favorite ice cream, double chocolate fudge brownie from the artisanal place in Sakata City I loved. I lunged forward to stop him, but Dad caught my arm.

  We watched Dom load up the bags, take them down the hall to the airlock, open the airlock, drop them in the hold, close the door, and send everythin
g we loved to eat into outer space. He nodded at the door, dusted off his hands, and left to go to his room without saying a word to anyone.

  That was the last time I purchased ice cream for myself while I lived on the Mikasa. I continued to purchase snacks for my sisters, and then for my younger brothers when they came into the world. But I kept them locked away in my room, where I knew Dom would never go.

  But at least I won at Bridge.

  18

  I leave the hotel room in the morning before Marcelo can come and grill me about my evening with Saif. I don’t know what to tell Marcelo. Saif left me here at the door to my hotel room with a kiss on the cheek. I wouldn’t blame him one bit if he returned to his place, slept on everything that happened, and decided I was too much work. No matter how long he had dreamed about dating me. Dreams are often not reality, and my problems are way too real for most men.

  Instead of spending the money on an autocab, I grab a coffee and take the bus across town to the spaceport where the Amagi is docked. I sit and stare out the window; I’m one of the few that do. Everyone else is reading from a datapad or staring straight ahead at whatever they see on their ocular implant. I’m afraid to access my home screen or inbox. I’m sure the gossip sites have dirt on me today — stories about Saif and me, rumors about Takemo and me at odds. Most of them will be correct, and I should face them head-on, but I don’t want to. Vivian used to put her head in the sand when it came to the things people said about her on the duonet, and I didn’t agree with that. I should live up to my own standards.

  I glance at the arrival board, and we won’t be at the spaceport for another ten minutes, so I finish my coffee and call up my inbox. A vidmessage sits at the top of my queue from Dominic Batista. The only good thing my mother ever did was not marry Dominic or Juan. She was done with the legal rigamarole by that time and decided marriage was no longer worth it. They signed ten-year contracts and renewed them instead.

  The subject reads, “Your mother.” My breathing deepens as I imagine what he has to say to me. He knows with a subject like that, I’ll read it. Because despite everything, I don’t want anything bad to happen to my mom. He also knows I have always looked up to her. Yes, she’s hauling trash, and I’m sad about it. But she’ll live. And maybe this will make her think twice before she passes me over again.