Page 5 of Marrying the Pakhan

The sound eventually fades, because I’m doing actual math on a napkin. The kind where marriage as a legal fact solves the exact sentence sitting on my legal pad.

Household income: insufficient stops mattering if there’s a second income. Marital status: single stops mattering if it isn’t true anymore.

And there’s the trust, sitting untouched since my grandparents died, the one thing from that side of my life I’ve refused to go near out of pure stubbornness.

I’ve never needed it badly enough to swallow my pride and accept the terms attached to it. A marriage clause, of all things, because apparently even from the grave they didn’t trust me to manage money without a husband standing next to me.

I hated the condition enough to leave it alone for years.

Tonight, for the first time, the condition looks less like an insult and more like a key that’s been sitting in my kitchen drawer the entire time.

By the time I’ve written it out twice, the idea no longer sounds like Renata’s joke. It’s started sounding like the only line on that page I actually know how to fix, and the only door I have left that opens without anyone’s permission but my own.

I call Marisol. She picks up on the second ring, already half asleep from the sound of it.

“Hey, I know it’s last minute,” I say. “Any chance you can come sit tonight? Just a couple hours.”

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah. I just need to run out for a bit.”

She doesn’t ask any more questions. “Give me fifteen minutes.”

She’s true to her word. By the time she’s settled on the couch with her phone and a blanket, I’ve already got my coat on.

I check on Ginger one last time before I leave. She’s asleep, one arm thrown over the edge of the bed, completely unaware that her aunt is about to do something reckless a few miles away.

I tell myself I’m just going to look. I can get a sense of the place, and see if this is even a real option before I make a fool of myself.

The drive over doesn’t feel real. Streetlights blur past, the radio’s off, and somewhere around the third turn I stop pretending I’m undecided.

I pull into the lot on Ashford and see the sign. Gold letters lit up against brick, glowing steady over a line of people waiting to get in.

I sit in the car for four full minutes with the engine off, watching them go in, telling myself I can still turn around and tell Marisol it was nothing.

But… I don’t turn around.

Inside, the noise hits me before anything else does. Bass heavy enough to feel in my teeth. It takes my eyes a second to adjust from the parking lot lights to whatever color this is, dark purple, maybe, or blue trying to be purple.

There’s a stage running the length of the far wall, three poles, dancers working all of them, men and women both. They move like they’ve done this so many nights that the moves stopped being a performance a long time ago and became muscle memory.

A woman in silver struts the runway. Two men in barely-there black work the pole nearest the bar, and one of them locks eyes with a table of women who scream like it’s a concert.

I stand near the entrance longer than I mean to, scanning. Now that I’m here, I have no idea how you’re supposed to do this. I mean, how do you walk up to a stranger and ask him to marry you for money without either of you laughing in the other’s face?

I haven’t quite worked that out before I see him.

The guy is near the far end of the bar, one hand braced flat against the wood, head down. His chest rises fast, uneven, and there’s a sheen of sweat along his collarbone where his shirt hangs open, buttons undone almost to his waist.

He tips a water bottle back and drains half of it in one go, throat working. When he finally straightens, his eyes drag slowly across the room, like he’s still catching up to himself.

I didn’t see him up on stage. There have to be twenty men working this floor tonight between the poles and the runway, and I only walked in a few minutes ago. But he’s breathing like he just finished, and the water and the sweat do the rest of the math for me.

He’s older than the others I’ve noticed. Silver hair, damp at the temples. Lines at the corners of his eyes that the twenty-year-olds on the runway don’t have yet. If anything, that makes him look better, not worse. Like he’s actually lived in the body he’s standing in instead of just showing it off.

He’s broader, too, through the chest and shoulders, built like whatever he does up there takes real strength, not just a routine.

Good, I think. Him.