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“Impossible. You are a goddess,” he insists, and I allow him to lie to me.
I want his sweetness. I crave the kindness of a man who could just as easily be cruel and uncaring. He’s so firm and stoic that being able to see him in this vulnerable state feels like a blessing, something nobody but me will ever get to witness.
It’s beautiful.
We lay together for a while, but sleep doesn’t come easily this early in the evening, and I find myself wanting to ask him a million questions about his past. I feel like I should know the man that I’ve married, even if I’m a little afraid I’ll find out something I don’t like.
Still, I can’t just lay here in silence. He might be comfortable with it, but I’m used to something happening at all times. I’m going crazy without my phone.
“Tell me about yourself,” I say, keeping the question wide open in the hope that he’ll take charge and decide what to talk about. I’m not good at starting conversations, only finishing them.
“What do you want to know?” he asks.
“Anything.”
He looks at the ceiling, then at me, then the ceiling again. “Well, maybe you’d like to know how I became who I am. That might bring a bit of clarity.”
“That would be nice,” I reply. “Tell me about your childhood.”
He laughs through his nose. “Well, it wasn’t much of a childhood, I’ll admit. I was running around, selling matches on the street corners half the time. The other half I was trying to buy cigarettes off older kids. My sister would rat me out to my dad, and he’d beat me for smoking. He never cared when I got older, though.”
“Sounds rough. Did you even go to school?”
“No,” he admits. “I never did. Mostly, I just learned to read and write at home, and then when I got older, I read bigger books and sort of learned through experience. I wouldn’t be able to tell you any sort of math equation or anything like that, but I can handle money and I think that’s much more important.”
I laugh. “God, you wouldn’t be able to pull an equation out of me if my life depended on it. I was a total fuck-up in school. My father was always so angry about it, but he gave up around high school. Never graduated. Never cared enough to.”
“You’re worse than me,” he says, grinning. “At least I wanted to learn, but I wasn’t allowed to go to school. My dad said it was better to make money than waste my life sitting in a classroom.”
“Was he wrong? You’re rich, aren’t you?” I ask, genuinely wondering if his dad was secretly brilliant. It sounds horrible, but then again, so does getting your brain scrambled by a bunch of stuffy teachers for twelve years.
“Rich and a little fucked up in the head,” Danya says, looking at me apologetically. “So, you’re going to have to deal with that. I hope you’re ready.”
“Probably not,” I admit with a laugh.
“Life comes at you anyway.”
“True.”
“But what about you?” he asks, turning to face me more. “I want to know what kind of life you had before you came here. It seems that we’ve come from very different backgrounds, even if we’ve both found ourselves around wealth.”
I think about it for a moment, not wanting to sound spoiled, but I can’t think of a way not to. Truthfully, Iwasspoiled, but that was the experience of everyone else I grew up with, and it’s all I know.
At the time, it seemed normal. I lived in a bubble, and I liked it that way.
“Well, I don’t think my life is all that interesting. It would probably seem silly to you, I’m sure,” I say, feeling shy about telling him what I’ve been up to all these years.
“Tell me anyway. I want to know,” he says, his voice deep and calming. There’s no judgment in his voice, and I hope there won’t be after I explain my upbringing.
“I was going to a private school for a while, until I flunked out. You know, some people will get their kids good grades by buying them, but my father refused to do it. He just let me fail. I probably deserved it, but I was still a bit pissed off at him because it meant I was disconnected from my peers when they moved on and went to universities. The only people left were the losers, and I dated a lot of them.”
“And then you married the biggest loser of them all,” he says.
“Not a chance,” I reply, shaking my head. “Those guys were absolute morons. I’m actually embarrassed that I was with any of them, but at least I never fucked them. I saved myself because I knew that one day, I’d find the right man.”
“And am I the right man for you?” he asks, looking into my eyes for confirmation.
I don’t know if he is, but I don’t want to tell him that. I married him, so I guess it doesn’t matter anymore.
