Page 30 of A Life Imagined
Rayan looked down at the bowl in his hands, suddenly serious.“Why did your import license get revoked?”
“It’s an empty threat.Nothing to take seriously.”
Rayan frowned.“Who’s sending you a warning, Mathias?”
Mathias seemed to consider his answer.“The Albanians.They’ve taken an interest in the business.”
“As in, the Albanian mafia?”
“Like attracts like.”
“Should I be concerned?”
“Do I look concerned?”
“No, but I’ve seen you smile staring down the barrel of a gun.”
Mathias took another pull on his cigarette.“It’s not working, by the way.There are simpler ways to distract me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What you said the other night.”
Rayan felt a hot spike of discomfort.“I haven’t had thoughts like that in a long time.Not since you.”He swallowed, the bowl warm in his hands.“I don’t do well without someone to live for,” he said, the truth of it almost painful.“It was easy to make you that person.Even without you knowing it.”
Mathias stared at him, the cigarette perched between his fingers.“You know…” he said after a moment.“It was a point of pride, how little people meant to me.Then you had to get under my skin.”He leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, not breaking his gaze.“Who exactly do you need to redeem yourself to?”
Rayan dropped his head.He thought of his mother’s hopes for him, forever memorialized in her inscription.Noble and kind.Someone to be proud of.A reminder of everything he wasn’t.
“She would have hated what I am.”
“And what’s that?Alive?”Mathias countered.“Believe me, that’s an accomplishment in itself.And you’re going to agonize over how you did it—that in the glut of options you were given, you didn’t pick a cleaner way to survive?She’d take the end over the means—I guarantee it.”
Rayan’s eyes snapped back to Mathias, his mouth lurching.“You don’t…?”
“I don’t what?”
“Regret anything?”
When Mathias replied, his voice was hard.“I don’t regret a fucking thing.This is how life works—you get dealt a hand, and then you make your move.You don’t spend the rest of the game wondering if you should’ve made a different one.”He crushed his cigarette in the ashtray on the coffee table, and a single column of smoke rose from his fingertips.“Stop playing hooky, Rayan.There’s nothing wrong with your humanitarian crusade, but considering it a form of penance is a waste of head space.”
“I needed a way make sense of things,” Rayan said, unable to articulate the fear that had gripped him after leaving the family and looking out at the yawning expanse of life ahead.Even now, part of him still felt unworthy of his freedom.
“You don’t have to make sense of it.Not every event needs to be assigned some greater meaning.You can either remain inactive or act.Forward momentum—live by that.”
While he’d done so far less kindly when Rayan was a grunt, Mathias had always managed to bring the salient facts of a difficult situation into clear definition.
“So, what are you sitting around here for?”Mathias got to his feet.“Think of all the needy people you could be wasting your time helping.”
He headed for the door but stopped as he rounded the back of the sofa.Mathias reached out and cupped Rayan’s chin.He bent to kiss him, his lips warm and gentle.
Rayan closed his eyes, words deserting him, hoping only to communicate the depth of his gratitude in the sweetness of the kiss he returned.
Rayan arrived at the service office later that afternoon to find a relieved Asmarina sorting through files in the back room.
“There you are, Rayan.”She wrapped him in a tight hug.“We were worried when you stopped returning our calls.”
Rayan hadn’t communicated much about his absence.He’d simply left a message at the center to say he wasn’t coming in.
