Page 35 of Saint
She got this faraway look on her face, then she whispered, “Can’t recall a time.”
I nodded, “Well, that shit is going to change. Promise you that.” I told her as I buttered up my potato.
Then I asked, “So, what do you want to know about me?”
“How old are you?” she asked.
I smirked, “Twenty-three.”
Then I watched as her mouth fell open, “There’s no way, you’re twenty-three.”
I smirked again, leaned forward, pulled out my wallet, and then handed her my license, “Promise you. One thing I can tell you about me is I’ll never lie to you.”
She took my license and got that soft smile on her face, one that I had put there.
Would it be appropriate to beat my fists on my chest right now? Askin’ for a friend.
She shook her head as she handed it back to me.
“You?” I asked.
She smiled, “Twenty-two.”
I did the math then, “Had Soraya at sixteen. You were a baby.”
She nodded, “Yeah. But to tell you the truth, there is nothing I would have changed. I got Soraya out of the deal, and we are here now.”
I liked that, but I was curious.
Hell, I had been curious.
I asked, “What about her father?”
She growled, “Don’t ever call him that. Just refer to him as a rat bastard. That’s what I call him.”
I nodded, “Okay. Got it. Noted.”
Then I hesitantly asked, “How does Soraya feel about him?”
She sighed, placed her fork down, tagged her beer, and took a sip.
Once she sat it down, she said, “Tell you the truth, she hasn’t asked about him. And I haven’t brought him up.”
“Wanna tell me what happened?” I asked her, as I, too, set my fork down, then went with my gut again, and reached over the table and tagged her hand.
She looked down at where our hands were connected and said, “I was in high school. The bell had just rung, ending the day. I headed home and found my deadbeat dad had friends over. The kind of friends I didn’t want to be around.”
“So, I headed to the library because I had a report I had to work on, and when I walked in, I saw him. He looked debonair, you know. Brown hair, blue eyes, nice clothes, nice shoes.” She paused as she shook her head.
“I thought that any man who went to the library was someone who wanted to be knowledgeable. You know?”
I nodded cause I got that.
“Anyway, I later found out that he was there waiting to meet a girl he had met online. She was fourteen. I didn’t find that out until I was twenty, and the statute of limitations for that sort of thing had expired. He had waited to tell me when he wanted to cut me down another peg. Something he loved to do.”
I growled at that, then she said, “I’ll tell you how he did that. But not tonight. Anyway, we were together from that moment onward. I thought I had gotten lucky. A girl from the trailer park. Lands an older man, one who has a stable job. I never had to worry about not having heat. I never had to worry about running water or power. I never had to worry about where my next meal came from. Even though he had something bad to say about any type of calorie, I put in my body.”
I bit back the growl I wanted to unleash, and I bit back the urge to stand up and find something to pummel with my fists. Any man who criticized a woman about what she ate wasn’t a man at all if you wanted my opinion on the matter.
