The jacket is buttoned in the front. His shoulders are broad and his hands are back in his pockets.
The man I met at the beach, the surfer, and the man who came to my door last night seemed to have vanished completely. But then he runs his fingers along his jaw just like he did last night and I see a glimpse of him.
When a strand of hair that has been slicked back breaks free and falls into his eyes, I see another.
“I wanted to thank you again for accepting my gift,” he begins.
His words are confident, strong, sharp.
“Of course, I wanted to thank you for being so generous. I mean, that’s a lot of money.”
“Not for me,” he says without a trace of hesitation in his voice. “I wanted you to have it.”
I give him a slight nod.
“Now, let us discuss what you can do to repay your debt,” he says.
18
When he asks me…
I take a step away from him. The floorboard creaks under my left foot. The chirping of insects gets louder along with the heartbeat pounding near my temples.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
My whole body starts to tremble so I lean back on the railing for support.
“I did you a favor and now I would like you to do something for me,” he says. His eyes meet mine. Suddenly, there’s a coldness in them. A darkness even, one that I have never seen before.
Of course. How could I be so stupid?
No one does anything for anyone without wanting anything in return.
He didn’t just find me sitting next to a gas station and give me a buck out of his pocket. He sought me out. He did research on exactly how much I needed.
“I thought you said that the check was a gift,” I remind him.
“It is.” Nicholas’ eyes narrow, looking into the distance over the ink-black water.
I pull my eyes away from his and look out into the abyss before us. The moon illuminates the crescents of the waves with its cool light, but only a little bit.
Suddenly, I see a fin. One followed by another. The dolphins dive in and out of the water making a high-pitched giddy sound that makes me smile.
“I’ve never seen dolphins before,” I admit.
“You should come out here to this spot in the mornings. You’ll see dolphins, whales, birds…” he says, letting his words trail off at the end.
When he turns his body toward mine, I know that the sightseeing portion of the evening is over.
“If something is a gift then it doesn’t have any strings attached,” I say.
“You don’t even know what I am going to ask you to do,” he challenges.
His tie gets bunched up a bit, so he unbuttons the two buttons of his jacket and straightens it.
“I don’t want to even hear about it if it’s something illegal,” I say.
“It’s not.”
I clench my jaw. I feel my reasons for saying no starting to disappear.
“Why did you send me this money? How did you even know that I needed it? Did you hire a private investigator to study me?”
“Which one of those questions do you want answered first?” he asks smugly. I cross my arms around my chest and wait.
“You’d be amazed what you can find out about someone with a good private investigator, but I didn’t need that. All I had to do was run your credit score. They showed all of your debt. A lot debt.”
I catch myself slouching, so I straighten my back out in defiance.
“Yes, I know that I had a lot of debt. I wanted to get a good education. So what?” I ask.
“You didn’t have to accept my gift,” he says, leaning back on the railing.
He has me there.
Now, I wish I hadn’t.
I’m about to say something else, but he puts up his arm to stop me.
“Okay, do you want to hear what I have to say or do you want to argue with me?” he asks.
I give him a brief nod.
“I paid off your debt, every last penny,” he starts. “Now, I want you to do something for me.”
I wait.
“I want you to spend 365 days and nights with me,” he says slowly and deliberately. "Live with me. Go everywhere I go. Business trips. Dinners with clients. You will act charming and happy to be there. The people I deal with will have to like you. A lot. Some will have to want you.”
I hear all of the words that he says but my mind focuses on only one of them: nights.
“What do you mean by I have to spend 365 nights with you?” I ask.
“Exactly that.”
“I won’t have sex with you,” I say categorically.
“You don’t have to,” Nicholas says, his eyes challenging mine. “But I promise you one thing. You will be begging me to do it before our time is up.”
The words send shivers through my body, the good kind.
My tongue touches the roof of my mouth and it takes actual effort to not let it lick my lips.
I hate to admit it, but one of the reasons I even came here tonight is because of how incredibly sexy I find him.
If he were a lot older or not so attractive, I’d probably find this proposal absurd and degrading.
But with him, I feel this chemical pull toward him.
“I don’t understand why you need me to do this,” I say after a moment. “I mean, couldn’t you hire someone to be your girlfriend instead?”
“Isn’t that exactly what I’m doing?” He tosses his hair out of his eyes, flashing a crooked smile.
“But why me?”
I ask. “Why fly a total stranger across six thousand miles to ask her to do this?”
He opens his mouth just a little bit, pressing his tongue on his lower lip. That’s when it occurs to me. We are not strangers at all. He has to know me.
“How do you know me?” I ask.
Now, it’s his turn to look down at the floor. Now, it’s his turn to hesitate.
“You have to tell me or I won’t even entertain this offer,” I threaten even though I don’t think that I’m really in the position to not consider it.
Nicholas looks up at me.
His irises grow big and dark.
He straightens his broad shoulders and folds one of his hands into a fist.
I don’t know how but I sense that I’m in no danger from being with him, he’s just trying to keep the anger building up in him at bay.
“You owe me a debt, Olive,” he says slowly. “I don’t have to explain anything to you beyond stating the terms of how you can repay it.”
“I know,” I concede. “I just want to know why me.”
A moment passes without him saying a word. Then another. The first feels like a decade while the second feels like a century.
“If I tell you, you have to promise to not tell anyone about this,” Nicholas finally says. “Not Sydney, not anyone.”
I think about it and then say, “I promise.”
19
When I remember…
There’s a bench that goes around the perimeter of the gazebo and Nicholas takes a seat. He points to a place next to him and I sit down as well.
“When we used to know each other, my name was Nicky Reed,” he says. “That’s my biological father’s last name.”
I search my memory for anyone with that last name, but nothing comes to mind.
“Do you remember a girl named Ashley Price?” he asks.
Thin, scrawny, with long red hair that she used to wear in braids like Laura Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie. The kids in my middle school used to tease her mercilessly for her crooked teeth and her freckled face.
I stood up for her when I could, but if you take someone’s side too much in middle school the powers that rule, the popular seventh grade girls, can quickly turn against you as well. I devised another plan: we would pretend that we had work to do at the library and hide out there during lunch. Technically, eating wasn’t allowed in the library but we could eat our sandwiches if we wer
e really quiet.
“Ashley moved away when we were fifteen in the middle of the year,” I say. “We were really close but she never told me that she was leaving. I was shocked when I heard that from one of the teachers.”
“Our mom made her go live with our distant cousins in Mississippi because she got pregnant,” Nicholas says.
Something that sounds like a helicopter taking off makes my head pound. My thoughts ping-pong back and forth between two revelations. One is that my childhood friend, Ashley, is related to this man standing before me. Two, Ashley got pregnant. I’m not sure which one to start asking about first, but my mouth has a mind of its own.
“We knew everything about each other,” I say. “Ashley wasn’t dating anyone. I would be the first person to know if she had a boyfriend. She wasn’t even into boys. She thought she liked this girl in our math class.”
I remember the exact moment when Ashley told me about having a crush on Christy. Her face turned two shades paler than usual and her whole body was shaking. She cracked her knuckles over and over again and said that she had to tell me something but she was afraid of losing me as a friend. I had no idea what she could tell me but I promised to be there for her no matter what. And I was.
“You only knew what Ashley wanted you to know,” Nicholas says. “Our mother’s husband, our stepfather, had been molesting her for months. And then he raped her. She was terrified of telling our mom because she knew she would blame her for seducing him.”
My mouth drops open. Why didn’t she tell me? She could’ve come to live with me. I could’ve protected her.
As if he can read my mind, Nicholas answers, “She didn’t tell anyone until…later. She found out she was pregnant and she was terrified of both our stepfather and our mother. I tried to be there for her, but I spent most of my youth on the streets trying to get myself out of that house. Plus, she kept everything in this vault around her. She never told me anything until…”
The words are difficult for him to say.
I wait for him to gather his strength to continue. But he doesn’t. Instead, he just looks away into the distance.
“What happened?” I whisper under my breath.
“Mom kicked her out of the house and sent her to Mississippi to live with not very nice people. She wanted to get an abortion, but she didn’t know anyone there, didn’t have a car, or money. She was all alone and scared to death.”
“Why didn’t she reach out to me?” I ask, tears are starting to build up in the back of my eyes. I don’t know what happened yet but I can sense that it was something terrible.
“If I had known any of this before…I would have helped her. She was my sister but she kept it all from me. I didn’t even know about the pregnancy. Mom just said that she was going to Mississippi to visit Mom’s cousins,” he says. “I should’ve asked why. I should’ve demanded some answers, but I was never really home. I hung around a bad group of guys and did anything I could to survive.”
I nod.
“But it’s no excuse. And not a day goes by that I don’t think about…”
There is something he is not saying. It’s the reason why I haven’t heard from Ashley in all of these years. The lump in the back of my throat gets bigger.
I slide a few inches closer to him and take his hand in mine. I don’t know if I’m doing it to comfort him or to comfort myself.
“Tell me,” I say, giving him a squeeze.
Nicholas looks down at the floor.
His hair falls over his eyes.
Without letting my hand go, he says, “Ashley killed herself two days after she arrived in Mississippi. She hung herself in a closet while everyone else was watching TV in the living room of that trailer.”
The ground starts to shift under my feet. I focus my eyes, but they get cloudy with tears.
“What do you mean?” I whisper even though he couldn’t be any clearer.
“She sent me a long email explaining everything that had happened. Everything that she never told me,” Nicholas says, looking up at me. “Our stepfather coming into her room at night when she was eleven. Mom getting drunk and then waking her up in the middle of the night and punching her to make herself feel better. The rape. The pregnancy. Mom finding out and calling her a slut for sleeping with her husband. Mom calling her a murderer for not wanting to keep her baby. Mom sending her away to live with strangers. The cousin’s husband making sexual jokes about her body after her being there for less than an hour. Being horrified of being forced to give birth.”
“Oh my God,” I say under my breath, covering my mouth with my hand.
“Her email was like a long confession of everything that she had been keeping bottled up. At the end she wrote, I hope this explains why I’m going to do this. And then she hung herself.”
I shake my head in disbelief.
“I was partying that night,” Nicholas says. “I was drunk and high like I was every night back then, trying to deal with my own shitty upbringing in the only way I knew how. So, I didn’t find out what she’d done until the next day. But by then, it was too late.”
20
When I try to forget…
Nicholas and I sit there for some time, each trying to process our own grief. I bury my head in my hands and try to keep my tears at bay but they just keep coming. After a few moments, I give up trying. Ashley was my best friend and one day she just stopped going to school. I called her phone, I called her house, I talked to her mom. Her mom said that she thought I knew because they’d all moved away, but that was a lie. Whenever we spent time together, we either went out to a local fast food restaurant, the library or, on occasion, to my house. I was always embarrassed to invite her to my place, but she said that there was no way we could go to hers.
After her mom told me that they had moved away, I should’ve gone to her house. But I didn’t even know where she lived.
Still, I should’ve tried to look her up.
I should’ve done some research.
Someone must have known something.
But I didn’t.
I was devastated and I missed her and I was a kid.
The thing about going through shit is that it makes you a very self-centered person. We were friends but we never really confided in each other the way we should have.
I could’ve been there for her, had she just opened up to me a little bit. And given what she had been through, I now know that she could’ve been there for me as well.
Instead, we just orbited each other.
Never really letting one another in.
“What happened after that?” I ask, my tears still wet on my cheeks.
“My mother said she got what she deserved,” Nicholas says, moving his jaw around from one side to another. “She refused to pay for her body to be transported back to Massachusetts. She said that our family didn’t believe in suicide.”
His words ring in my ears.
Didn’t believe in suicide?
What is there to believe in? It happens. People do it all the time.
Is it an option for some people? Unfortunately, yes.
Could it have been prevented had Ashley had a different mother? A different stepfather? A better best friend. Most definitely.
“How do you know me?” I ask Nicholas.
“We met once, in passing. I gave you two a ride back from school,” he says.
That doesn’t seem like enough of a reason to do any of this. I wait for more.
“She wrote about you in my email,” he says. “She told me not to blame myself for anything that she did. She said that there was nothing I could do to help her, but if I still wanted to help someone, I should help you.”
My heart begins to pound and then to swell.
“After that I got clean. I got on my feet and I’ve been checking up on you over the last couple of years,” Nicholas says. “You are actually doing really well.”
“Thank you,” I mumble, through the tears running down my cheeks.
&nbs
p; My friend’s dying wish was for her brother to help me. The clarity that she must’ve had at that moment is difficult for me to imagine, even now.
I’m no longer a teenager and I don’t have anywhere near that kind of understanding.
Yet, she still decided to end her life. Why? Didn’t she know that things would get better?
Teenagers don’t have the experience of years to know that it’s possible to go through a lot and still live a happy life. Life is long. Full of many ups and downs. Things get worse and then they get better.
“I didn’t know how I could help you, but then I saw the loans that you had. I was in the position to help and I’d made a promise to my dead sister. So I did.”
“But now you say that I owe you a debt,” I say, challenging his interpretation of his charity.
The expression on his face changes. The pain that existed only a few seconds ago gets buried somewhere deep inside.
A coldness appears.
His gaze turns to ice.
“I was in the position to help you and now you are in the position to help me,” he says.
“Three hundred and sixty-five days is a long time,” I say. “I have a job.”
“You will be compensated handsomely.”
I wait for him to say a number, but he doesn’t. I feel myself drawn to him. Yes, my heart beats a little faster in his company. Yes, my palms get a little sweatier. But it’s more than on just a physical level. There’s something more to this. My thoughts return to Ashley.
“Why do you need me to come with you on your trips?” I ask, realizing that I don’t even really know what he does for a living.
“That’s my business,” he says.
“Where will we go?”
“Not sure yet, but you will need your passport.”
I’ve never been abroad, but I’ve always dreamed of traveling.
Am I actually entertaining this offer?
Why?
Tell Me to Stop Page 7
