He’d said she was worth it. He wanted to get her eggs, and if she went somewhere he’d come get her. Somehow, things didn’t seem so messed up inside her, when he did things like that. A little space opened up, between the nobody she was and the person she could possibly be one day.
And that person just went right ahead and said it.
“I love you.”
He didn’t broach the subject again until quite a long time after. Mainly because he then wanted to tangle together on the bed for a while, until she felt breathless and flushed and just as good as she had the night before.
And then once she was in this dazed, lax state, he brought her eggs. Delicious eggs, incredible eggs, eggs that didn’t even taste like eggs anymore. They had green bits on them, and they came with ham and bagels and sauce.
He really wasn’t playing fair.
“I think you’re trying to trap me here with food and sex,” she said, as she licked the last of it off her fingers. It was the first time she’d ever eaten anything in a bed, the first time she’d ever stayed undressed until noon.
The first time she’d ever felt relaxed enough to do either of those things.
“If food and sex aren’t working, I could go with something else. There’s a movie theater two blocks from here.”
She couldn’t keep the grin from her face.
“How did you know I was thinking about movies?”
“Because you’ve been eyeing my DVD collection since you got here. Plus—it’s one of the first things I would want to do, if I’d never had the chance. Anything to do with movies, books, magazines…life. Culture.”
“It’s all very tempting, true.”
“It’s not a temptation, Evie. It’s the way things should be. It’s stuff I want you to have.”
She looked away, briefly.
“You did hear me when I said I can’t support myself, right? I don’t know how to do anything. I can’t—”
“You can. I’ve got enough money to take care of us both—it’s not a lot, and we won’t live the way you did back in suburbia. But then, I don’t think you really want to live like that anymore, anyway.”
“I don’t care how we live,” she blurted, without really intending to. But once the words were out there, she couldn’t really take them back. They’d already made him smile in this warm, satisfied sort of way.
He’d got her, and he knew it.
“We?”
Oh, he knew all right.
“Okay, yeah. It’s pretty unrealistic to think I can just go out there on my own and pretend I know what I’m doing. And true, my only other option is to maybe stay with you. But…you get why I find that hard, right? Life isn’t a fairytale. You can’t just run away with the prince and live in his castle.”
“Or in this case—his rat-infested, falling down apartment building, with a roommate who comes into the bathroom to pee while you’re in the shower.”
“He does that?”
“He does that.”
She added it to the mental list of weird things Tim did. Sex in the living room, peeing in the kitchen sink, ogling Van while Van took a shower…
“So you know—I’d understand if you didn’t want to live here.”
“No, no—I do.” She thought of waking up every morning like this, and wanted to more than anything. “And I guess I could train to do a job. I could be a cleaner, or a waitress, or—”
“Or you could finish your degree someplace normal and get a job you’d actually like. I have the money for you to do that, if you just stop being so prickly about it. I mean—it won’t last as long as I would have wanted it to, but it doesn’t need to last if I have someone by my side, to think about the future with. To work out a mortgage or set up college funds and all of that kind of stuff.”
For a second she couldn’t quite come to grips with what he’d said. There were too many elements to it, too much time in there—God, it sounded as if he’d just described the next eight hundred years of their lives.
Which sounded crazy, until she said, “Van, exactly how much money do you have?”
And he replied, “Ninety-three thousand dollars.”
An almighty silence fell then. One in which she considered many things. She thought about this terrible apartment he was living in, with all that money lying in a bank account somewhere, and the things he’d said about beautiful houses and chickens in the alley.
But most of all she thought about the kind of person who walked away from a life of wealth to plan and save and be so careful. To be so grateful for that amount of money, and not want to throw it all away on nothing.