“Oh, Ryan…”
“Probably from one of the shitty jobs she forced herself to have so that I could have anything at all,” he muttered. “But the medical bills kept on getting bigger until I wasn’t breaking even anymore. So, I knew this guy who could get some F, and I managed to make some arrangements so that I could buy from him and sell it on. Pretty much straight away, that started making even more than the cosmetics business. It covers the medical bills and then some.”
“Is she getting… what do they call it… is she in remission?”
Ryan’s face contorted for a second before he squeezed out the answer he didn’t want to give. “No. But she will. She’s going to have it all.”
I reached out and pulled him towards me, holding his head against my chest as we fell backwards along the couch. “Shhh, it’s OK.”
Holy shit. What an emotional can of worms I’d forced him to open. This poor guy was just doing the wrong thing to try to do the right thing. He was a good man.
I will keep you safe. I’ll say it’s entrapment, we can still use the information to work up your supply chain… just not against you. And it could take years. That’s a long time for us. Whatever “us” is.
I stroked his hair for a while until he was breathing normally again. “Sounds like we’ve got some things in common then,” I said.
“Like what?”
“I’m an only child too, and I never knew my dad. Of course, I never knew my mom either. I was adopted, but then the adopted family were deemed unfit to parent and somehow I ended up in the foster care system. A broken system if ever there was one. I bounced around for a while, each family worse than the last until I ended up in a home with a guy that sounds a lot like your dad. Um… I never tell anybody this either.”
“Well, it seems fair…” said Ryan.
I gulped. “I guess so. This guy… one night he was so drunk… beating the shit out of his wife right in front of me. “Teaching respect” he called it. Well, something… snapped inside me, you know?”
Ryan nodded, without looking up at me.
“I was like… “You want to hurt her? You’ll have to go through me.” So I got right in there, in the middle of it, and, boy, he went straight through me. Feel this.”
I reached down and picked up Ryan’s hand, aiming the fingertips at just the right place on my scalp.
“That’s from when he gave me a black eye and I flew backwards and hit my head on the edge of the kitchen counter. I was just waking up when he was done with my foster mother and I saw him coming towards me. That’s when the cops arrived, kicked the door down and dragged his ass off to the holding cells.”
That’s when I first decided to become a cop, I thought.
“Sounds like he needs to get in touch with his feminine side,” Ryan mused.
“Yeah. Well, instead he got in touch with a lawyer, and he was back in the house by the weekend. But no lawyer in the world could keep me there, so I bounced around a bit more until I ended up with a family that wasn’t awful for a couple years, until I turned eighteen. I don’t keep in contact with them, though. Living there was like living in a hotel, you know? Clean, reasonably safe, but impersonal. So, that’s why I took those self-defense classes, why I saw that guy in the club coming at you with a knife and I thought “You’ll have to go through me.” I’m not a fifteen-year-old girl anymore and I can fight for what I care about. For who I care about. For some reason, I cared about you from the moment I saw you, Ryan.”
Ryan looked up into my eyes for a while, as if he was lost and finding himself in there. “Does that mean you wanna…”
I nodded and smiled. “Ryan and Sarina. Has a nice ring to it, huh?”
Ryan turned towards me and moved between my legs before kissing me. I wrapped my arms and legs around him, holding him tight as I kissed him back.
There was no rational and objective argument for what I was doing… but I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Ryan
With Sarina’s coursework piling up, we didn’t get to spend as much time together as I would have liked over the next few weeks after making it official. It seemed like the “high school” relationship did some pretty quick growing up during that talk.
Every touch was still the embodiment of excitement when I was with Sarina, but I’d never touched anybody that I’d shared that deeply with. In my world, I couldn’t let anybody know my vulnerabilities or they’d just use them against me. It was both liberating and terrifying that Sarina had that window into my inner workings.