The Wall of Winnipeg and Me (10 page)

“People do it all the time. Remember Felipa?” That was her cousin; how could I forget? “That Salvadoran guy she married paid her five thousand dollars. You might get a house, Vanny. You could be a little more grateful.”

Definitely the wrong person. “We’re not each other’s biggest fans.”

That had her exasperated. “You like almost everyone. He can’t exactly hate you if he’s asking you and not someone else. I’m sure he’d have bitches lining the block if he even remotely put in some effort.”

Her comment had me groaning. “You really think I should do it then?”

“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t. You don’t have a boyfriend. You have nothing to lose.”

She was making this too easy, making me feel dumb for not immediately jumping at the chance, but something had been lingering in my gut, and it wasn’t until she said the thing about bitches lining the block that I realized what it was. My pride. I cracked my knuckles. “I don’t know how I’d feel about being married and having my
husband
,” I almost choked on the word, “being with other people during. Even if it was fake. Someone would find out that we’d gotten married, and I don’t want to look like the poor idiot wife whose husband cheats on her and everyone knows.”

Diana hummed again. “Did he date around while you worked for him?”

He didn’t. Ever. He didn’t even have any females saved in his contacts on his phone. I would know. I was the one who had gone to the store to get him a new phone and have his contacts transferred, and I might have looked through them. There had definitely never, ever been any sleepovers at his house, or any women hanging around. There couldn’t be any after away games because, according to Zac, Aiden always went straight back to his hotel room afterward.

So, yeah, I felt a little dumb. “No.”

“So then there’s nothing to worry about, is there?”

I swallowed my saliva. “I can’t date anyone either.”

That had her cracking up and I suddenly found myself insulted at how hard she was laughing. “You’re funny.”

“It’s not funny.” So I hadn’t had a boyfriend in a couple of years. What the hell was the big deal?

Her hysterical laughing reached a peak. “
I can’t date anyone either,”
she mocked me in a voice that I knew was supposed to be mine. “Now you’re just making shit up.”

It was a well-known fact that I didn’t date much.

Diana sounded like she was covering her mouth with her hands to smother her laughs. “Oh, V. Do it and stop thinking about it so much.”

She wasn’t being any help, and I found myself still torn in half. “I’m going to keep thinking about it.”

“What’s there to think about?”

Everything.

B
ut I thought about it
. Then I kept thinking about it some more.

I looked online at how much I still owed on my loan, and I almost threw up. Looking at the balance was like looking at an eclipse; I wasn’t supposed to do it. The six digits before the period that glared back at me from the screen made me feel like I was going blind.

This thing with Aiden was a lottery, and I happened to be the only one with a ticket to it; it also happened to be the winning ticket. This small nugget of uneasiness jiggled around in my chest, but I ignored it as much as I could until I couldn’t handle it any more.

I would be helping someone whose sincerity I couldn’t judge completely.

I would be signing away years of my life.

I’d be doing something illegal.

And I would be doing this all as technically a business transaction. It wasn’t that complicated because I understood what Aiden was doing and why he was doing it, for the most part.

I just didn’t completely understand why he insisted on trying to reel me back into his life.

Regardless of everything else though, a part of me was resentful that Aiden I-get-everything-I-want Graves, had his mind set on me to be the one to help him out. I guess I didn’t feel like he deserved my help or my loyalty when he’d never exactly done anything to deserve it.

But…

My student loan debt wasn’t just a paycheck; it wasn’t payable in five years like a car loan. Plus, if a house would also be a form of payment… We were talking a lot of money, a lot of heartache, and a lot of interest. Thirty years on a mortgage. It would be a massive relief.

Wouldn’t it?

Could I just forgive Aiden and do this?

I knew people made mistakes, and I understood that you didn’t always know what you had until you didn’t have it; I had learned that myself the hard way about small things I’d taken for granted. But I also knew how resentful I could be, how I held on to grudges sometimes.

I found myself driving to Aiden’s house, heart in my throat, risking my life and freedom for a freaking student loan that I couldn’t just forget about or disregard.

The security guard at the gate grinned at me when I pulled in to the community Aiden lived in. “I haven’t seen you in forever, Miss Vanessa,” he greeted me.

“I quit,” I explained after greeting him. “He shouldn’t be surprised I’m here.”

He gave me a look that said he was a little more than impressed. “He’s not. He’s been reminding me every week to let you in if you came by.”

He was either a little too confident or…

Well, there was no ‘or.’ He was a little too confident. I suddenly had the urge to turn my car around to teach him a lesson, but I wasn’t egotistical or dumb enough to do it. With a good-bye wave at the guard, I drove passed the gate and toward the home I’d been to too many times to count.

I knew he’d be home, so I didn’t worry about the absence of cars in the driveway as I parked on the street like I had every time in the past, and marched up to the front door, feeling incredibly awkward as I rang the doorbell.

I wanted to turn around, walk away, and tell myself I didn’t need his money. I really wanted to.

But I didn’t go anywhere.

It took a couple minutes for the sound of the lock getting tumbled to let me know he was there, but in no time, the door was swung open and Aiden stood there in his usual attire, his towering body blocking the light from inside the house. His expression was open and serious as he let me in, and led me over to where everything had begun—the big kitchen. It didn’t matter that his couch was incredibly comfortable; he always seemed to prefer to sit in the kitchen at the island or in one of the chairs of the nook to eat, read, or do a puzzle.

He took a seat on his favorite stool, and I took the one furthest away from him. It was weirder than it should have been considering what was at stake.

I was a person, and he wasn’t any more or any less special than I was, and regardless of what happened, I had to remember that point.

So I sucked in a breath through my nose, and just went for it. Honesty was the best policy and all that, wasn’t it? “Look, I’m scared,” I admitted in one breath, taking in his familiar features, the slants of his cheekbones, the thick, short beard that covered the lower half of his face, and that ragged white scar along his hairline.

For two years, I’d seen his face at least five times a week, and not once had we ever had a moment remotely close to this. I couldn’t forget that, because it mattered to me. It would be one thing to have a stranger ask me to marry him because he wanted to become a U.S. resident, but it was a totally different thing to have someone that I
knew
, who had never cared for me, ask.

Honestly, it was worse.

Aiden’s long lashes lowered for a moment, and the man who was as greedy with his attention and affections as I was with the red and pink Starbursts, lifted a rounded, hunk of a shoulder. “What are you worried about?” He commanded the words.

“I don’t want to go to jail.” I
really
didn’t want to go to jail; I’d looked up marriage fraud on the internet and it
was
a felony. A felony with up to a five-year prison sentence and a fine that made my student loans seem like chump change.

Apparently the male version of my best friend said, “You have to get caught to go to jail.”

“I’m a terrible liar,” I admitted because he had no idea how bad of one I was.

“You knew you were planning on quitting for months before you did. I think you might be okay with it,” he threw out suddenly in a slightly accusing tone.

That might have made me wince if I felt guilty about what I’d done, but I didn’t. It also didn’t occur to me right then that he somehow knew I’d been planning on quitting for a long time. It just sort of went in one ear and right out the other. “I didn’t lie to you. I only stayed because you had just gotten better, and I felt bad leaving you so soon afterward. I couldn’t talk myself into doing it, and I was only trying to be a nice person. There’s a difference.”

His thick eyebrows went up a millimeter but no other muscle in his face reacted to my comment. “You told Zac,” he pointed out like an accusation.

An accusation I wasn’t going to grab onto. “Yeah, I told Zac because he’s my friend.” I damn sure wasn’t going to apologize for it. “Please tell me when I was supposed to casually tell you, and expect a high five. Or were you going to give me a hug and congratulate me?” I might have nailed him with a look that said ‘are you fucking me?’

“When I did finally tell you, you didn’t care, Aiden. That’s what half of this comes down to. I’m still…
I’m s
o
mad at you
, and I accept that I shouldn’t be. I just can’t help it. You’re not my friend; you’ve never tried to be my friend. You haven’t once given a shit about me until you needed something, and now for some strange reason, you’re making it seem like you can’t live without me. And we both know that’s bullshit.”

He stayed quiet for a moment, taking a sharp sniff, his eyes seemingly trying to pierce a hole straight through my head. “I’ve apologized to you. I meant it. You know I meant it,” he insisted, and I could grudgingly admit to myself that the logical part of my brain recognized that statement as a truth. Aiden didn’t apologize, and for all the things he was, he wasn’t a liar. That just wasn’t in his genes. For him to actually say the ‘A’ word? It wasn’t insignificant. “I don’t have time for friends, and if I did, I wouldn’t go out of my way to make them anyway. I’ve always been this way. And I really don’t have time for a relationship. You understand that. I’m not worried about getting caught—”

So he was changing the subject. “Because you won’t be the one going to jail,” I reminded him under my breath, frustrated at his tactics.

He raised one of his eyebrows another millimeter, but it was his flaring nostrils that gave away his irritation. “I’ve done a lot of research, and I consulted an immigration lawyer. We can pull it off. All you would have to do at first is file a petition for me.”

Aiden didn’t say
I think we can pull it off
, he said we could do it and I didn’t miss that nuance.

“You know, Aiden, you make saying yes so damn difficult. I would have done just about anything for you if you’d asked me when I worked for you, but now, especially when you act—you still act—like one single ‘sorry’ makes up for disrespecting me in front of other people, and letting someone talk about me, it pisses me off. How can you ask me to do this huge favor for you when I feel zero obligation to? We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if I didn’t want my loans paid off.”

I bit the inside of my cheek. “I want to tell you to leave me alone, that I’ll pay off my debt on my own like I had always planned on doing. I don’t need your money.” Meeting his eyes, I had to fight the urge to tear up. “I wished you had respected me enough to appreciate me back when it would have meant something. I liked you. I admired you, and in the course of a few days, you killed all that.”

The words came out of my mouth before I could stop them.

We stared at each other. And stared at each other. Then stared at each other a little more.

When I was a kid, I learned the hard way how expensive the truth was. Sometimes it cost you people in your life. Sometimes it cost you things in your life. And in this life, most people were too cheap to pay the price for something as valuable as honesty. In this case, I could tell the price tag had hit Aiden unexpectedly.

Slowly, after a few breaths, he ducked his head, and rubbed at the back of his neck with that great big hand. His breathing got harder, raspier, and he sighed an Alaska-sized breath. “Forgive me.” His tone was rougher than ever, seemingly dragged through sand, and then covered in shards of glass. Yet somehow, it sounded like the most real, heartfelt thing to ever come out of his mouth, at least in front of me.

But it still didn’t feel like enough.

“I can forgive you. I’m sure you regretted it later on when I wasn’t around but—” I shoved my glasses to the top of my head and rubbed my forehead with the back of my hand before lowering them again. “Look, this isn’t a good start to a fake relationship, don’t you think?”

“No.” He moved his head slightly, just enough so that I could see those dark coffee irises with that bright amber ring surrounding the pupil peering up at me beneath the fanned cover of his long eyelashes. “I always learn from my mistakes. We made a good team once. We’ll make a good team again.”

Lifting his head completely, a dimple in his cheek popped out of nowhere, and he raised his hands to cup the sides of his head. “I’m no good at this kind of stuff. I would rather give you money than have to beg, but I will if that’s what you want,” he admitted, sounding about as vulnerable as ever. “You’re the only person I would want to do this with me.”

Why wasn’t this so black and white?

“I’m not asking you to beg me. Come on. All I’ve ever wanted from you was… I don’t even know. Maybe I want to think that you care about me at least a little bit after so long, and that’s pointless. You want this to be a business deal, and I understand. It just makes me feel cheap because I know if Zac was asking me, I would have probably said yes from the beginning because he’s my friend. You couldn’t even find it in your heart to tell me ‘good morning’.”

He sighed, his index finger and thumb pulling at his ear. Dropping his gaze to the kitchen countertop, he offered, “I can be your friend.”