The thing was, he was speaking about it the same way he’d talked about the situation with my parents and their debt. I could tell this was really meaningful to him, and that was making it matter to me as well.
But that was just making me realise how abnormal my own response was. Any other young woman would have been beside herself, sobbing. Her path to this moment would have been a lot more romantic, of course, but surely I should be feeling something that was… softer.
Maybe what was happening now in my head was as soft as I got. After everything I’d done to guys I judged to be weaker than me, why was I expecting myself to behave like a regular girl?
I thought about that little change in Devin’s eyes. “Hey.” I was speaking before I’d really thought better of it. “Obviously you knew… who you’d been born to, a lot earlier than me… but was there a specific moment when you were younger that you started to understand what that meant? Like, you realised your life was always going to be different to other kids’?”
I didn’t entirely expect him to answer. He was silent for several seconds, hardly moving, and then he made a soft noise, a hum. Warming his voice.
Suddenly I was afraid without really knowing why, but there was nothing I could do. I had asked him to tell me, and for once he was giving me exactly what I wanted.
Chapter Thirteen
“I was seven or eight, in a regular primary school not far from here.” His right hand moved, grasping for his phone, then he left it alone and pulled my hand he was still holding onto his knee, placing both of his over it. If the ring I was wearing was digging in, he didn’t give any sign. “It might surprise you to hear this, Julia, but I was not the best of children.”
“Shocking revelation.”
“I was always targeting kids a bit younger, a bit smaller. The ones I knew wouldn’t be able to give me any shit in return. Except this one time, there was this kid—Billy Burke, I remember his name really fucking vividly—and he did give me shit. He told me he wanted me to stop pushing him around and trying to scare him, and no he wasn’t going to give me his lunch money, by the way. And I’d never run into this situation before when I was running this scam, so I panicked a bit. I hit him in the face, gave him a bloody lip, and he told on me to the teacher. Told on me to his parents.”
I didn’t know what to say to this. It took me all too quickly back to the years I’d spent at school, the way I’d been with some of the other girls. My behaviour had always been a bit mixed: sometimes I would be trying to be best friends with these girls, but when I got tired of that I would switch to pushing and pinching.
“I went home
and told my mother because I thought I was done for sure, there was a really strict anti-bullying policy at my school, but I was really confused. She told me Billy Burke’s family was broke as all fuck and the poor bastard probably never had any lunch money for me to rob in the first place. That was what she seemed most bothered by. Not that I’d done it but that I’d done it to a kid with no money. And I figured that was just because it was a really bad look for a family like ours, with a really nice lifestyle. But then I went back to school, and… nothing happened. I didn’t get called up to account for what I’d done, Billy’s mother didn’t come to the school to address it further… but I could tell from the way Billy glared at me sometimes across the classroom that absolutely nothing had been forgiven and forgotten.”
“Your mother put a stop to it,” I said.
“She never did a thing. She didn’t have to… our teacher put a stop to it.”
“Your teacher? Wow, that’s…” I didn’t know what to say—more to the point, I didn’t know what I could say. The corruption in this world I was apparently a part of was seriously deep.
“She pulled me back after class and had a chat with me, explained she’d headed off Billy and his mother because she knew there was nothing good that could come to them from picking a fight with my family. I swear she said it just like that too, like it was a given an eight-year-old kid from a crime family would know exactly what sort of shenanigans his parents were involved in. I didn’t ask her any questions, I was already used to not asking too many questions at home, but it was in my mind then. I realised we were different, and everyone knew about it. And…”
I wanted to press him when he stayed silent, encourage him to keep talking, but some intuition warned me to keep my mouth shut. I was used to brushing intuition aside, doing what I wanted. This time, I followed intuition.
“I think that moment damaged me,” Devin said. “Before then, I believed what every other kid in that class did, what they’d learned from their parents—that school had authority over us, power over us, and that was just the beginning. I thought I had to be careful, to control myself, or else I was going to be smacked back down into my place. And after that, I knew my world was a completely different world. I spent a lot more time doing things the way I wanted, not factoring other people into it at all. That makes a big difference.”
And maybe the same thing had happened to me. “I don’t think I ever had a moment where a teacher was that explicit with me. I probably wasn’t badly-behaved enough for that. But I guess I felt that too. That the rules didn’t apply, and I could just play the way I wanted with life.”
“And then you met that one boy who made you feel you weren’t beyond everything.”
“Bringing that up again.” But I didn’t feel like Devin was trying to mess with me this time. He was just asking questions, trying to learn more, the way I’d been doing with him. “Yes, I guess what happened with Steven had me running for cover again. Nobody ever told him who I really was, clearly.”
“And your parents never bothered to step up and do something about it.” That had me bristling a lot more, but I tried to bear with him. “The question that bothers me is, was that just some pettiness on their part… or were they trying to protect you in their twisted way?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“I worry about that,” said Devin in return. “I don’t know what the outcome is going to be for you. I think I may be bringing you into a world you are not equipped to handle.”
I tried to touch his shoulder, his face. He moved, so his stubble slid under my fingers. “That’s why you need to open up to me, Devin. If it’s the two of us together, we can help each other. I know we don’t know one another very well yet, but we would be able to get to—”
“And when you say things like that, you tell me I am right to have concerns.” He looked me directly in the eyes and took both my hands in both of his. Maybe he thought he needed to keep me from roving, trying things on him that would lead to trouble. “You haven’t paid any attention at all, have you? In our world, intimate relationships are deeply hazardous. If you expose yourself to someone in that way, you are liable to find it’s your undoing.”
“But not if we’re getting married,” I protested. “We have to come to trust one another. Right?” I pulled my hand now bearing his ring back so I could shake the gaudy diamond in his face. “Wasn’t that the point of this?”
“I see it as more of a protective arrangement for both of us. There are legal protections for each of us… incentives to keep one another’s secrets.”
I fixed him with what I hoped was the most vicious look I had in me. “I never went to the cops after you kidnapped me, didn’t go running to my parents begging them to find someone to break your kneecaps, and you thought you needed some other way of getting me to keep your secrets?”