Nora
“Take this,” Ryan said as I helped him pull his camping pack off his shoulders. He shrugged it off and let the straps fall down his arms. I set it down by the door and grabbed his coat, pulling it off for him while he panted as if he’d walked all the way to my apartment.
Layers of cold came off of him while I removed his gear. He had brought that inside with him as well. It lingered by my door, slowly dissipating into the small one-bedroom apartment he paid for but didn’t share with me— except for a few nights every six weeks or so.
I dropped all of his gear and extra layers in a pile by the door and walked back into the kitchen where I’d been working on dinner in anticipation of his arrival. I knew he’d need a hot meal when he finally arrived. I had also expected that he wouldn’t be affectionate or grateful. He never was.
“What’s for dinner?” he barked from the couch.
“Beef stew,” I told him. So I hadn’t exactly slaved over it. It had been cooking in the crock pot all day. All I had to do was serve it up when it was ready, and it should have been about ready for us.
“I’m fucking starving,” he said, making no effort to actually get off the couch.
I didn’t say anything. I knew he was tired from crossing the border.
He didn’t cross at the border checkpoints since he didn’t want to risk going through customs with his cargo. Instead he had a path through the wilderness that he used to get across. Even on the northern border with Canada, there were a lot of people crossing by foot, illegally, and they all had their reasons. Ryan crossed for business.
He didn’t walk the whole way. He drove to a point on the Canadian side where he could camp and park his car for a few days. Then walked across and picked up the truck he kept on the U.S. side of the border, came to the apartment, and stayed with me while he conducted business.
He’d bought everything in the apartment for me. He paid the rent and utilities, and he kept it furnished. So, if he wanted to come in and crash on the couch with barely even a hello, much less any sign of affection, that was his prerogative. I was in no position to rock his boat. My job was to be there when he showed up and to be a loyal, serving woman to my man.
“Are you ready to eat?” I asked, pulling out a couple of bowls and silverware.
“Yeah,” he grunted, getting up from the couch and trudging into the dining room. He sat down at the table and waited on me to serve him.
I filled his bowl and grabbed a beer from the fridge on the way to the table. I set his food and drink down, and then I went back for my own. When I finally sat down, I was able to get my first good look at him.
“Rough trip?” I asked.
He looked up at me with his dark eyes. They were brown, but sometimes they seemed almost black. His tired, haggard face told the story of a troubled crossing. The weather probably hadn’t cooperated either. He hadn’t shaved in days, and his cheeks were a little sunken in. He had dark circles around his eyes, and his thin hair was a matted rat’s nest on top of his head.
“You have no idea,” he croaked.
“Well, don’t worry. I’ll take care of you tonight,” I said in a soothing tone. “Eat some of this stew and get a hot bath. You’ll feel better then.”
“I hope so,” he remarked, returning to his food. “I wouldn’t have crossed if I’d had a choice,” he said a few moments later.
“Why did you, then?” I asked.
“Those fucking impatient bikers, man. We can’t keep Shadow Reapers waiting.”
Shadow Reapers was a local MC. We were in a small town near the border, but the Reapers had big city dreams. The MC was Ryan’s number one buyer, so I understood why he wouldn’t want to keep them waiting.
“Well, you’re here now,” I told him. “The worst is over, and you get a few days to rest.”
“You’re right about half of it,” he said as he continued to eat. He didn’t say much else, just kept eating. He got up at one point and refilled his bowl. When I realized what he was doing, I protested, telling him I could have done it for him, but he shrugged off my offer to help and sat back down to eat.
Without a word, he got up after he finished and put his bowl in the sink. Then he went down the hallway toward the bathroom. I heard the door close, and then water running. I sat at the table with my half-eaten bowl of stew and listened as the man who was supposed to be my boyfriend went on about his business like I wasn’t even there. I finally got up and dumped the rest of my food in the trash.
Ryan never talked much, but the last few times he’d crossed, he had grown shorter with me. I had long since accepted that our relationship was little more than a business arrangement for him, but that didn’t mean I didn’t get lonely.
I had met Ryan back when I was in high school. He rescued me from an abusive foster home. He needed someone to help him keep a kind of home base while he ran back and forth across the border, and I needed a safe place to call home. That was when he’d set me up in my own place. Well, in our own place.
“Babe, this is only for a little while,” he’d told me the night we moved into this apartment. “After about a year, I should have enough money to live off of. Then, we’ll get married and I’ll take you away from here.”
I couldn’t remember feeling happy and hopeful at the time, though I was certain I must have felt that way. Otherwise, why had I put up with him for so long? No, what I remembered was feeling grateful. The gratitude I had felt then was what had kept me with him for so long. That, and the fact that in between his visits, I had about six weeks to myself at a time.
I stayed loyal to my man, which meant only having sex a few times every few weeks when he was on the U.S. side of the border. Even then, sex was more of a chore. Like cooking dinner, it was something he expected of me when he was home. It was also something I needed by the time he made it back across, so it worked out for both of us.
As with any relationship, it had been incredibly intimate at first. There was a point when I had confused my gratitude for love. But as the promises went unfulfilled and he seemed less and less interested, I realized I was simply another tool of the trade for him.
I got a nice apartment out of it. I got to spend my time with friends. I had all the clothes I needed. He kept the pantry stocked, the bills paid. He paid for anything I wanted. It might have been lonely from time to time, but all in all, it was a pretty good arrangement.
By the time he got out of the bath, I was lying in bed wearing a nice piece of lingerie I had bought. It was a silk and lace teddy, lavender and black. I had bought it to surprise him with something a little new. I had pushed the covers back and waited for him to come out of the bathroom.
“I bet that wasn’t cheap,” he said, nodding at my lingerie.
“I think it looks good on me. What do you think?” I asked, ignoring his comment and trying to salvage the mood.
“I think you spent too much on something that’s just going to get taken off and left on the floor,” he said in a firm, gruff voice. He wasn’t even trying to be playful about it.
“I just thought it would be nice to do something a little different,” I told him. Hell, I was loyal to him; the least we could do was pretend every once in a while that I was present in the bed during sex. It wasn’t like I was going to ask him to tell me he loved me or anything stupid like that. I didn’t want that much out of it, but a little acknowledgment wouldn’t hurt.
“Yeah, and did you put this ‘something different’ on the card, or did you pay cash for it?” he asked as he walked over to the dresser and pulled out a pair of gray cotton boxers. He pulled them on, covering his dick.
So far, it didn’t look good for sex. It must have been a pretty rough crossing.
“I put it on the card,” I told him. “I ordered it online, what else was I going to do?”
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, as if trying not to unleash on me. “Why do you insist on putting so much on the damn card?” he asked.
“Like I said, I ordered it online. I couldn’t very well pay cash for it,” I argued.
“Do you need it, though? The card is to be used as sparingly as possible. What if I don’t get a score this month? What then? What if I can’t pay for all these things you keep putting on the card? I give you enough money for you to buy the things you need, don’t I?”
“Yeah, you do,” I said, giving up any arguments I had for the lingerie. When he started raising his voice, I knew he wasn’t going to listen to anything I had to say.
“There are shops here in town if you feel like you need something nice or sexy. Hit up the mall with your girlfriends,” he said.
We often referred to the mall as the small because it was just that – small. We didn’t have a Frederick’s of Hollywood, or anything close. We didn’t even have a Victoria’s Secret. We had a department store whose sexiest piece of clothing was a silk nightgown that stopped right above the knee and had a little lace across the top. And the way it was cut, it made every woman look pregnant. Not sexy in the least.
“I know you think you’re living the life here, Nora, but we’re one missed score away from having to cut back on things,” he said as he climbed into bed
He cut off the bedroom light and pulled the covers up. Then, he rolled over away from me and lay facing the other wall in the dark.
“Don’t put anything else on the card for a while,” he mumbled, and a moment later he was snoring.
In all the years we’d been together, he’d never talked to me about money. He had always acted like the money didn’t matter. He treated it like we had enough to do whatever we wanted, and if anything came up, he handled it.
I lay in the dark, in my sexy new lingerie, and I found myself crying silent tears. What had I done to deserve this life? What could I have possibly done that was so wrong that I wound up with a man who took me for granted?
I had always pretended I understood why he kept me around. I was there to feed him, to take care of his American home, and to serve his needs when he was with me. If he didn’t need me for those things, he could have simply paid rent on the apartment to make sure he had a place to sleep where he kept his clothes and stuff like that. Hell, for that matter, he could have paid for a room for the few nights he was here.
I rolled away from him and pulled up the covers, and cried myself to sleep, careful to keep it quiet so I didn’t wake him.