The Mistress

“Cleaning,” Laila thought of another.

“That was one. She had scared off six housekeepers by the time I moved in with her.”

“Six?” Laila gazed around her at the beautiful August evening with the sun low through the trees and this man walking with her. She wished she could enjoy it even a little but the fear held her heart in its unforgiving grasp. “Why so many?”

“Um...” Wes winced and Laila knew she’d inadvertently stumbled into secret territory.

“Let me guess...I don’t want to know.”

“She had a bad habit of not picking up after herself.”

Laila weighed whether or not to tell Wes what she wanted to tell him. Might as well. Her uncle tried to shield her from the truth about him and her, but her aunt never had.

“I have read her books. You don’t have to pretend she’s...you know...”

“Normal?” Wes supplied.

“Vanilla,” Laila said. “You read even one of her books and you learn the words.”

Wes exhaled with obvious and profound relief.

“Thank God. I wasn’t sure what you knew and what you didn’t.”

“I know enough to know that I wouldn’t go sneaking around in her bedroom without body armor on first.”

“It’s not that bad, I promise. I lived with her. She keeps most of the stuff in her closet. Sometimes I’d find snap hooks between the couch cushions. One time I accidentally sat on a Wartenburg wheel. That sucker hurt. And ripped a hole in my jeans.”

Laila laughed and the sound bounced off the road and into the trees.

“And she had this big long bag,” Wes said, stretching his arms three feet wide. “Kept it in her office most of the time. She told me not to open it unless I never wanted to look her in the eyes again.”

“Did you open it?”

“Nope.” He shook his head and Laila’s heart jumped as a sliver of the day’s last sunlight caught in Wes’s hair. She felt the most overwhelming urge to run her fingers through it. But she restrained herself. He probably wouldn’t like some girl he barely knew messing with his hair right now. “I liked looking her in the eyes.”

“I think I could have, anyway, even after opening the bag. My uncle, on the other hand...” She let her voice trail off and Laila found herself blushing.

“I guess you know about him, too, then.” Wes crossed his arms over his chest.

Laila nodded. “Well, if she is like that, then he is. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have stayed together so long. I’ve even accidentally heard them.” Accidentally? Not quite but he didn’t need to know that.

“I overheard my parents once. Oh, my Lord, I thought I’d never be normal again.”

“My parents got divorced when I was very young. I think I would have liked to have parents in love enough to sometimes overhear them in bed together.”

“I’m sorry. Yeah, hearing your parents having sex is better than not hearing it, I guess. How old were you when they broke up?”

“Six. Gitte was two. It was a bad match, my mother said. Neither of them did anything wrong. They didn’t have anything in common. She had the good job, and all the money, so we stayed in the house and he moved away. Min onkel Søren tried to step in, but it wasn’t easy for him across an ocean. He called all the time to check on us.”

“Min onkel?”

“My uncle Søren,” she corrected herself. “Sorry.”

Wes only smiled. “Don’t apologize. Seriously. I like when you slip into Danish.”

Laila blushed as if he’d complimented her br**sts instead of her words. Maybe since they were outside in the sun he wouldn’t notice how much talking to him made her turn so red.

“Happens when I’m tired. I slip in and out.”

“We should go back if you’re tired.”

She shook her head. “No, not yet. I don’t want to go back. It’s too...”

“I know,” he said quietly, staring into the sun for a moment before looking back at her. “Everyone’s so scared and we make it worse being around one another, scaring one another even more.”

“It’s hard to be around him,” she said. “My uncle. He loves her so much, and I can’t help him. I can’t even look in his eyes...I hate seeing him so scared. I don’t ever remember seeing him scared before.” Laila stepped off the road and into the manicured woods.

“Never?”

Wes followed right behind her. Inside a clearing she found a downed tree and sat on it.

“I didn’t think anything could scare him. Anything bad that happened, he was always so calm. Gitte fell once and hit her head on a rock. So much blood...I’d never seen so much. All of us were screaming and crying. He picked her up and carried her into the house and held her until help came. He made her tell him about her day at school and what she’d learned that week. Anything to keep her calm and awake. I realized that day that he was different from us.”

“Different how?” Wes sat next to her on the tree trunk. As he lifted himself and settled in, Laila noticed the muscles flexing in his arms. She needed to stop noticing stuff like that.

“No one in Denmark is Catholic. It’s a secular country. No one goes to church. I think that was the day I realized that him being Catholic and believing in God...he did believe there was some higher power taking care of people. He did have faith and it kept him calm when everyone else was afraid.”