The Wall of Winnipeg and Me

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 so 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.