I Stripped to Keep My Boyfriend in School, and He Sold Me to the Man My Brother Died Owing novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Twin Bed

Iris's POV

I started it on a Thursday in the third week, with my mother at bingo.

I did not ask him a question.

He had come to the house every evening since the church lot, and every evening he had sat at the end of my mother's table and answered what I asked.

He told me what the Reinholt family did and what it had cost.

He told me what he had done to a man on the Superior docks at twenty-four, and he did not want to say it twice.

He told me he had been afraid of me since I was fifteen, and that it had never once been the kind of afraid I thought.

He never touched me.

That Thursday the house was empty by six, and the radiator under my bedroom window knocked in the dark.

I took his hand at the kitchen door.

"Come upstairs," I said.

He went still.

"Iris," he said. "Your mother's house."

"She's at the Lutheran hall until ten. She won three dollars last week, so she'll stay for more."

"That isn't what I meant."

"I know what you meant," I said. "I'm not asking you to be good. I'm asking you to come up."

He came.

My room was at the top of the narrow stairs, under the slope of the roof.

It still had the twin bed and the quilt my grandmother made, and a corkboard with a hockey ribbon pinned to it.

He stood in the doorway with his head ducked under the beam and looked at the corkboard.

"You kept it," Toby said.

"Ma kept it," I said. "I just slept in it."

"That's the Bayfront ribbon."

"You were there."

"I was," he said, very low. "You skated backward the whole length of the rink without looking down. I stood on the boards and thought, that kid is going to be impossible."

"I was fifteen."

"I know how old you were. That's why I did nothing for seven years."

I shut the door.

The latch clicked, and I leaned my back against it with my hands behind me.

"Say what I told you in the lot," I said.

"That I'm not forgiven."

"Say the rest."

"That I get a chance to be asked," Toby said.

"I'm asking."

His breath went out of him.

"Tonight there are no terms," I said. "You don't wait for me to put your hands anywhere. You touch me where you like, and I'll tell you if I don't like it."

"Iris."

"I'll tell you."

He crossed the room in two steps.

He did not grab me.

He put both hands on my face, one on each cheek, with his thumbs under my eyes, and looked at me as if he were reading.

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