I Stripped to Keep My Boyfriend in School, and He Sold Me to the Man My Brother Died Owing novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The First Reason

Toby gives her a room with a lock on the inside and the only key, and the first true thing: Lars wanted her marker and he wanted it more. A second plate is laid at the table.

The lodge was warmer than I wanted it to be.

A fire burned in a stone hearth the size of a garage door.

The floor was wide pine planks, and the whole house smelled of cedar and woodsmoke and coffee.

Toby took off his black wool coat and held it out to me.

"No," I said.

"You're blue," he said.

"I'm fine."

"Iris, your lips are the color of the lake."

He didn't move.

He stood with the coat held out in the firelight, and I understood that he would stand there all night.

I took it.

It was heavy and warm from his body, and I hated how much I wanted it.

"Sit," he said.

"I'll stand," I said.

"Then stand."

He nodded to the men on the porch, and they went out, and the door shut.

A woman in her sixties with a gray braid came in from the kitchen and put a mug into my hands without a word.

It was hot coffee with cream and too much sugar, the way I take it.

I looked at her, and then at him.

"How does she know how I take it?" I said.

"I told her," Toby said.

"How do you know how I take it?"

"You were fifteen. You drank it at the rink out of a thermos that said Aalto on the lid."

I hadn't known he noticed anything about me at fifteen.

I drank the coffee so I wouldn't have to say so.

"You said you'd tell me why," I said.

"I said I'd give you the first one," he said.

"That wasn't the deal."

"It was the deal I could keep tonight," Toby said.

He stood with his hands at his sides, and they were steady now.

"Lars Heikkinen wanted your marker," he said. "I wanted it more."

"Who is Lars Heikkinen to you?" I said.

"He's the general manager of the club you work for."

"I know who he is. I asked who he is to you."

"Someone who answers to me," Toby said, "and has started to forget it."

"And you took me from him by putting me in a trunk," I said.

"By getting there before he did," Toby said.

"That's not a reason."

"It's the first one."

I put the mug down on the mantel because my hand was beginning to shake and I didn't want him to see.

"Tonight Lars said a name in the lot," Toby said.

"He said it to his driver. 'Matti Aalto's sister.'"

He said it flatly, like reading a label.

"You never said it," I said.

"No," Toby said.

"Why not?"

"Because it's the one thing I'd rather you hear from me than from him."

"Hear what?" I said.

"That I'm not Lars."

I laughed, and it came out wrong.

"You had me carried out of a van like a sack of salt," I said.

"I did," he said.

"Your men put a glove over my mouth."

"They did."

I shook my head at him.

"And you're telling me you're the nice one."

"No," Toby said. "I'm telling you I'm the one who let go."

I had nothing to say to that.

He had let go.

The whole yard had watched him do it, and I had felt it in my arms the second his hands left.

"Your room is at the top of the stairs on the left," he said.

"I'm not sleeping here," I said.

"Look at it first."

He took me up the pine staircase himself, a step behind and to the side, never near enough to brush me.

At the top a hall ran off in two directions.

One door stood open.

It was a big room with a sloped ceiling and a quilt, and a window that looked out over a black glimmer that was the lake.

A lamp was lit on the nightstand, and a pair of wool socks lay on the quilt beside a robe.

On the inside of the door was a heavy iron bolt.

I looked at it.

"There's one key to the outer lock," Toby said, "and it's in your hand."

He laid it in my palm.

It was a brass key on a leather cord, still warm from his pocket.

"The bolt is yours too. Nobody comes into this room unless you open it."

"Including you," I said.

"Including me. I won't be in any room you're in unless you ask me to be."

"I won't ask."

"Then I won't be," Toby said.

I closed my hand on the key.

"What was Brett's debt for?" I said. "And who did he owe it to?"

"You know that."

"I want you to tell me."

"You're not asking because you don't know," Toby said. "You're asking to see whether I'll say it."

He was right, and I hated that too.

"I'm tired," I said.

"Eat something first. The kitchen's open all night."

He went down ahead of me, and I followed to the kitchen because my stomach had begun to ache.

The table was long and scarred.

The housekeeper was already ladling something into a bowl.

It was kalakukko, rye crust with fish baked inside, my grandmother's dish, and I could have cried.

There were three places set.

One was for Toby at the head, one for me on his right, and one on the left at the far end, with a cloth napkin, a fork, a knife and an empty glass.

I looked at it.

"Who's that for?" I said.

"Nobody," Toby said. "It's laid every night."

"Who lays it?"

"She does it out of habit," he said, and the woman at the stove kept her eyes on the pot.

I ate with the leather key cord wound around my fist.

When I finished, she took my bowl.

Then she crossed to the far end of the table and picked up the extra plate, the glass, the fork and the knife, none of them touched, and carried them away.

I watched her do it.

It looked like a thing done every night for a long time.

"Iris," Toby said.

"Yes?"

"There's a phone in the study. It's yours, charged, your own."

I stared at him.

"Your mother's rent is paid through June," he said, "and your tuition is paid through May."

"You don't get to pay for me," I said.

"It's already done."

"Why?"

"That's the second reason," Toby said, "and you're not ready for it."

"Try me," I said.

"The road is a mile down the drive," Toby said.

"The gate's not locked. Walk down in the morning if you like. Nobody will stop you."

"Then what is this?"

"I'm asking you," Toby said, very quietly, "to stay anyway."

I went upstairs.

I shot the iron bolt.

I sat on the edge of the bed in his coat with my hands between my knees, running through the tally.

Four men on the grounds.

A woman in the kitchen.

A lock on the inside and the only key in my fist.

A man who had let go of me in the snow and whose hands had shaken in the cold.

He hadn't said why.

I knew he was holding back the reason when he said I wasn't ready.

I knew something else, lying there in the dark, the way I know a pulse is wrong before the monitor says so.

Nobody lays a plate every night for a man they don't expect.

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