My Husband Lent Me to His Best Friend for the Night, and the Man He Chose Was the One I Hated Most novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Locked Door
On her wedding night Kali's husband offers her to his friend Nikos Pappas, the man who broke her brother's hands; she takes off her ring, locks the door with both men inside and tells Nikos to sit.
My husband stood at the window of our bedroom with his back to me and told me what I was worth.
"Forty-four thousand dollars," Stavros Manolakis said.
"That is what your father owed my house, and your marriage clears it.
"You will have a room, a name and a card.
"I will not touch you.
"In return you will do what the house asks and you will not make a scene in front of my mother's staff."
I was sitting on the edge of a bed the size of my family's whole back kitchen.
I was still in the cream slip I had been told to wear under the dress.
The ceremony had ended eleven hours ago, and in all that time he had not looked at me once.
At the altar of the church on Union Avenue he had taken my glove and not my hand.
My father had not said my name at the church, or at the supper, or when he kissed the air beside my cheek at the door.
"That's the whole arrangement?" I asked.
"There is one more thing."
Stavros turned around.
He was thirty-six, lean, in a white shirt with the cuffs still buttoned, and his face gave nothing away.
"The house has a guest tonight."
He crossed to the door and opened it.
The man who came in out of the hall was Nikos Pappas.
He ducked his head a little under the frame because he was tall, and he shut the door behind him with two fingers.
He wore a black suit, no tie, and the short beard I had seen once through a kitchen doorway when I was fifteen.
Nine years had put gray at his temples and nothing else on him had changed.
I knew his face the way I know a burn scar.
I had stood behind the cash drawer in my father's taverna with my back against it and both hands flat on the wood, and I had watched this man walk through our back kitchen with two others.
I had watched him take my brother Aris's hands off the prep table and lay them on the steel.
I had heard what the fry pan handle did to them.
I had paid the late fee out of the drawer after, in coins, because he told me to count it.
"Nikos has been my friend since we were boys on Halsted," Stavros said.
"He will see to you tonight, as a courtesy between friends.
"It is better that it is someone I trust."
Nikos did not move.
His eyes had gone to me when he came in, and he did not look anywhere else.
His hands were at his sides, and the knuckles of the right were scarred white.
"Say it plainly," I said.
I was surprised to hear how level my voice was.
"You are lending me to him."
"I am saying that you will not be alone tonight, and that nothing will happen to you that I have not arranged."
Stavros straightened his cuff.
"My mother's housekeeper sleeps down the hall.
"I would ask you to be quiet."
Nobody had asked me anything since I was fifteen years old.
My mother had died that winter, and in the spring a man had put his hands on my brother, and after that my father had handed me from one kind of bill to the next until a man in a charcoal suit handed me to a church.
Every decision in my life had been made in a room where I was the one holding something shut.
I stood up.
I took off the ring his mother had chosen, a heavy gold band with a square stone, and I set it on the dresser.
It made a small clean sound on the wood.
Both of them looked at it.
"You don't lend me," I said.
"I pick."
"Kali," Stavros said.
"And I am not picking either of you for the reason you think."
I walked past my husband to the door.
I turned the lock, and the bolt was heavy and well oiled and slid home with a click.
Then I took the key from the plate and put it down the front of my slip.
Stavros watched me do it, and for the first time since the church something moved in his face.
It was not anger.
I could not tell what it was.
Nikos Pappas had taken a step toward the chair by the window, and put out his hand to pull it out for me.
I got there first.
I took the chair by its back and dragged it out of his reach, and it scraped on the floorboards.
His hand stopped in the air where the chair had been.
"Don't," I said.
"Don't hold anything for me."
He looked at his own hand, and then at me.
"Sit down," I said.
He sat.
He did it at once, without a word, on the edge of the chair, with his hands open on his knees.
I stood over him in my wedding slip with the key against my skin.
Stavros had not moved from the middle of the rug.
"I'll tell you why you're staying," I said to Nikos, "and then you'll tell me why you came."
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