“I don’t have a choice.”
Grabbing her hand in mine, I pull her to a stop. “We all have a choice. If he’s making you uneasy, you shouldn’t go to him.”
“I can’t. We have a deal, and I don’t know what he’ll do if…” Yasmin shakes her head, dismissing the idea. “I can’t.”
The hairs at the nape of my neck rise with trepidation. “What kind of a deal?”
At this point I’m not sure what to expect. The person I thought I knew for the better part of two years, the person I admire, is a farce, and I’m not sure what to believe in.
Yasmin watches me for a moment. I can see her debating on whether to tell me the truth or not.
Intertwining our fingers, I tug at her arm. She falls on the floor next to me. With my free hand, I push the strand of her hair behind her ear. “You know you can tell me anything. I’ll keep your secret.”
“Because I’m keeping yours?” Yasmin cups my face.
“No.” I trace her cheek with the tip of my thumb. Leaning down, my forehead brushes against hers. I shouldn’t do this. Hell, I shouldn’t have asked her to come in the first place. It clashes with everything we agreed on. But seeing her, it does something to me. She does something to me, something I can’t name, but don’t want to give up. Consequences be damned. “Because you know my darkness, and I want to know yours. I didn’t want to tell anybody about my mom because I don’t want them to pity me, but I don’t regret taking you home with me that day, Yasmin. Having you there with me… it made it a little bit easier. So yeah, I want you to tell me your secret, not because I want to have something on you, but because hopefully it’ll make you feel better. The decision is all yours.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
YASMIN
The decision is all yours.
Nixon’s words ring in my mind. I want to tell him, share this secret I’ve been hiding with somebody. No, not just somebody. I want to share it with him. The most unlikely of confidants. But there is something about Nixon that draws me to him. That has drawn me to him from the very moment we met.
My throat bobs, tongue sliding out to wet my suddenly dry lips.
“He got me into Blairwood,” I confess quietly. My secret. My truth. My shame. “He got me into Blairwood and, in exchange, I have dinner with him once a week.”
“What?” Nixon pulls back to look at me, completely dumbfounded. “How?”
Not something he expected to hear, huh?
Shifting in my seat, I move closer to him. I’m not sure if they don’t have the heating system down here, or maybe they just don’t turn it on, but whatever it is, it’s freezing, especially since we stopped moving.
Nixon lifts his hand and puts it over my shoulder, pulling me into the crook of his arm. I rest my head against his shoulder, relishing in the warmth of his body.
Just this once, I say to myself, but the other part of me laughs.
That’s what you already said.
“I was supposed to go to Yale. I got a scholarship, a full ride,” I say, remembering the events like they happened yesterday. The joy of that moment I got home to find the envelope with my acceptance letter. The look of pride on my mom’s face. “I worked my ass off for as long as I can remember. That’s just the way I am, the way I was raised. Hernandez girls always work hard, it’s like it’s written in our DNA.”
I should have known it couldn’t last forever. It was just too good to be true. Too good to last.
“But then, my senior year, Mom got real sick. She got pneumonia, and it was so bad she ended up in the ER.”
I could still remember those days. Our apartment was tiny, but even if it were bigger the walls were so thin, sometimes I’d swear I could hear what my neighbors five stories up were talking about. Mom was constantly coughing, but it sounded more like she was trying to spit her lungs out. Her breathing was low and wheezy, and she could hardly get a few words out. By the time I finally got her to go to the hospital, she could barely breathe.
“Things were… bad. They wanted her to stay, but we couldn’t afford it, so she went home and tried to get better. But staying home for so long meant that she couldn’t work.” I shake my head. All my life she worked two jobs so we could have a decent living and not once did I hear her complain. If you work hard, you’ll be rewarded. She used to say it all the time. It was our mantra, and in an ideal life it would be just like that. But life is far from ideal, and it throws you a curveball when you least expect it. Sometimes if you’re lucky you get to dodge it, but more often than not, it smacks you right in the face, throwing you to the ground and ripping away everything you worked for.”
“When she got sick you found a job,” Nixon says quietly.
For a moment, lost in the memories, I forgot he was even there.
“I found a job.” I nod in affirmation. “It was after school, so I didn’t miss my classes, but the hours were long. I slept little, missed some deadlines, failed a few pop quizzes… By the end of the year, I managed to salvage enough to graduate on time, but I lost my scholarship.”
It was still hard to believe that those years of hard work could have all been for nothing. That everything was lost in a matter of months.
No, not all. I still had my mom. It took time but she got better and that’s better than any scholarship at any college I could have ever gotten.
Nixon pulls back and tips my chin to face him. His gentle eyes pierce mine, not missing a thing. “You never told her, did you?”
“I couldn’t bring myself to do it.” I smile sadly. “Mom was so happy when I got those acceptance letters. She told all her friends that her girl was accepted to one of the top colleges in the country. When you come from nothing and struggle all your life to make it work, when you come from a family where most of the people barely finished high school, you want to show the world you’re better than what they give you the right to be. I couldn’t take that joy away from her. But without a scholarship, there was no way I could actually make it work.”
“So you called the coach.”
My throat tightens, but I force the words out. “And so I called the coach, something I never thought I’d do.”
“Why not?”
“Why not?” I shout, pulling back. Angry with him for asking the question, for not seeing. But even more angry at myself for still caring. I shouldn’t care. “He left me, left my mom, and he never, not once, looked back.”
And when people leave you, you want to show them that you did make it. All on your own. A lot of good that did me.
“I’m sorry, that was stupid.” Nixon grabs my arm. “So, how did you get in touch with him?”
“You’d think it would have been harder, but by then he hadn’t been a professional athlete for quite some time. I found him online, phone number and all. I called, introduced myself and asked him to meet me. Not even a week later he was in the city, sitting across from me in some shady bar in Queens. I told him what I needed, and he agreed. On the condition that I spend one night a week with him, giving him a chance to get to know me.”
A shiver runs through me. The cool air and exhaustion are getting to me, so much, not even Nixon can keep me warm.