Chapter 59: Lia’s Dreams
Lia was towing me toward the small footpath at the edge of the quad with both hands on my wrist now, her face the color of a stoplight, and behind us her three friends were cackling.
Once we were ten yards down the path, far enough that the cackling had become a distant thing, she finally stopped.
She put both hands over her face, "Daddy."
"Lia."
She cried out, "You did that on purpose."
I nodded, "...I did."
"Daddy."
"You called me sugar daddy in front of them, Lia. I am allowed one move per interaction. Those are the rules."
"Those are not the rules—"
"Those are the rules now."
"...Damnation."
I rolled my eyes, "You stole my swear."
"It is a good swear."
I laughed.
She peeked at me through her fingers, the pink still high on her cheeks, and then very slowly slid her hands down and gave me a small, real smile, the kind I had not yet seen on her, somewhere between sheepish and pleased.
"Hi, daddy."
"Hi, Lia."
"...Walk with me?"
"Lead the way."
...
She led me off the campus proper and through the side gate to the small public park that ran along the back fence, the one with the row of benches under the line of oak trees and the small duck pond that did not, as far as I could tell, currently contain ducks.
We sat on a bench under the largest oak.
The afternoon light was doing that thing it does in late spring, slanted, gold, soft on the grass.
Lia tucked one foot under her thigh and turned to face me on the bench, her knee almost touching mine.
"Okay." She took a small breath. "Get to know me."
"Just like that?" I asked.
"Just like that. You’ve seen me without clothes, daddy, you should know my deal."
"...Fair."
"Tell me yours after."
"Deal."
She looked down at her hands for a second, picking at a loose thread on the hem of her skirt. The flirty register was gone for the moment. The thing underneath it was quieter.
"I want to be an actress," she said.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Since I was a kid. I used to sneak into the drama club room during lunch and read scripts. I have a whole list of roles I want to play. I have a spreadsheet."
"That’s hot."
"Daddy."
I coughed, "Sorry. Continue."
"I’m in economics because I had to pick something that pays." She kept picking at the thread. "Acting doesn’t pay. Not at first. And I needed a degree that, you know. Translates."
"Translates to what?"
She paused.
Then she told me.
She told me about being an orphan and not remembering her bio parents at all. About a woman who had adopted her at twelve, a divorced woman, no kids of her own, who had taken her home from the agency and made her breakfast every morning for years without missing one.
About the woman’s ex-husband, who had run an investment fund, who had committed a fraud big enough that his name had been in the regional papers for a week, and who had then gone abroad and vanished, leaving the debt behind.
The debt was the part that mattered.
The ex-husband had borrowed against a lot of people. A few were banks. Most were not banks. The not-banks were the kind of lenders who, when the borrower disappeared, went after the spouse, and the spouse’s relatives, and the spouse’s relatives’ relatives, and did not particularly care which one of them paid as long as somebody did.
Her mother had been paying it down for years. Slowly. The principal had not really moved. The interest kept catching up. The relatives, her mother’s own family, had started to pull back, embarrassed, tired, blaming. Her mother had stopped going to the family dinners.
Lia had watched her mother get smaller and smaller over six years.
"She tries to hide it," Lia said. "She tries so hard, daddy. She tells me to focus on school. She tells me she’s fine. She’s not fine. She’s so not fine. And I—"
She paused. The thread on her skirt had been pulled out about an inch by now and she was still pulling.
"I can’t be an actress while she’s paying that off. I have to take a real job after I graduate. Something with a salary. I have to put money in the household every month. That is the deal I made with myself a long time ago."
"How much is left," I asked, quietly.
"...A million."
"Dollars."
"Dollars, yes."
I sat with that for a second.
A million. Six years of payments and still a million. The not-bank lenders are bleeding her on interest. Standard predatory structure, probably compounding monthly. Her mother has been carrying this alone for six years while raising a kid who didn’t know.
I looked at Lia. The pink had gone from her cheeks. She was just a tired twenty-year-old in a university uniform with a loose thread, telling me a thing she had probably never told anyone outside her own kitchen.
I whispered softly, "Lia."
"Yeah."
"I’ll handle it."
She blinked. "...You’ll what."
"I’ll handle it. The debt. The acting thing. All of it."
She stared at me. Then she gave me a small, careful, do-not-joke-with-me look, "Daddy."
"I’m not joking."
"You are joking."
I shook my head, "I’m not."
"Daddy, that is a million dollars, you cannot just—"
I pulled out my phone.
I opened the banking app.
I typed her number into the transfer field, the number she had given me yesterday for the small things, and I put in a hundred thousand and hit send.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
She did not move.
"Check it." I said.
"...Daddy."
"Check it, Lia."
She pulled the phone out with hands that had gone, I noticed, very slightly unsteady. She looked at the screen. She looked at me. She looked at the screen.
"This is a hundred thousand dollars."
"Mm."
"This is... daddy, this is...this is a hundred—"
I said, "That’s for now. To take some pressure off your mom this month. The rest I’ll clear in a few weeks. I’ve got something settling on my end. When it lands, the whole debt goes. Your mom doesn’t owe anything to anyone after that."
"Daddy."
"Yeah."
She looked down, "You can’t be serious."
"I’m serious."
"...*Why.*"
"Because I want to see you on a stage."
Her eyes did something complicated.
"And because," I added, because I’d promised myself I would say things out loud, "you should be an actress, Lia. Not because we have an arrangement. Because you’ve been carrying this since you were twelve and you deserve to do the thing you actually want."
The thread on her skirt tore the rest of the way off.
She did not notice.
The kiss landed somewhere between my mouth and the corner of it because she had moved too fast to aim, and then she corrected and got it properly, and then she got it properly again, harder, and her hands were in my collar and her knee was somewhere on my thigh and the whole bench moved approximately two inches to the left from the impact.
A woman walking her small white dog twenty feet away made a small oh! noise and pretended very hard to look at the duck pond, which, again, contained no ducks.
Lia did not care.
Lia, I was learning, did not care about a great many things when she had decided not to care about them.
She finally pulled back about two inches, breathing hard, her forehead against mine, her hand still fisted in my collar.
"Daddy."
"Lia."
"I love you so much right now I cannot speak."
"...You’re speaking."
"Shut up—"
She kissed me again.
The woman with the small white dog gave up and walked away.
’Filed,’ said the writer in the back of my head, distantly, from somewhere very far away. ’All of it. Including the bench.’
