Page 77 of A Life Betrayed
Teaching at the center had started as a temporary preoccupation but become something bigger, more important. The pay was next to nothing—as Mathias took pains to point out. He would observe Rayan as he gathered his materials each morning. “They keep coming, and they’ll just keep shipping them out. How will a few months of learning French change any of that?”
“It’s something though, isn’t it?”
And Mathias would sigh, shaking his head. Rayan knew what it was like to have nothing, and he knew what it was like to feel that knowledge gave him something.
Rayan walked into the kitchen, dropped his bag, and placed the rolled-up piece of paper on the counter. He took out a stockpot from the cabinet, filled it with water, and put it on the stove to boil. From down the hall came a click and then a soft thud as the front door opened and closed. Rayan hadn’t expected him back for another few hours.
Mathias strode into the kitchen, and his eyes fell on the paper from Rayan’s class. He plucked it from the counter and unrolledit, one eyebrow raised. “I thought you were supposed to be teaching them French,” he said, dropping it back down.
Rayan shrugged. “Sometimes you need to make peace with the old to learn something new.”
“Two years of philosophy, and now you’re a fucking oracle?”
Rayan snickered. “A little early, isn’t it? Not like you to slack off.”
“Who’s slacking?” Mathias said with a smirk. “I got my hands on an original Monet.”
The skills that had served Mathias so well in the family had proven effectively transferrable. Rayan knew he didn’t tell him everything about the business, no doubt to avoid implicating him. There were bound to be aspects of it that brushed up against the law—or at least stretched the interpretation of it. Mathias was well-versed in the ways the world worked and how best to place himself in it. Nothing had changed there.
Mathias stepped over to the fridge, and as he passed, his hand grazed the small of Rayan’s back. Rayan remembered a time when he would have given anything for that casual brush of contact. Now it came easily, built into the groove of the day without him realizing. Rayan caught Mathias’s arm, moving to kiss him—seamless, like a song paused and then restarted.
“Don’t start something you can’t finish,” Mathias murmured, pushing him up against the counter.
“Who said anything about not finishing?” Rayan asked, his arms encircling the man’s neck, and he tilted his chin to capture Mathias’s mouth once again.
Behind him, the piece of paper curled on the counter, the curves of black paint forming a neat word that contained multitudes:home.
