The Wall of Winnipeg and Me - Mariana Zapata Page 0,44
shocked to have to count to ten after that.
All As and a couple of Bs hadn’t been good enough. Yet I’d still been horrified and disappointed when I got accepted to every decent school I applied to, but received no financial help other than a federal grant I qualified for because of my financial need, but that only covered 10 percent of my total yearly tuition.
And, of course, the school I wanted to go to was out of state and incredibly expensive. I’d loved it more than I loved any other one I’d gone to check out with my friends the fall of my senior year.
So, I did the unthinkable. I took out loans. Massive student loans.
Then I did the next most unthinkable thing in the world: I didn’t tell anyone.
Not my foster parents, not my little brother, or even Diana. No one knew except me. There was no other person in the world who carried the burden of nearly $200,000.00 on their conscience but me.
In the four years since graduating with my bachelors, I’d been paying off as much as I could from my loans while also attempting to put money aside in savings to eventually be able to dedicate myself full-time to my dream. A debt as large as the one I had was a bottomless pit that you had to accept like it was Hepatitis—it wasn’t going anywhere—but it only served to make me work harder, which was why I didn’t mind going to work for Aiden, and then doing my design work well into the middle of the night afterward. But there was only so much you could take, and I’d saved and paid off a significant enough of a chunk to get to the point where I felt like I could breathe for the first time in years… as long as I didn’t let myself look too closely at the loan statements I got in the mail every month.
But…
“What do you think?” the big man asked, leveling his stare right at me as if he hadn’t just busted out the greatest secret in my life.
What I thought was he was out of his damn mind. What I thought was my heart shouldn’t have been beating so quickly. What I also thought was no one else should have known about how much money I owed.
Mostly though, a small part of me was thinking there was a price for everything.
“Vanessa?”
I blinked at him before looking down at my poor, contaminated sandwich sitting in the sink. Then I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and opened them once more. “How do you know about my loans?”
“I’ve always known.”
What? “How?” I felt… I felt a little violated honestly.
“Trevor did a background check on you.” That sounded vaguely familiar now that he mentioned it, even though it was disturbing to hear they knew something I’d tried so hard to keep to myself. “There’s no way you’ve managed to pay them off,” Aiden stated.
He was right.
Vomit. Vomit. Vomit.
“Whatever you owe, I’ll pay it.”
Just like that. I’ll pay it. Like $150,000.00 was no big deal.
I liked to watch that show on television where bosses went undercover at their businesses and then at the end, they surprised their employees with some crazy amount of money to go on vacation, or to pay off whatever it was they owed money on. More often than not, I got teary-eyed watching it. The employees would usually always cry and say how they never expected something like that to happen to them, or they would talk about how much of a blessing the money was going to be for their families. Or how much the gift they were being bestowed was going to change their lives.
Yet here I was.
My hands shook. The ability to breathe was stolen from my lungs.
My loans were my Achilles heel.
I was only slightly ashamed of myself for not immediately thinking his offer was preposterous. Why wasn’t I kicking him out or telling him to go eat shit? Why wasn’t I laughing at his idea? Or telling him to get the hell out because he couldn’t buy me? He hadn’t treated me well. He didn’t deserve for me to do him a ‘favor’, and put my life on the line for him.
Clenching my hands at my sides, I let the sensation of being overwhelmed wash over me. He was offering to pay off this thing that weighed on my soul like a cement block in a pool. Who did that?