Decent lies

Allison grew up in a children's home. There, she learned not to cry in front of others and not to ask for what she knew she wouldn't get. Then came a boarding school, where she learned to lie. Not out of malice—to survive. So no one would hurt her, no one would scold her, so the other kids would accept her, so she could sneak out after curfew.

By eighteen, she had learned to be different people. To teachers—a diligent straight-A student who would pass her exams and get into college. To peers—a fun friend who always kept the conversation going and never pried. To herself—no one. No one knew who she really was when she was alone.

After college, she rented a tiny room in the house of an elderly couple who kept to themselves. Mr. and Mrs. Harrison were old, quiet, and barely left their half of the house. Sometimes Mrs. Harrison would leave a plate of cookies or a jar of homemade jam outside Allison's door, but she never tried to talk. It was the best thing that had happened to her in a long time. No one controlled her, no one asked questions, no one demanded explanations. Just silence and freedom.

But freedom turned out to be as empty as a cage. Just more space to be alone.

She worked at a small bookstore downtown. The pay was laughable, but Allison loved the smell of the place—old paper, dust, and coffee from the vending machine by the entrance. She sorted books, shelved them, sometimes read in the evenings when there were no customers. Life flowed evenly and quietly, page after page.

Life goes on in its usual rhythm, settling into routine. Time feels like rubber, and the thought creeps in that this is your permanent state. This is how it will always be. Until one day, life flips completely. And within moments after a pivotal event, you're hit with the realization that nothing is in your control—something can happen without your involvement, and the old life will never return. That's how Allison met him.

He worked at a small diner across the street from her bookstore. Allison stopped by for pastries in the mornings—one poppy seed, one chocolate. The guy was always at the counter—quiet, focused, his hands moving with the precision of a samurai wielding a katana.

For a whole week, she came there for lunch. For the first time, she felt this kind of pull toward the opposite sex. She hesitated for a long time. She liked everything about him—the way he adjusted his apron before stepping out to customers, the way he stared out the window when the diner emptied. In his eyes, there was no boredom, no sadness—only a calm, deep emptiness.

One day, during her reconnaissance, she gathered her courage and decided she would finally approach him and talk about something other than pastries. She finished her pastries, finished her latte, and was about to walk over when a line formed at the counter. First three people, then two more. She waited thirty minutes, but the crowd didn't thin out. Meanwhile, her lunch break ended, and she had to return to her post at the bookstore.

Her mood soured for the rest of the day. Near closing time, as she was shelving books, her attention was caught by a bright red cover—Stephen King's Carrie. She set it aside to read until the end of her shift.

In Carrie, she saw herself—lonely, misunderstood, desperate to belong, to be normal. Carrie's mother reminded her of the caretakers at the children's home. They too were obsessed with Christ and instilled the fear of hellfire in their charges.

Only ten minutes remained until closing. Allison was right in the middle of the book's bloody climax when someone knocked on the wooden counter. She looked up and saw him. In that instant, she flushed—embarrassed and startled. So absorbed in her reading, she hadn't even noticed him walk in.

"Hi," he smiled.

"Hi," she replied, feeling her face turn red.

"My name is..." he started.

"I know," she interrupted. "You forgot to take off your name tag."

He laughed, and the sound seemed the most genuine thing in the world.

"So you're Allie?" he nodded at her tag.

"Yeah, Allie."

"Nice to meet you. I see you in the diner a lot."

"I like your pastries."

"Chocolate and poppy," he finished for her.

"Yeah," she laughed again.

He looked at her with warm, chocolate-brown eyes, as if he could see right through her. Allison felt something tighten inside—not fear, but something else she couldn't name. That look. As if she were sitting before him completely naked.

"How's Carrie?" he asked, nodding toward the book in her hands.

Allison looked at it as if she'd forgotten what she was reading.

"Lots of blood. I like it so far. Have you read it?"

"Yeah, but I don't like Stephen King. Too dark for me." He paused for a moment. Allison didn't know what to say, lost in his deep brown eyes.

"There's a cheese festival this Sunday. Want to go together?"

Allison couldn't hide her joy. Her mouth stretched into an unnaturally wide smile. "Yes, I love cheese!" she answered.

"So should I call you?" he asked cautiously.

"Yes, of course!" she blurted.

Silence hung in the store, broken a moment later by him: "Are you going to give me your number?"

They both laughed. Allison quickly scanned the counter for a scrap of paper to write her number on, but found nothing. She shuffled things from the center to the edges—coffee mug, books, folders, stationery—and stumbled upon a receipt left by a customer. Writing her number on the back, she handed it to him. As he reached for it, he accidentally knocked over the half-drunk coffee mug she'd left on the edge. It crashed, and shards scattered across the wooden floor.

"Oh, sorry. I didn't see it," he said, immediately crouching to clean up.

"No, it's my fault! I'll clean it," Allison exclaimed and rushed to the back room for a broom and dustpan. When she returned, he was still on his knees, picking up pieces. Odd how a simple mug, falling from such a small height, had managed to shatter across the entire floor. While he collected the larger pieces near the counter, Allison swept the smaller fragments from the edges. She worked backward from the corner toward the center, focused on the task, and accidentally whacked him on the head with the broom.

From that day, everything began.

He was a man of few words; Allison couldn't stop talking. She constantly told him things, often about her childhood, and for some reason, often referred to herself in the third person. Their conversations were exactly what conversations should be, as if God designed them—one spoke, the other listened.

He rented a modest apartment above a laundromat, about an hour's drive from the diner where he worked. Allison loved visiting him. The old wooden floorboards in the hallway creaked underfoot, and so did the front door. It locked with four bolts, but that wouldn't have helped much—the door looked like it was made of cardboard. Anyone who wanted to get into that old one-bedroom apartment could have cut a hole through it with a utility knife. Despite the decrepit state of the place, he had managed to create a cozy refuge. Minimal furniture. In the center of the room stood a round dining table with two chairs. In the corner lay a mattress directly on the floor, but neatly made. Beside the mattress stood a floor lamp with a warm, pleasant glow. Above it, shelves lined the wall, packed with books—mostly cookbooks and classic literature.

When she visited, he cooked her dinners and breakfasts. New dishes every time. He was practicing, and she was his only critic. Occasionally, he taught her to cook—it was a wonderful, romantic time.

He was poor. His clothes fit into one small suitcase by the entrance. But his poverty wasn't pitiful—it was inspiring to Allison. They were on the same social level, but his confidence made him seem infinitely richer than her. She admired that he never pretended to be what he wasn't. And he never lied. He preferred the potential discomfort of truth to the weight of a lie. This sometimes caused friction between them.

It drew Allison in and frightened her at the same time. He wasn't like her. She was used to lying, pretending, adapting.

They rarely talked about the future. Allison saw him sometimes writing in a worn notebook, calculating something in his head, looking at rental ads for commercial spaces. But he never said these plans aloud. Allison was afraid to ask—what if there was no place for her in those plans? What if what felt like the love of her life was just a summer fling for him? It would have destroyed her.

One day, they were walking in the park by the pond, holding hands. He was talking, and Allison was quiet and listening—unusual for them. For several days, a question had been eating at her. She knew it would torment her until she asked it aloud. This moment in the park, while he was so talkative and cheerful, seemed right.

"I want to ask you something," she blurted out, interrupting him mid-sentence.

"Ask away, Allie," he smiled.

"Have you thought about our future?" she asked finally, holding her breath.

"Next week?" he clarified.

It felt like mockery. She was sure he knew exactly what she meant and was trying to dodge the question in the stupidest way possible. But she swallowed her irritation and gave him another chance. "No, I mean us. The future. Are we ever going to live together? Maybe get married?"

"Only when I'm sure about tomorrow," he said, as if his earlier flippant clarification had been just a stalling tactic.

"You know what I mean? When I'm sure we won't get kicked out of our rental, that I can support us. When I have everything I need for that kind of certainty—then I can think about it."

"And when do you think that'll be? A year? Two? Maybe five or ten?"

He turned to her. In his eyes, she saw that the good mood he'd radiated at the start of the walk had vanished completely. Only that calm, heavy seriousness remained—the one that frightened her most.

"As long as it takes. I can't predict the future, but I'm doing everything I can to get that stability and certainty. We're young—why complicate things so soon?"

Allison fell silent, her blue eyes filling with tears.

He realized his answer hadn't satisfied her. She realized it had been foolish to expect fairy tales from him. That was who he was—a straightforward man. And that was who she was—a girl dreaming of the family she'd never had. Walking to the end of the park, having received his cold answers as they were, she felt a strange relief. The human mind hates nothing more than incompleteness. An answer, even if cold and hurtful, still satisfies it.

When they left the park and headed to the bus stop, Allison had already processed everything and felt that familiar warmth for her companion again. She took his warm, soft hand. He took hers.

A few months later, their relationship somehow naturally reached the point where Allison moved in with him. They bought a bigger mattress. Allison started taking extra shifts at the bookstore—she seemed to be modeling herself after him. He set goals and outlined steps; she accepted them and worked toward stability. Evenings, they were too tired and just collapsed into bed. They only managed to be a romantic couple on weekends. To avoid getting bogged down in domesticity, they promised each other not to talk about work on weekends and to spend them only together—whether lying in bed watching Jim Carrey movies, walking in the park, or going on adventures.

When their relationship was almost eight months old, Allison noticed changes in her body and mood. Women pay much more attention to such things than men. Men won't go to a doctor until someone has to drag them there in an ambulance. Women, on the other hand, listen to every whisper their body makes.