The Older Man Part I

Chapter 20

Adam

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VINCENT'S POINT OF VIEW

February 7, 2002, 2:39 P.M.

"How the hell am I gonna get out of this?" I heard Rachel say to herself under her breath. She was sitting in the dining room with her head in her hands and a pile of papers scattered across the table in front of her.

I furrowed my eyebrows at her before walking from my place in front of the TV in the living room to stand beside her.

With a comforting hand on her shoulder, I pressed a kiss to her head and asked her what was wrong.

"It's these damn tuition fees. I don't know how I'm gonna pay them," she huffed out with frustration.

"Tuition fees? Why do you have to worry about that? I thought your parents were paying for your tuition," I responded.

She sighed out heavily. "They were but they stopped paying for it when we got married."

I took a step back at her words. I couldn't wrap my head around what she had just told me. "Wait, what? They stopped paying for it right when we got married or-" Before I continued further, Rachel cut me off by explaining the situation to me in detail.

"My parents paid for the first three years I was at U of C, but when I told them that I was marrying you, they just stopped. They cut me off," she said blankly, "it's their stupid way of showing me that they don't approve of you and I. As if that was any secret," she grumbled her last words under her breath and rolled her eyes.

Rachel never mentioned this to me before so my initial reaction as shock but when I looked at how much stress was weighing on her shoulders, I quickly birthed the desire to want to help her.

Her parents always hated me and always would. That was a fact I had grown to accept.

Rachel, on the other hand, had difficulty handling it. Her parents liked to make her feel like she needed to choose between them or me. When she married me and became my wife, they took that as a slap in the face and reacted accordingly (at least in their eyes).

They never spoke to us or came to see us at our apartment. They never communicated happy birthdays to either of us. I assumed they would get past it for their daughter's sake. If they didn't want anything to do with me then that was understandable but Rachel was their only daughter. For them to treat her this way infuriated me.

I didn't take well to people disrespecting Rachel. She was the love of my life and I stood by her no matter what. I didn't care who I went toe to toe with defending her, even if it was her own mother and father.

Ever since we got together and they knew I came from a low-income family, they never treated her the same. It was shameful.

"Baby, why didn't you tell me? I could've done something," I said going to wrap my arms around her.

She shoved me away and got up abruptly from her seat. The wood floors creaked under her as she made her way to the kitchen.