Love In The Wild West

“Oh really?” said Lila with a chuckle. “I am not at all out of your league, though. Rather, I am firmly in your league I would say! Anyway, that is a conversation for another time. Shall we go?”

“Yes,” said Kurt, offering Lila his arm. “Let’s go.”

They went outside to the car park where Kurt’s car was standing in a reserved spot. Lila was rather surprised by the car. It was a really nice one, but nothing like the enormous monstrosities that people tended to drive when they were obscenely rich. She had expected Kurt to have a ridiculously expensive vehicle, or at least the kind of car that would make him appear as rich as he actually was. She was not used to people being this humble, or this willing to not appear rich. She had even expected a driver, or some kind of indication that he owned a chain of very successful restaurants.

“This is a nice car,” said Lila. “I am pretty impressed. I thought that you would be like all other rich men and would need to use this car to make yourself feel good and manly. A lot of rich men end up spending a great deal of money on cars for some reason. I should realize, by now, that you are nothing like other rich men.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Kurt. “I am just more aware of how things can look to the objective observer. After all, I grew up on a ranch among cowboys. If I had not adapted to the way things were and realized that a lot of behavior is simply inappropriate I never would have heard the end of it from my parents!”

Lila laughed and said, “I am really glad that they knocked some sense into you when they did. I do not know what I would have done if you had ended up being some kind of douchebag! At least this way you are a good person and I do not have to feel weird around you.”

“I am glad too,” said Kurt, “because I have a feeling that you would not have liked me very much if I was like all those other rich people.”

They got into the car and started to drive away from the hotel and closer to the town.

“So,” said Lila. “You mentioned your parents. What are they like?”

“Oh they are great,” said Kurt. “My father died a couple of years ago. A heart attack. But my mother is still around.”

“I am so sorry to hear about your father,” said Lila. “May I ask what happened?”

“He just led a bad lifestyle,” said Kurt. “He was always working, he never ate healthy food, he drank a lot. He was not an alcoholic, he just didn’t have fun without whiskey and since he was a work hard play harder kind of person he really needed to drink a lot to let loose after a hard days work. It’s okay, though, it happened a while ago now and I am quite used to it. I think that if he were here he would have been proud of me. He was that kind of person, after all. He was the kind of person that would make you feel like you are doing the right thing, and he was always there to give you a hand if you felt confused about anything. I miss him, of course I do, but at the same time I have come to be grateful for all of the time that I did get to spend with him because it made me a better person. You mentioned that your parents were… not very good for you. May I ask why?”

“Yeah,” said Lila. “They were just… I do not know. They were very broken people. This was why they ended up together, I think, because they were both broken and this allowed them to be easily understood in each other’s eyes, because they had both had similarly traumatic childhoods. I think they were happy in the first few years of their relationship. They were together, and this was all that mattered to them for a very long time. When they had me… I think that changed things a little. Because when I was born, my father lost his job. They had to depend on my mother’s income for a year or so because he was unable to find a job. This ended up undoing a lot of the progress they had made over the last few years. They ended up being miserable, and I grew up in that misery. I think they blamed me, in a way, for the ruination of their happiness. I was not planned, you see, and when I was born my father lost his job so they just came to associate my birth with all of that hardship.”

“That was not your fault though,” said Kurt. “I am so sorry that you had to go through that. You… you really are a very beautiful person and I wish that your parents had not treated you that way. It’s pretty remarkable that you went through something like that and you were still able to…well, maintain your sanity. Most people end up getting severely traumatized as a result of such things. I think it is a testament to how powerful you are and how inherently strong that you came out on the other side more or less intact.”

They pulled up in front of the restaurant. Lila saw it through the tinted window of the car and she liked what she saw. She also like the direction this conversation was taking. She had never talked to any man about her parents, least of all on the first dare. Kurt was the first person she had ever talked to about this that she was romantically involved with, and he was not freaking out at all. On the contrary, he was being quite supportive of the whole thing and she was really glad that this was the case.

They exited the car and headed into the restaurant. Lila was having a really nice time, and she hoped that the rest of the evening would go just as well as the first half of it had gone. They were a little later than they had expected to be, and Lila wondered if this would end up taking the night in a direction she was not sure she wanted it to go.