Page 39 of Asher Black (The Five Syndicates)
“Thank you, Monica. You may see yourself out now.”
It’s a dismissal, and my body relaxes when I hear her leave. Asher’s footsteps are eerily silent as he approaches the bed and throws something onto it beside me. It’s heavy.
“Here,” he says.
I peek an eye open slowly, pretending to just wake up. He rolls his eyes at my theatrics.
“How’d you know I was awake?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer me, and I don’t bother asking again. I haven’t forgotten about his time as a fixer. With his super ninja skills, he’s probably able to count my heartbeats from a mile away like Edward Cullen or something equally cool and predator-like.
Instead, I look at the thing he threw at me. It’s a black, nondescript binder, unlabeled and about an inch thick.
“What is it?” I ask.
“It’s full of paperwork and activities for marriages involving a noncitizen. Green card marriages. They use these activities and questionnaires in preparation for their interviews with immigration officers.”
“And you thought we could use these to get to know one another,” I finish.
He raises one of his hands, showing me an identical binder. “It’s a quick and efficient way, yes.”
I moan and nod. “Fine, but let me brush my teeth first.”
When I’m done brushing my teeth, I find Asher on the bed, sitting crisscross applesauce. Bare chested and in jogger sweats, he looks mouthwatering and almost… approachable. He has a pen cap in his mouth and has already begun filling out his questionnaire.
He glances up at me as I approach him, perching myself on the other side of the bed. I catch the pen he throws my way, open the binder, set it comfortably on my lap, and start my questionnaire.
We sit in comfortable silence, the only sound coming from the scribbles of our pens. The questions are simple at first, just general background questions… But the problem is that my background is shady at best. My name isn’t even my real name.
I answer the questions as best as I can, filling out my legal name and being truthful about my birthplace. I leave my biological parents’ names empty, because answering those lines will just lead to more questions about why I have my mother’s last name and not my father’s. If the rest of the questions are like this, this is going to be a long day.
By the time an hour has passed, I’ve only answered a handful of questions, skipping about ninety-nine percent of them.
I groan, finally deciding to give up. “This isn’t going to work.”
Asher studies my face, lingering on the light sheen of sweat on my forehead. (Some of the questions made me nervous. Sue me.)
“Why not?” he asks, his tone even but annoyed, which I find typical.
I settle for a half truth. “Because I’m a foster kid. I don’t know a lot of things about my past, and what I do know is complicated. Like the parents section. Am I supposed to list all the foster parents that had a hand in raising me? There’s a lot of them.”
He reaches out and grabs my binder. A frown graces his face as he scans the pages, presumably annoyed by all the empty blanks. He sighs. “We’ll have to do this verbally.”
Great.
Now I have to lie convincingly aloud.
I nod reluctantly. “How do you want to do this?”
“We’ll go question by question, taking turns to answer them.”
“Okay. You go first.”
“My name is Asher Aaron Black, and I was born on May 17, 1991.”
He snorts when he catches me taking notes on the Quizlet app of my phone. I make sure to set my profile to private first. I don’t want people to wonder why I have flashcards on Asher’s life, like I’m a stalker or something. I wave for him to continue.
“I was born at Mount Sinai Queens Hospital to a junkie mother and a pimp father. No siblings that I know of.”
