Read Online Little Nothing by Marisa Silver - Free Book Online Page B

blue then but no less unnerving, their color unfathomably deep. She was small and oddly formed, and yet her creamy skin, her sumptuous curls, and that gaze which seemed guileless and knowing at the same time—she’d moved him more than any girl he’d ever seen.
    But he knows that if he looked at her now the way he dreams of, taking her in fully, letting her see his desire for her, she would be insulted. She is too used to being stared at, to seeing the curious, then leering, then repulsed expressions on the faces of strangers. How could he convey to her that his interest is any different?
    And is it? Would he really take her in his arms? Would he lay his cheek next to hers, feel the bristles there, run his hand over her long nose and not be sickened? Would he brush her mouth with his lips?
    She picks up a pair of lady’s underwear that has, inexplicably, been left on the ground. She twirls it around on her finger and laughs before letting it sail and land on top of the trash. Their cleaning duties done, she wraps herself in a ragged shawl. “You should leave,” she says. “Get away from him. I don’t know why you don’t.”
    Danilo tries to hide his disappointment. They have had this discussion many times before. Of course she has no option but to stay with Smetanka. Who else would employ her? How would she live? Václav’s plumbing business folded once the village learned what he and his wife had done to their daughter. Her parents are living off money from the deal they struck with Smetanka whereby he sends them a percentage of her earnings each month. Her work is all that is keeping them alive. But Danilo is another story.
    â€œI won’t leave you alone with him,” he says.
    â€œYour guilt doesn’t do me any good,” she says.
    The truth of this stabs him. How could she ever care for him? It was he who built the table, who turned the crank. It was he who didn’t have the nerve to stand up to his employer then just as he doesn’t now.
    He started to work for Smetanka when he was seventeen and his twin brother fell ill with a fever that wouldn’t abate. His family did not have the money for the doctor’s care and so offeredtheir healthy son as payment. Despite Smetanka’s prescriptions, the twin did not survive. After a year of unpaid service to the doctor, Danilo settled the family’s debt. But when he returned home, he found that his parents no longer wanted him there. Although the birth of twins had been considered a sign of great luck, the boy’s death signaled that the family’s good fortune had turned and that they were cursed. Danilo, as the living representation of their failure, made it impossible for his father, a cobbler, to attract new business, and even loyal customers began to take their worn-down shoes elsewhere. Where once every self-respecting family wanted a newborn to wear a pair of Novák soft leather booties at first communion, or a daughter to be shod in a pair of Novák satin wedding slippers on her special day, now to ask the shoemaker to punch an extra hole in a belt to accommodate an expanding waist was to court bad fortune. Danilo was a torture for his grieving mother. When he arrived home from Smetanka’s after that first indentured year, she screamed as if she were seeing a ghost, and it was hours before her husband could calm her enough to convince her that Danilo was not her beloved dead son come back to haunt her. But even then, she would not look at him. With no family business for Danilo to inherit, no mother willing to cook for him and give him a bed to sleep in, and no one else in town offering to take him on as an apprentice, all that was left for Danilo was to return to the employ of the doctor at unfavorable terms: in exchange for his work, he would be allowed to sleep in the storage closet and receive one and a half meals a day.
    Danilo had little formal learning, but it did not take