"Mark." She stopped talking. "You don't have to tell me how these things got here, but if you need someone to listen to you, I'll be there." I swallowed. "It. it was my father." "Oh fucking asshole, how can you say that to her? Your father is the most calm guy from Scotland. He can't even see a wrestling game because he says he can feel the pain when someone is hit," my brain said, but my heart said: "Don't tell her the truth, she will leave you." So I continued. "Everyday after school.I didn't want to go home..be..because he slapped me everytime I did something, or didn't. If I went to school, and had a bad rate, he slapped me. If I got a good one, he slapped me. I..I can't talk about it any further." And I started to cry. But not because I thought about the slapping, as Susan thought, but because I thought I needed to cry, just to make it look a bit more real.

Mark started to cry and I didn't know what to do. I was so angry. We are going to his parents tomorrow and I hope his dad is home so I can tell him what I think about him. But now Mark needed a loving Susan and not an angry one. So I wrapped my arms around him and let him cry. When he became a bit calmer I looked to his arms and kissed his scarves one by one. Just to show him that there is someone who loves him.
We continued and we made love like I'd never done before. We really made LOVE. It was not a fast shag or something. And he said things to me that I never thought to hear out of his mouth. He just said what he felt at that moment. He said he loved me. I have never been so happy in my whole life. I thought I didn't heard it right so I asked him what he was saying and he said: "I think you heard me clear enough," and he went with his mouth at my ear, "I love you, my Dutch princess." I was blushing so hard, I looked like an almost exploded tomato. I turned my mouth to his ear and said: "And I love you, my Scottish piece of scum." And he laughed when he heard it. " Well, that's nice, I treat you like a princess and then you call me scum. I think I'm going away now."
I saw his eyes twinkle when he said that. "I like it when your eyes twinkle like that," I said to him, and now it was his turn to look like a tomato.
About an hour after that, I slept. But I didn't sleep very well. I was worried about Mark and about tomorrow. I kept having these little movies inside my head where Mark's father is a gigantic man and he is slapping this poor little child.