I met her at the college fair

I met her at the college science fair. I had no idea who she was at the time. All I knew was that she looked familiar. I couldn’t really place her, though.

I spied her at one of the booths, and we started talking. Turns out she had an interest in space exploration, and, funnily enough, so did I. We must’ve spent at least fifteen minutes talking before some of her friends came up and demanded to know what was taking so long.

I remember their hostile looks as they practically surrounded her and dragged her off to another booth, all the while glaring at me over their shoulders until the crowd swallowed them up. And I remember thinking to myself, what the hell was their problem? I hadn’t hit on her, or flirted with her. We’d just had a normal conversation, as two adults were wont to do when they had a shared interest. Looking back on our encounter, I couldn’t for the life of me work out what the hell her friends’ problem with me was.

I put the incident out of my mind until I ran into her at the mall a couple of weeks later. This time she was on her own, and she apologised for her friends’ behaviour.

“They really don’t like it when I go off on my own.”

“Some friends they are then.”

“Um, well, they’re actually my bodyguards.”

“Okay. I guess that’s fair. But why were they looking at me like I was dirt on their shoe or something?”

At that moment, her phone rang, and her face fell as she answered the call. A short, terse exchange followed, and then she hung up with a scowl.

“I have to go. I’m sorry. Maybe I’ll see you around again.”

And then she was gone.

It was a few weeks after that when I spied a familiar face on the TV. And my eyes all but popped out of my head.

It turns out she was the youngest billionaire alive. And as I watched her, I felt my heart sink right to the bottom of my chest.

No wonder her bodyguards had been so hostile to me at the science fair.

She had a net worth that surpassed many billionaires twice her age, and she was the most eligible bachelorette at the time. Small wonder, then, that her bodyguards would guard her jealously.

Even so, as I turned off the TV, I wondered why she just didn’t tell them to shove off.

Then again, she probably didn’t have the freedom to do that. She had a rich uncle, as I recalled, who had a very jealous eye, and he was reported to have some rather… unsavoury designs on her. I didn’t even want to think what those designs might be, but they weren’t pretty. I could tell.

Even so, there was nothing I could do. I was a college drop out. And even if I managed to get a decent job, I’d be nowhere in her league.

So I put it out of my mind and moved on.

But a year later, she came back into my life.

And that’s when all hell broke loose.

Apparently her uncle had heard about our two encounters, and had decided to isolate her from the rest of the world. Thankfully she’d broken out of the house where she’d been kept prisoner, but now her uncle had men after her, and they had their orders.

Kill her at all costs.

Let’s just say it was a hell of a ride. And no one was on my side, even after she made her uncle’s debauchery public. I wasn’t in her class. I wasn’t a part of her world. I was just a lowly sales associate (told you I was a college drop out. Who’d want to hire me for their business when I hadn’t even gotten a degree?). In fact, people thought I was the one making up the claims about her uncle.

Like I said. All hell broke loose.

But then she came up with a plan.

And it was a bloody brilliant plan.

One night, she bugged every place in her uncle’s mansion that she could. And she went there on her own (but with the cops as back up in case things went south), to “apologise” for the “rumours” she’d spread. And she got him to admit everything.

Suffice to say, he was arrested within ten minutes.

But even after the trial, I still wasn’t accepted as a suitable husband for her.

But she didn’t care. She married me anyway.

Now we live in a house in Flushing, Queens. It’s a shit hole, but she’s happy. And we’ve got two kids, and another on the way. So all in all, it’s worked out. People still give me dirty looks when we walk down the street. But I don’t care, and neither does she.

As she said the day we got married, “I don’t give a shit what the rest of the world thinks. You’re my world, and that’s all that matters.”

In fact, she had those words engraved on the inside of our wedding rings. One half went on my ring, and the other on hers. It’s actually kind’ve cute, in a way, and it’s a perfect reminder of how we’re able to stand against the rest of the world.

We’re each other’s world, and our kids mean the world to us. And as long as we’ve got each other, well, the rest of the world can go to hell.