The Billionaire's Command (The Silver Cross Club) (28 page)

On Friday evening, when I asked her what she wanted to do that weekend, my blissful interlude came to an abrupt end.

“I’m working tomorrow night,” she said, rolling over in bed to face me. “I talked to Germaine. I can’t just keep pretending that I’m on permanent vacation.”

I still hated the thought of her going back to work at the club, but I swallowed my objections. She already knew that I disapproved, and scolding her about it wouldn’t make her change her mind. If I tried to control her, she would tell me to fuck off. Probably in exactly so many words.

So I said, “Let’s do something tomorrow morning, then. Something noteworthy. Soon you’ll be a nocturnal creature again, and I’ll have to settle for seeing you on your days off.” I slid one hand down her side, trying to show her that I wasn’t upset.

“It’s not that bad,” she said, her expression slightly guilty despite my best efforts to mask my displeasure. “I told Germaine I’m not going to be working seven days a week anymore. Probably five. I’m going to try to stick to five.”

“I’m fairly certain that’s a sign of workaholism,” I said.

She covered her face with both hands. “I know! Okay. I know. I can’t help it. We never had any money when I was growing up, and now I have enough money to help my mom and send my sister to college, and it’s hard to know when to stop. I think about all the things I could do for my family if I just had a little bit
more
money, and it’s like. Where do I draw the line?”

I drew her hands away from her face and kissed each of her palms, one and then the other. “Stop worrying about money. I told you I’d give you whatever you need.” I set my fingers against her lips, staving off whatever protest she was about to make. “I know you won’t take me up on it. But you don’t have to worry anymore. If something happens, if—who knows, if one of your brothers is paralyzed in a terrible accident and needs cutting-edge robotic technology in order to walk again, you’ve got a backup plan. You don’t have to do it alone anymore. You can lean on me if you need to.”

She pushed my hand away from her mouth and said, “You’re sweet.”

Her tone didn’t indicate sarcasm, but I was suspicious anyway. “Are you mocking me?”

“Of course not!” she said, frowning. “I mean it. You
are
sweet. But I’m never going to take your money, so you might as well give up on the idea.”

She had been perfectly willing to take my money when it was a business transaction, but I knew better than to bring that up. Business was business, and what we were doing had long since ceased to be business. If I was being honest with myself, it had stopped being business the very first time she spent the night in my bed, the day she signed the contract.

“We’ll revisit this topic at a later time,” I said. “Now, what would you like to do tomorrow? We could have lunch at some breathtakingly trendy restaurant, or—I don’t know, rent out the Empire State Building for a few hours and have sex on the observation deck—”

“I want to go to the Statue of Liberty,” she said.

I raised my eyebrows and ran one hand down the curve of her back, settling on her sweet ass. “Really? You know it’s full of tourists and teenagers from New Jersey.”

“I’ve never been,” she said. “Isn’t that sad? I’ve lived in New York for three years and I’ve never been to the Statue of Liberty.”

“That
is
sad,” I said. “And a known side effect of workaholism. Of course we’ll go, if that’s what you’d like to do.”

She smiled at me and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “You’d better be careful. If you keep indulging me like this, I’m going to get spoiled.”

“And what a terrible state of affairs that would be,” I said. I rolled onto my back and pulled her on top of me, and those were the last words we exchanged for quite a while.

She spent the night at my apartment, and in the morning we got out of bed at an unreasonably early hour for Saturday and walked to the subway station in Union Square. We stopped for bagels on the way, and I was treated to the surprisingly delightful sight of Sasha eagerly stuffing her face with a dab of cream cheese on her nose.

“I’m hungry,” she said, when I smiled at her vigor.

“A healthy appetite in a woman is a sign of gluttony,” I said. “Surely you know that. Also, you have cream cheese on your nose.”

She shrugged. “I’ll lick it off later.”

“You’re disgusting,” I said in admiration.

We took the train to Bowling Green, and walked from there to the ferry terminal in Battery Park. We had timed it so that we were in line for the first ferry of the day: less crowded, and fewer tourists. I knew that, as a lifelong New Yorker, I was supposed to be tolerant of and helpful to the tourists, who were, after all, the lifeblood of the city; but I mainly found them irritating, with their sparkling white athletic shoes and propensity to stop in the middle of the sidewalk and unfold their maps, oblivious to everyone around them. The thought of sharing Liberty Island with dozens of squawking teenagers and red-faced men in “I Heart NY” t-shirts was more than I could handle.

It was a hot morning, and even with the sun still rising over Brooklyn, the humidity had me sweating through my t-shirt as we waited in line for the ferry. A breeze blew off the water to the south. Sasha turned her face into it, her hair blowing, and said, “Thanks for indulging me.”

“I don’t indulge,” I said.

“Yeah, you say that, but you do,” she said. “I bet you’ve been to the Statue of Liberty so many times you’re sick of it.”

That was true, but I wouldn’t admit it to her. “I haven’t been here in years,” I said. “Not since middle school, I think. They tried to make us go in high school, but my father sent a note to school that I was sick, and we spent the day at the Central Park Zoo instead.”

She smiled up at me. “You’re close with your dad, huh?”

I shrugged. “He raised me. My mother was always at work, always busy. I love her, of course, but my father’s the one who changed the sheets in the middle of the night when I wet the bed.”

“I can’t imagine little Alex ever peeing the bed,” she said. “I bet you were a really serious little kid. Like, reading boring Russian novels by the time you were eight. I bet you didn’t even go outside to play.”

“You have very strange ideas about me,” I said. “Do I seem serious now?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes. But sometimes you’re really playful. I can’t figure you out.”

“Good,” I said. “When the mystery’s gone, the relationship’s over.”

“Oh, is that what this is?” she asked. “Are we in a relationship?”

Her tone was light, teasing, but I looked at her very seriously—as serious as she accused me of being—and said, “I wouldn’t hesitate to give it that label.”

“Well,” she said. She glanced away, and slipped her hand into mine, small and warm. “I guess that’s okay.”

We crossed the water at the front of the ferry, standing at the railing while seagulls swooped overhead. The ferry was almost empty at that time of day, and our only company at the bow was a man and his son, probably about eight years old, tossing bits of bread at the birds and shrieking with laughter as they stooped to catch the pieces midair.

Sasha smiled at the man and said, “He looks like he’s having fun.”

The man chuckled. “We do this every weekend, and he never gets tired of it. Kids, huh?”

“Yeah,” she said, and looked away.

I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and squeezed. “Troubled thoughts?”

“I’m just thinking about my brothers,” she said. “I kind of raised them, you know? We would walk into town because there was this duck pond near the church, and Tristan always got his fingers bit because he was too dumb to toss the bread on the ground.”

“When was the last time you saw them?” I asked.

“My dad’s funeral,” she said, and there was nothing to say after that.

The ferry landed at Liberty Island, and we disembarked and walked around the perimeter of the island to the front of the statue. Tickets to go inside had been sold out months before, so we just stood and gazed up at the golden flame in silence.

“My ancestors probably saw this,” Sasha said, after a few minutes of quiet contemplation. “They came over from Scotland in the late 1800s. The land of promise, you know. All that bullshit. And then they ended up digging coal out of the earth.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I took her hand and threaded my fingers through hers.

“This is really nice,” she said. “I’m glad we came. I’m glad—Christ.” She turned to the right and looked toward the Manhattan skyline: the skyscrapers of the Financial District, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Empire State Building small in the distance. “I really love New York.”

Her voice was thick, choked with emotion, and I watched with concern as she blinked back tears. “Sasha,” I said, “what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said, and shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s just—I’ve lived here for three years, and I’ve never appreciated it. I’ve never
done
anything. I just work and go home and then go to work again. And now, being with you, seeing the city through your eyes, I just—I wish I had taken advantage of it, you know? Like, done stuff. Gotten out of the apartment more.”

“We can start doing stuff,” I said, bewildered. “Whatever you want. There’s plenty of time.”

She shook her head again and didn’t reply.

Women baffled me. I kissed her temple and waited there with her, giving her time to work through her emotions. She turned to me at last and gave me a watery smile. “Want to see if we can charm the guard into letting us inside?”

“It won’t work,” I said.

“I bet you ten dollars,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “You’re on.”

* * *

I didn’t see her again for several days. I tried, but she was always at work. Finally, fed up with texting her and being rebuffed, I decided I would visit her at the club.

It was a stupid idea. I knew that even as the thought occurred to me, and as I exited the subway at 14th Street, having come directly from work, I knew that Sasha would be unhappy with me, and that I would regret it. But I didn’t turn east and walk home, like I should have. I walked to the club.

It was close to 6 by the time I arrived, and the evening was in full swing. A half-naked dancer spun around the pole on the main stage, and the gathered men watched, rapt, slack-jawed, as she spread her legs above her head and slowly sank toward the floor. It was an impressive display of strength and artistry, and I felt nothing as I watched it. She was beautiful, and she had perfect breasts, and she aroused me as much as a well-constructed piece of furniture would have.

I was truly fucked.

I took a seat toward the back of the room, far from the stage. When a cocktail waitress materialized at my table, silently waiting for instructions, I ordered a gin and tonic. It amused me to think of myself as a colonial gentleman, here among the natives. Racism at its finest: the inhabitants were good for fucking, and not much else.

The girl on stage disrobed, finally, stripping off her g-string in a slow tease, and tossed it into the audience. A man caught it and brought it to his nose, inhaling dramatically. The girl beamed, curtsied, stepped down and made her way through the audience, accepting caresses and cash in equal measure.

This was what Sasha did, when I wasn’t with her. This was her daily existence: anonymous men, full of desire and thwarted longing.

The thought made me sick.

I told myself that I would get up any moment and leave, ideally before Sasha emerged from the dressing room and caught me flagrantly in the act, but I didn’t move. I ordered another drink. I watched another girl take her turn on the stage. She was as lovely as the last one, with dark skin and bright eyes. The club employed the best. The men were enraptured. I was slightly bored, and yet, I still didn’t leave.

It was masochism, really. I was torturing myself by imagining Sasha up there, pirouetting and posing for the watching men, letting them grope her as she moved through the audience to collect her tips. She had every right to do it. She was a grown woman, and she made her own decisions.

That didn’t mean I had to like them.

Finally, after the third dancer, and my third drink, my disgust with my actions managed to overwhelm my twisted urge to keep torturing myself, and I stood to leave.

And then Sasha came out.

I didn’t notice her at first, not until the spotlight shifted across the floor to illuminate her. She must have been waiting at the edge of the room, keeping out of the way until it was her turn to go on stage.

I sank back into my seat.

She mounted the stage and waved to the audience like a 1940s starlet entertaining the troops. With her blond wig and red lipstick, she looked like she had stepped directly out of that decade, but her corset and frilly bustle hinted at something more Victorian. She had an enormous feather boa draped over one shoulder and trailing on the ground behind her. She was stunning, and I wanted to rush onto the stage, cover her with a blanket, and hustle her out of there.

I couldn’t do that, of course. I couldn’t let her see me. I would just have to sit there, burning with jealousy and shame, until she had finished and returned to the dressing room.