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I was silent. She was right. She lived in a poverty-stricken part of town, and seemed to be depended on by both her mother and grandmother. My brief research had told me she was a college drop-out. Her CV was a chaotic combination of gas station night-shifts and waitressing shifts.
I changed the subject. “Why did he want you to sleep with me? To form a relationship, find out more about my weak spots that way? Or were you lying about your birth control, and he hoped you’d fall pregnant, then use the child as leverage against me?”
Ria was unusually quiet. When I looked over at her, her expression was a contusion of hurt and rage.
Then she stood up, walked over to me and jabbed me in the chest. “I don’t do that for money.” Her voice was a hiss. “Are you so blind to your own intuition, so jaded by your incredibly fortunate lifestyle, that you don’t know when sex means something? Didn’t you feel what I felt? And if not, was it not you that was using me? I don’t sleep with my clients. I have sex when it means something. Maybe we weren’t on the same page, then.”
I was stunned. I had felt something, but I’d thought it was a trick, a deception. I was on the fence about whether I believed her story. I had a right to be paranoid, but there were admittedly times when I was too highly strung.
“I don’t know how to answer that.”
“You don’t have to. I have my answer.” She retreated, and went to sit back in her seat, arms folded.
“Look, I don’t just sleep with anyone, either. Yes, I felt something. You can tell that to Apollo if you want. I presume you will, anyway. But you said you were good at finding out what made people tick. You could easily have opened me up, prodded my vulnerabilities, and...”
“You’re saying I took advantage of you?”
“No. I’m saying my half-brother may have done.”
Ria scoffed. “I told you, I don’t do that for money. I don’t have a problem if other people do. It’s just not my business. I wouldn’t need to read cards if I did.”
I looked her in the eyes. Beyond her defensiveness and her scorn, I almost believed she was telling the truth. I looked away. Now I was feeling guilty for making those accusations. This wasn’t how I thought the interaction would go.
I stood in the corner, wrestling with my feelings and deciding what exactly I intended to do here.
Ria’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “I didn’t tell him, you know.”
My head snapped around. “Didn’t tell him what?”
“It was only the first session that he paid me for. At the networking event. He wanted to know what cards you’d gotten, how you’d reacted to them.”
It stung remembering it. That event had been a combination of a pleasant meeting and an unpleasant jolt to my nerves.
“I told him the first two, the past and the present. I didn’t think there was anything there he’d be able to use against you. But when I was staring him in his smug face... I realized that he’s who you saw in ‘The Sun’ card. Am I wrong?”
I stared at her, then slowly shook my head. “You aren’t wrong.”
“I told him you pulled the Ace of Cups. A card symbolizing new relationships, births, that sort of thing. I wanted to throw him off course. You may not trust your intuition, but I trust mine. I may have been blinded by money the first time I met him, but at our second meeting, I saw him for who he really was.”
“Why the Ace of Cups?”
Then, amazingly, she smiled. “My grandmother had told me a stupid prophecy earlier that day. I used it for inspiration.”
As I watched her, her smile dropped and was replaced by something like worry. She wasn’t responding to me – she was thinking about something else. Her family, maybe.
Then I surprised both of us. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
I spoke measuredly. “For not telling him about ‘The Sun’. You were putting yourself in a lot of potential danger lying to my brother. I’m sure you didn’t realize how much, but thank you, anyway.”
“You believe me?”
I groaned. “I think so. I need to think on it. Today has been a head fuck. Why didn’t you turn up?”
“I wasn’t feeling well. Just a sickness thing. It had passed by the time you got to mine. I was going to message, but, well, I had my head in the toilet.”
I considered this. After a pause: “I overreacted.”
