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He gritted his teeth.
“Yes, but I am still willing to take the couch, no argument.”
“Great.”
“Will there be media at this wedding?”
“Yes, lots. That’s why I knew we needed to go together. Josh is a Colter, you know, of The Colters who own the restaurant chain, so it’s a big deal.”
“And still you booked everyone’s rooms? They must all be millionaires at minimum.”
“My wedding gift,” she said.
He looked at her, trying to read her, trying to figure her out. She was insecure, yes, he’d read that early on. Compliments would go a long way with her, because she was hungry for external validation. And yet, also, she did these things that were just nice.
She gave to people for no reason and he found he had a hard time understanding that.
Or maybe it wasn’t so much niceness. Maybe she was buying friends. Yes, that made sense to him. Especially knowing what he did about her.
“And your attempt at buying friends?” he asked.
She frowned. “Everyone does nice things for their friends.”
“I don’t.”
“Do you have friends?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Because. At this point in life, yes, I would always feel I was buying them. I’m not particularly likable, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“No, I had.”
“I came to the world stage with nothing. There are no connections from my past I wish to maintain.”
She sighed. “I’m not buying friends. I’m doing this because I want to, and I can, so why not? I do find that problem with dates, though,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Do you?”
“Yes. Gold diggers. I am a meal ticket to almost every man that wants to go out with me and it’s really, really tiring. The big question I ask myself before I agree to go out with a guy is would he have dated me before I had money? If the answer is no, I don’t bother anymore.”
“And how do you gauge that?”
“Men of a certain…handsomeness threshold,” she said, “are not with me because of my brains.”
“Stereotyping.”
“But I’ve found it to be true. I had a uh…incident in high school.”
“More of your past hardship?”
The cynicism in his voice had her turning away from the urge to share. “What about you? You don’t have friends, but I’ve seen the sort of women you take to events.”
Yes, he was very selective about the kind of woman he took to parties. Beautiful, shallow. He bought their dresses, their jewelry, he let them hang on his arm and have his picture taken. And at the end of the night, they always went their separate ways.
He had never started out intending it to be that way, but the voice was always there. Interrupting desire. Destroying his lust.
“I don’t care what they’re after,” he said. “As long as we both get what we want.”
He got to present the image he wanted to give to the press, they got diamonds, exposure, the thrill of being with a celebrity, whatever it was that got them off. So long as it wasn’t sex.
“Gee, you’re like most of my dates.”
“No, I don’t use. I trade. And anyway, you think it’s better to try to guess what they want before you get in too deep?”
“Okay, so that sucks. But so does finding out the guy who you’ve gone on four dinner dates with is a gay man in a committed relationship trying to get close to you to get to your money. By the way, the man he was in the relationship with had no idea, and he was very, very unhappy to discover us together at the trendy restaurant I had taken him to.”
“At least he only took advantage of your wallet and not your body.”
“I know,” she said, biting her lip. “I really do. But it would be nice to go out with someone who clearly just didn’t want to use you. Back before…before Anfalas, everyone in my life always made it very clear that there was something wrong with me. And now, yeah, now I’m popular because I dress well and I have money.”
She looked away from him then, out the window. He felt something strange happen to his chest. Like there was an invisible thread that ran between them and he could feel what she did. Or maybe it was just what she’d said. The desire to feel what normal people did, if only for a moment. He didn’t usually worry about it, but sometimes he wondered. What it might be like if his body, heart and brain worked together instead of as separate entities.
