Chapter 4

Evan POV

The words land in the space between us and stay there.

I keep my hand on the edge of the tray and look at the man across from me — in his undershirt, elbows on his knees, blue eyes level and direct and entirely unapologetic — and my first coherent thought is that he has made a mistake.

The kind that happens when someone with enough money spends too long in a place like this and starts assuming everyone in it operates on the same terms.

"I think there's been a misunderstanding," I say, and I keep my voice even, the tone I use when a situation needs to be closed cleanly without drama. "I'm floor staff. Waiter. That's the arrangement I'm here under."

"I know that."

"Then you understand why I'm going to decline."

"I understand that you haven't heard what I'm offering yet."

No heat in his voice. No particular urgency. He says it the way someone states a scheduling conflict, and the flatness of it is more unsettling than aggression would have been. I straighten up fully and meet his gaze.

"Mr. Perry," I say, "I'm not interested. Whatever the number is. I'd like to go back downstairs and finish my shift."

Something moves at the corner of his mouth — not quite a smile, more the expression of someone who expected this answer and filed it under preliminary. "You need money," he says.

I stare at him. He says it without inflection, and I find myself running back through the last twenty minutes trying to locate the tell I must have given him.

"Everyone who comes through that service corridor needs money," he continues. "That's the point of the place. You've been here two shifts, maybe three. And when Dom mentioned the private arrangement options, you said no." He pauses. "So maybe you're not opposed in principle. Maybe you just have a number that hasn't been reached yet."

I hold his gaze and feel something sharpen in my chest — not quite irritation, not quite something else — because I recognize what he's doing. He's not drawing a conclusion. He's constructing the most useful interpretation of my refusal and presenting it as observation. The distinction matters.

"You're right that I need money," I say. "That doesn't change my answer. I want to earn it in a way I can live with. That's not a temporary position."

"You think people who do this work aren't earning it honestly."

"No." The word comes out hard, because that's genuinely not what I mean and I don't want to be misread. "I don't think that. I have no issue with what they do. I just know it's not something I can do."

"Because."

I hold the word in my mouth for half a second longer than I should, and I am aware of that half-second in the specific way you become aware of a thing only when it's already past. "Because I'm straight," I say. The words come out with the right amount of certainty. I tell myself it's because the fact is straightforward, not because I'm working to make it sound that way.

He looks at me. The assessment behind his eyes is private and unhurried, the look of a man who has heard this particular sentence before and is deciding how much weight to assign it. He stands up from the chair.

He crosses the room without rushing, and I make a small internal decision to hold my ground, because stepping back feels like conceding something I haven't agreed to concede.

He reaches past me for the jacket folded over the sofa — the motion brings him close, not the incidental closeness of passing someone in a corridor but the kind with a specific direction behind it, and I feel the warmth off his skin and catch the faint cedar smell of him — and I am aware, with a precision I find inconvenient, that this is not the same as brushing against a table or handing a drink across a bar. This is something else. I don't have a name for what it is, and I don't look for one.

He steps back, and I get a clear look at him for the first time since I walked in — really look, the way you do when you're no longer managing a tray or watching your footing. The blue eyes, which I'd registered as cold when I first came in, are something more complicated up close. The line of his jaw, the way the undershirt sits across his shoulders.

He is, objectively, the best-looking person I have encountered in a room full of people whose entire professional value is their appearance, and I register this the way I'd register any other factual observation about my environment.

Then he reaches forward and slides the card into the breast pocket of my shirt, two fingers pressing it flat against my chest for exactly one second before he withdraws his hand.

"When you've thought about it," he says, "call that number."

Then he steps around behind me, and I feel the press of his hips against mine through the fabric of my pants — deliberate, unhurried — and it takes me a full two seconds to understand what is happening, and then I understand completely, and I step forward and to the side with more speed than I intend, putting the length of the sofa between us, turning to face him.

He looks at me from across the room. His expression hasn't changed. That is somehow the most aggravating part.

And right then, standing there with my pulse going and my face warm, I become aware of what I am actually doing, which is: standing in a private room in a members-only club, having just relocated myself to a safer distance from a man whose face I have spent the last thirty seconds cataloguing like it was something worth remembering. A man who called me up here because he assumed I had a price. A man who just pressed his hips against me without asking, because he has decided that I am the kind of person that sort of thing happens to.

I look at him.

Get it together, I think. You were just sized up like a transaction and your first instinct was to notice his jawline.

"I told you," he says, from across the room now, his voice the same register lower as before. "I want you. And I always get what I want — but I'll wait until you ask me."

I open the door and walk out.

The hallway is empty and air-conditioned and smells like the cedar diffuser they run on the second floor. I walk to the elevator and press the button and stand with my back straight and the card at my side. My pulse takes longer to settle than it should. I attribute this to the fact that I have been on my feet for four hours and the situation was strange and I am tired, and I move on.

Downstairs, the floor has gotten busier. Dom catches my eye from behind the bar with an expression that is carefully professional, and I give him a small nod that means everything is fine and I need to get back to work. He accepts this without comment.

I pick up my tray. I take a table's order. I carry three drinks to the far corner and say the right things and turn back toward the bar. The work is straightforward and I am good at straightforward work. I focus on that.

Sometime past ten, I reach into my pocket and pull out the card.

Eric Perry. The name is embossed in clean black type, no design beyond the lettering itself. CEO, Perry Pharmaceuticals. A phone number. A suite address. The card sits flat against my palm and I look at the name and think about the billing email from St. Maria's that arrived this morning. Three thousand eight hundred and forty-seven dollars, due in eleven days. Lily's voice on the phone yesterday, careful and quiet — the cardiologist mentioned a follow-up procedure, probably next month, don't worry about it tonight, I'm fine.

She always says she's fine. She has been saying she's fine for four months.

I look at the name on the card for a long time. The letters don't rearrange themselves into something easier. The number doesn't change. The heat that climbed into my face upstairs has been gone for an hour, but I am aware of the card's weight in a way that is disproportionate to its size, and I note that awareness without finding a satisfying reason for it.

I slide the card back into my pocket.

I pick up my tray.

I don't throw it away.