“I’m not crying,” Dree said, holding her dead phone in her hand and surreptitiously smearing her wet face on her shoulder.
“You’re crying,” Augustine said, his voice lowered to a growl. He was so hot when he scowled like that, which seemed odd to Dree. Usually, she freaked out when men got mad at her. He asked, “What did I do wrong?”
“Nothing, you didn’t do anything. You were great. No, you were magnificent.” An amazing fragrance had filled the air while she was talking, something like baking pastries smothered with the best kind of Irish butter that she’d only bought once because it was too expensive. “What is that smell?”
“Croissants,” Augustine said, holding out the pink box. “You said it was your first time in Paris. You should eat croissants in Paris.”
Her lack of breakfast in the hotel room embarrassed her, and she felt like she shouldn’t let him go out of his way to give her something. “I—I appreciate that, but you didn’t have to.”
He shrugged. “My favorite café was near—where I was, so I picked some up. I also promised to buy you a new coat today.”
“You only said that to stop me from going back inside the Buddha Bar.”
His slow smile was sexy as hell. “Yes, but a promise is a promise.”
The weird shakiness in her chest subsided. “I was going to go back down there and see if they found it. I really liked that coat. And if they didn’t find it, like you said, it’s not that cold. It’s just a little ‘fresh.’ I don’t really need a coat.”
“You were freezing last night. I say, do you mind if I come inside? Standing out in the corridor like this is odd.”
“You weren’t supposed to come back,” she told him.
He shook the box again. “But I brought you croissants.”
“Fair enough. Come on in. I mean, it was really nice of you to offer to share your croissants with me, but you don’t have to.” She stood aside so he could come in. “I have coffee.”
“I brought you some of that, too. Do you have a table?”
She locked the door behind him. “I have a countertop.”
He set the boxes and cups on the table and held the flowers out to her. Ivory roses and white Narcissus blooms filled the brown paper cone. “To celebrate your first trip to Paris.”
She stared at the flowers for a moment, gathering herself. Francis had never brought her such extravagant flowers, and he was the one who was supposed to be here in Paris with her, buying her flowers and seeing it together.
After nearly a year with Francis, marrying him had seemed inevitable.
Instead, this beautiful, impossible man had brought her flowers and breakfast in Paris.
He tilted his head. “You’re crying again.”
“I am not,” she said, wiping her face on her tee shirt again. She gulped some air and said, “The flowers are just so beautiful that they caught me off guard. And it was so nice of you to bring me croissants.” She took the flowers, the paper crackling in her fingers. “I’ll put these in some water. I really do appreciate them, Augustine.”
His smile was wary. “Are we still doing the ‘Augustine’ thing?”
“Yes.” She found a plastic water pitcher among the assorted useless things in the kitchen cabinets and filled it with water for the flowers. “Yes, and I don’t want to talk about why. Don’t tell me who or what you really are. Just be a mystery, okay?”
“All right,” he said, though he was still frowning, and his eyebrows still pinched together.
“It’s not about you,” she said. “It’s about me. I just don’t want to be me anymore. I want to be somebody, anybody else. I want to be a superhero or a princess in disguise.”
His dark eyebrows twitched.
She continued, “But I’m pathetic and stupid, and I want to be anybody else, so you can be someone else, too. Otherwise, I’d feel bad about lying to you.”
Augustine closed his eyes and shook his head. “I don’t think I’m following your logic.”
“That’s because there isn’t any. Just accept it, okay? Let’s just do it.”
He spread his hands. “All right. I’m game. It’s probably better, anyway. For the time being, my name is Augustine, and I owe you a coat. Is your name actually Dree?”
“Uh, yeah,” she said, wincing because he’d caught her. “I was too drunk to make something up. My name is Dree, and I shall call you ‘Auggie.’”
He cracked up, laughing long and hard from his gut. He placed one hand on his lean, flat stomach as if his tummy were going to split open. When he wound down, he said, “Auggie, yes. By all means, let’s call me Auggie. Friends of mine will perish when I tell them this. Can we eat breakfast? I’m famished.”
“Sure. Didn’t you get something to eat while you were out?”
“I don’t eat in the mornings. I have to attend—” He stopped talking and frowned.
“The gym?” she offered.
“Right,” he said, drawing out the word. “I have to attend the gym.”
She set the pitcher of white flowers on the bedroom dresser by where Augustine was standing. He opened the box and began setting out the food on paper napkins he’d brought. Inside the box, a stack of a half-dozen croissants nestled little tubs of butter and strawberry jam.
She said, “Strawberry is my favorite! That is so sweet of you.”
He smiled at her, and his dark eyes crinkled at the edges. “Mine, too.”
Dree found some knives in a drawer, slathered butter and jam on a croissant, and bit into the flakey, buttery heaven. Brittle layers shattered in her mouth, and tender layers inside collapsed when she bit down. “Oh, my God. This is nothing like those little crescent rolls from the tube. Those are just bread.”
He raised one eyebrow while he ripped off a hunk and stuffed it into his mouth. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“Those little rolls in the tube, and when you open the tube, it explodes and you jump.”
He shook his head as he spread jam on his croissant.
“Must be an American thing.”
The way his lips closed around the pastry and he sucked on his thumb made Dree’s knees flinch. Damn. She tried not to watch him nibble and lick the French pastry and failed.
She wanted to be the croissant, but she wasn’t supposed to see him or touch him ever again.
Stupid bucket-list napkin, bossing her around.
When Augustine had finished chewing the last bite, he glanced up at her. “Are you going to tell me why you were crying?”
She shook her head and concentrated on buttering her next bite of croissant.
“Then lie to me,” he said, reaching for another croissant.
What? “Lie to you?”
“Yes.” He tore another croissant to pieces with his long fingers. “That’s what you said we should do. If you don’t want to tell me the truth about why you were crying, tell me lies.”
It was completely ridiculous, so she laughed at him. “Okay, I don’t even know how to start.”
He was standing straight and still as he ate, not leaning on the counter or fidgeting. “What could be so awful that it would make a beautiful woman like you cry?”
She did laugh at him for that. “I don’t know, alien abduction? The state of the whole world? That I had no one to bring me flowers, but now I do?”
His gaze slowly rose from his croissant to her eyes.
Dree realized what she’d said and waved her hands, crossing them like she was waving off a landing airplane. “Oh, I didn’t mean it like that. I’m not imagining that we have a relationship. We don’t. It was just one night, and that’s all it was supposed to be. I just meant that it was nice of you to bring me flowers this morning. If there had been something else going on, if I were in Paris alone for some stupid reason when I should have had a romantic trip planned but then everything went to shit, it’s not your responsibility. I don’t expect anything from you. We’re cool. That’s all. We’re cool.”
Augustine held a piece of croissant pinched in his fingers, staring at it and not eating it. Butter and strawberry jam leaked onto his fingers. His steady look seemed resigned and sad, not freaked out.
Or he might be screaming inside and good at covering it up. It was hard to tell with guys sometimes.
“It really is okay,” she said. “I was just thinking about things I might do in Paris, like tourist stuff.”
He finally spoke. “Last night, it sounded like you had a bucket list.”
“Funny you should put it like that, a bucket list.” That’s what Roxanne and Gen had called it the night before. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
Augustine neatly wiped his fingers on a paper towel and then reached over and picked up her special napkin that was covered with black handwriting and her map for the rest of her life.
“Uh, yeah,” she said. “You don’t have to look at that.” A lot of it was pretty embarrassing and made her look like a tramp. Well, even more like a tramp than she’d already made herself look by screaming that she wanted to screw all the men in a bar and then taking a guy home for the hottest sex of her life.
Yeah, the tramp ship had already sailed.
He studied it, frowning in places. “This is quite a list.”
“I wasn’t planning on doing it all.” She totally was.
Augustine tilted his head, glanced up at her with a startled expression, and then looked back at the napkin as his eyes grew larger. “A threesome, a foursome with three guys, a gang bang. You mentioned these last night.”
It all sounded so sordid now, like only an idiot would want to do ridiculous things like that. “It’s just a list. I don’t even know how many of those things I’ll be able to do, ever, in my whole life.”
“It also says that you should see the Louvre. You haven’t seen the Louvre?” He shook his head and raised one hand. “I forgot it’s your first time in Paris. Of course, you haven’t.”
“Yeah, I haven’t done anything.”
“Just as a fellow tourist in Paris, I might suggest you prioritize seeing the Louvre and the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and eating in some of the restaurants listed here before you check the various debaucheries off your list. You can sleep with men anywhere in the world, but only Paris has the Louvre and the Palais Garnier.”
Dree considered the one hundred fifty-two euros that were still in her wallet. Tickets to get into the Louvre were seventeen euros, and she needed to eat. “Well, I’m not going to be here for very long. I don’t know how many of these things I’ll be able to see at all.”
“When is your flight back?”
“Thursday morning,” she said.
His dark eyebrows rose. “That’s when I’m scheduled to leave, also. I believe I have an early flight.”
“You don’t live in Paris?”
He shook his head. “And no more questions unless you want me to lie to you, as you said. Of these restaurants listed here, may I heartily recommend Le Cinq. It’s the restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel George V.”
Dree muttered, “I’m kind of on a budget. I don’t think I’m going to be eating at any of those fancy restaurants my friends recommended. They’re a lot better off than I am.”
He looked up from the napkin. “Oh?”
Shame filled her. Some families were weird about money. Dree’s sheep-farmer family was ridiculously proud of how they’d made do for over a hundred years with the small income that shepherding their small flock provided. Dree had never owned any clothes that weren’t hand-me-downs from her siblings or cousins, and most of them had made a trip through the church’s poor box at some point, too. She could mend, darn, or patch anything.
In college, when the teaching hospital had provided her with brand-new scrubs for her student nursing rotations, that had been the first time she’d ever owned brand-new clothes.
Dree swallowed hard. Like everyone in her family, she’d always been too proud to admit her poverty, and they’d actively hidden and denied it.
But she was trying to change her life.
Since her family had adamantly denied their poverty, she wouldn’t. It was just a thing, not her fault. She was also blond of average height, and a little plump. They were just things to neither take pride nor shame in.
And she had always been poor, and now she was destitute.
She sucked in a deep breath and used every bit of that air to tell him. “My people aren’t well-off. I don’t even know how to make a reservation at a place like that, and I don’t think I have enough money to go to the Louvre. I was just going to walk around Paris or something and do the free stuff.”
“Oh, but you have to see the Louvre. It’s truly worth the price of admission. Surely, you have a credit card or something.”
Dree steeled herself and said with no shame, “I don’t have the money for the Louvre. I had a problem.” Problem was a good way to put it. “Yeah, a problem, and I had a non-refundable plane ticket to Paris. I figured I could decide what I was going to do with my life in Paris as easily as I could in Phoenix, so I got on the plane and came here. But now I’m here, and I don’t have enough money and I don’t know what to do. I’m just a hard-working girl who got screwed over again.”
Augustine had been watching her quietly, almost without moving. When she finished talking, his thick, black eyelashes rose as his eyes widened slightly, and his lips parted. He was perfectly still for a moment, and then he shook his head just one time as he pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and thumbed the bills inside, counting.
Dree wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do at that point, so she didn’t do anything. Okay, whatever.
He removed a thick sheaf of bills from his wallet and placed them on the dresser beside where he was standing. Quite a lot of the currency seemed to be green, which meant they were one-hundred-euro notes, but at least two of them were yellow two-hundred-euro notes.
Weird. “What are you—”
He said, “I apologize. I didn’t understand the situation last night. That should cover my tab, right?”
Dree squinted at him. She had missed something. “Your—your tab?”
Augustine resumed tearing a pastry apart and slathering it with butter and jam. “For last night. I apologize for leaving without settling the bill, but all’s well that ends well.”
“Wait, the bill?” He thought—oh, there was no way he thought she was a— “Are you kidding me?”
He thumbed through his wallet again and added another green euro note to the stack. “Is that enough? Extra charge for the monster, huh? It’s fine. I’ve paid that before.”
Dree yelled at him, “Auggie, I am not a prostitute!”
He paused and swallowed the bite he was chewing. “I don’t understand.”
“I wasn’t telling you a sob story to get money out of you. I was being open and honest and vulnerable.” Anger swelled in her throat. “I am not a ‘temporarily inconvenienced millionaire’ who’s asking you for money. I’ve just been poor my whole life, and now I’m poor again. But that doesn’t mean I’m a wh—” She swallowed because she couldn’t quite say the horrible word. “A wh—A lady of the evening!”
“I apologize again,” Augustine said with one eyebrow arched high. “Should I take the money back?”
“Yes! Yes, you should take it back! I’m not a prostitute, and you shouldn’t try to pay me for what we did last night. I would never—I would absolutely never—”
And she stopped, blinking, and looked at the money lying on top of the dresser.
Augustine hadn’t moved to take it back yet.
When Dree was in nursing school, a lot of her friends had danced on tables a couple of times when they couldn’t quite make it to the end of the month on the pittance from student loans they lived on. They had joked about blowing guys for beer money, but she had thought they hadn’t actually done it.
Now she was less sure.
That was a lot of money up there. When she got back to Phoenix, she wouldn’t have enough money to make rent on the first of next month, and she didn’t have a bed in her bare apartment. She wasn’t sure Francis hadn’t broken her lease to get at her deposit, too. She might have nowhere to live when she got back. Francis had cleaned out all Dree’s bank accounts, even the one she shared with her sister, which was the most important one.
If Dree ended up bashing Francis’s head in with a fireplace poker or a branding iron, that would be why. Stealing money from her sister Mandi and Mandi’s kid was just frickin’ reprehensible.
And Holy Mary, Mother of God, Christmas was coming. People in her family depended on her cash Christmas presents to get them through because they’d used their food money to buy presents for their kids and other people. If she didn’t have that—
Her chest knotted.
Dree should take Augustine’s money.
She’d been stupid for protesting it. That cash he’d laid up there without a second thought could go a long way toward food for the next few days and then helping her start a new life.
He asked, “Should I take it back?”
Dree ran one hand up the side of her face, thinking about how much money was sitting over there. It looked like at least six hundred euros, which was somewhere north of seven hundred dollars, American.
She thought about what that money would mean to her sister.
But when Dree got back to Phoenix, she would still have her job. She could figure out some way to get a loan from somewhere, and then she could pick up extra shifts to make sure Mandi had enough money.
It just might be next month.
She finally said, “You should take it back. I’m not a prostitute, and I never meant anything I said that way. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Sex work is work.”
Augustine reached for the bills on the dresser. “Of course.”
Sex workers came into her ER all the time with anything from the problems you would expect to sprains and broken bones from abusive customers to ear infections and tonsillitis, and they brought their kids for the usual childhood complaints. There was one lady of the evening named Melinda Williams, her legal name was David Williams, who had three of the sweetest, cheerfullest, cleanest little kids you can imagine. Dree never saw normal childhood dirt on any of those kids. Yes, ma’am and no, ma’am and showing off how well they did in school and pictures from when Melinda chaperoned their school field trips with them, but she couldn’t afford health insurance and so ended up in the ER with them too often.
Dree said to Augustine, “Obviously, you were fine with it. You even knew the going rate.”
He shrugged and put his wallet back in his pocket.
“I mean, Jesus hung out with prostitutes, drunks, and tax collectors, right?”
Augustine reared back for a second, but then recovered. “That’s one interpretation, though I always thought misogynists were trying to smear the reputation of Mary Magdalene to reduce her importance in the New Testament. But that is one interpretation, and one could do worse than to emulate the Son of God, as best one can.”
His frown had turned sad as he stared at his breakfast.
Dree kept thinking about that money.
He finally asked, “You said you’d encountered a problem?”
She didn’t want to admit how stupid she’d been, but she was changing her life. Old-Dree would have hidden what had happened to her out of mortified embarrassment.
But she was trying to be someone else, someone better.
Someone strong enough to be honest, even when she was embarrassed.
Okay, here it went.
She said, “On the day before yesterday—I think it was the day before yesterday. I was on the plane for so long and with all the time zone changes, I don’t know what day I should call it. Anyway, I was on my way home from work after a fifteen-hour shift, and I stopped at a grocery store to buy milk.”
Augustine had set his next croissant on a napkin and was just listening, his dark eyes steadily watching her.
The ease with which he watched her and his open, compassionate expression with the hint of an accepting smile seemed so kind.
She hadn’t thought of him as having kind eyes, but maybe she’d been too busy obsessing about his muscular shoulders or his perfect washboard abs.
Because he totally had those, too.
When he smiled at her like that, she felt more comfortable and heard, somehow.
She went on. “When I went to check out at the store, my debit card was declined.”
Mortification filled her, but she pressed on.
Looking into Augustine’s eyes helped. She felt calmer.
She said, “It was weird. I should have had plenty of money in my checking account. I’d just gotten paid two days before. So, I tried to get money out of the store’s ATM to pay for the milk, but all of my accounts came up overdrawn. The ATM even ate my debit card and wouldn’t give it back. It was like I was in The Handmaid’s Tale or the Twilight Zone. Nothing that I tried would work. I thought maybe my bank’s computers had gotten hacked or something, and it would be fixed in a few hours. So, I left the store and went home.”
Her heart was knocked around in her chest at telling him this, and she swallowed hard. “I’m boring you. You don’t want to hear all this.”
He leaned forward and said quietly, “I’m listening.”
Dree sighed. “When I walked into my apartment, it was bare. I mean, there was nothing. All my furniture, my clothes, my jewelry and computers and kitchen appliances and everything were gone. You could see the marks in the carpeting where my couch and other furniture had been, and some crumbs on the kitchen counter where I needed to clean under my toaster. When I went outside to look, my car was missing, too. That really felt like the Twilight Zone. It was like I’d been erased.”
Augustine nodded. Dree absently noted the way the strong cords of his neck moved under the open collar of his white shirt.
Her hands were fluttering in the air with nerves. “So, I called my boyfriend, Francis, because I was freaked out. I mean, of course I called my boyfriend, right? I thought I’d been robbed and had my identity stolen, or maybe I’d accidentally slipped into another dimension where I didn’t exist. But he started screaming at me that he needed money, and did I have any other credit cards or bank accounts because he needed it all right then.”
Augustine frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t, either.” Her incomprehension had turned to realization and then horror on the plane to Paris. It had been almost a fifteen-hour flight. That was a lot of time to be tied to a seat alone with one’s thoughts. “My boyfriend stole everything from me. Everything. Like, a swindle. A con job. We were together for eleven months. Eleven months is a long time. We stayed over at each other’s apartments most nights for the last six months. I’ve met his parents and his brother, and we hung out with his friends all the time. I’m not rich. I didn’t have that much to steal. He knew that. We went and met my parents on their sheep ranch. It’s a sheep ranch. It’s not even cattle. It’s nothing, and I don’t even own it. He couldn’t get at that. This couldn’t have been a long con, not for almost a year. I mean, with all of it, everything he sold and all my bank accounts and the money he withdrew from my retirement account—”
“He stole from your pension?” Augustine asked, his voice rising in dismay.
“Yes, he called HR, told them to screw the penalties for early withdrawal, and sucked it dry for everything he could, and he did the same thing with our credit cards we had together. He maxed them out with cash advances. I found the ad on Craigslist where he sold my car. He negotiated online. He got a thousand dollars for it. That’s all. It was only eight years old! With everything he stole, my whole life, he couldn’t have gotten more than thirty thousand dollars, total, and now I’m probably in debt that much again from the credit card advances. He even took money from a checking account where I put money for my sister and her kid.”
Augustine said, “Tell me about your sister.”
Her family had kept this quiet for years because they might have gotten thrown out of their church if they’d just said it outright. “Mandi got pregnant in high school. She wouldn’t tell anyone who the dad was because then his family would be in trouble, too. We sent her to live with my aunt over in Flagstaff to have the baby, and then she ‘adopted’ the kid while she was there. Nobody believes it, but they don’t have to. It’s just what we say. When her kid didn’t start talking by the time he was four, we figured out he was autistic. He’s on the far end of the spectrum, too. He’s ten now, and he’s non-verbal. She lives in Tucson so she can be nearer to doctors and get him therapy at the medical school there.”
“And you give her money?” Augustine asked.
Dree shrugged. “Someone has to. She waits tables at Applebee’s. My parents try to send her twenty bucks a month, but money is tight around the sheep ranch, like always. Raising sheep in southern New Mexico is not like having a sheep farm up in Massachusetts where you can sell overpriced sheep cheese to the rich people.”
“What’s his name?” Augustine asked her.
Dree was confused. “The guy who knocked her up?”
“Your nephew.”
“Victor.” That was weird. No one asked what her nephew’s name was. Some people were cruel about it and said it didn’t matter what his name was because, like barn cats, he wouldn’t come when he was called, anyway.
“And his last name is—” Augustine asked.
“Clark. Like mine.”
“Ah, all right.”
Oh. “I didn’t mention my last name last night, huh?”
His smile lifted a little more, but it was still kind. “It didn’t come up.”
“It’s a really common last name. There are a thousand Clarks all over southern New Mexico. I mean, it’s in the top twenty-five most common last names in the U.S. and, like, number fourteen in Scotland. Over a million people in the U.S. have the ‘Clark’ surname, and then there’s a bunch in England, Scotland, and Wales, too. There’s a Clark University and a Clarks shoe store. It’s as common as mud.”
He smiled. “You’ve looked into this.”
“There is not a lot to do on a southern New Mexico sheep ranch on weekends at night, and my parents were always proud of their name. So, yeah.”
“Do you have any pictures of Victor?”
“Um, I suppose, if I can access them. I don’t know if I can get to my cloud storage.” She grabbed her phone from where it was lying on the countertop and turned it on. As soon as it powered up, she pulled up the main settings menu and turned off the Wi-Fi so Francis couldn’t call her again.
It took just a second to scroll through her pictures—swiping quickly past the hundreds of pics of her with Francis—to find pictures of when she’d driven down to Tucson last month. She did that a lot on her days off because, in addition to seeing her sister and nephew, she also went to Victor’s therapy clinic with them to talk medicine with his therapists. Medical practitioners can get impatient with people outside the discipline, so Dree went with Mandi to ask the hard questions and then interpret the answers later for her.
She found a decent one of her holding onto Victor and grinning. He was just a little blurry from thrashing around while Mandi took the picture. She turned around the screen to show it to Augustine.
He looked at it and reached for her phone. “May I?”
“Sure.”
He took the phone out of her fingers and studied it. Then, he tapped it once and scrolled by moving his finger up and down.
“Dude, privacy?” she said. “Besides, I’m lying to you about everything.”
“Right, you are,” he said and handed her phone back to her. The pictures app was still open. The top half was pictures of her with Victor and Mandi. Most of the pictures of Victor were less flattering than the one she’d chosen, with Victor striking out or running from them. Mandi usually had her mouth open and was reaching toward him. His thin limbs’ flaccid muscle tone due to autism was evident to anyone who knew what they were looking at.
The bottom half of the screen was filled with pictures of her with her friends and Francis.
It was the most boring photo scroll in the history of time.
“So, that’s him,” she said, her chest tightening again. “That’s Francis.”
Francis’s flat, pale eyes and his dorky, frizzy hair that stuck out like yellow-orange spikes were evident in every photo. His skin on his thin frame was so milky white that it looked like he’d never seen the sun, which is hard to do in Arizona. He slathered fifty SPF sunscreen on every day because sunlight made his freckles worse. He always looked like he’d been dunked in baby powder and smelled like cheap paint.
She said, “I was so stupid.” It was all her own fault. She might as well admit it. “You ready for this? This is how stupid I was. I thought Francis was going to propose to me on this trip.”
“Francis?” Augustine asked.
“Yeah, Francis Senft. It’s a stupid name—too many consonants. I’m better off staying with Clark. So, two months ago, Francis asked me about what I wanted a marriage proposal to be like, ‘in case he did something.’ He measured my ring finger with a piece of string. So, I believed him because I’m an idiot, and I bought us two tickets to Paris for a romantic vacation together because I thought he was The One.”
She wanted to smash then-Dree over the head for being so stupid.
So very, very stupid.
Instead, hot tears filled her eyes again, and she looked down from Augustine and stared at the half-eaten croissant on the white kitchen counter. “How stupid was I, that I believed him, that I fell for everything he said, hook, line, and sinker? I bought the plane tickets. I gave him access to everything I owned. I thought we were going to get married. I always thought I was savvy, that I could take care of myself, but I’m just someone who’s dumb enough to get swindled.”
A hot, wet drip drew a line down her cheek. Then another.
Dree covered her stupid face with her hands, trying to stop crying. She shouldn’t be crying. She’d gotten what she’d deserved for being so stupid.
Warmth touched her hand. Augustine’s fingers slowly slipped around hers.
She clutched his hand but kept her other one over her face. “Don’t be nice to me. Don’t encourage this. I’m not a crier. I’m tough. Ranchers don’t cry,” she ground out through clenched teeth.
God, she was even madder at herself for crying.
She couldn’t open her eyes, but she heard Augustine say, “You loved him.”
She nodded and sucked in a gasp. She tried to steady her voice, but it came out as a stupid croak anyway. “I did. I loved him. I was stupid, and I loved him. I told him I loved him every night before we went to sleep. He said it back. I believed him, and I’m an idiot for believing him.”
Augustine’s hand tightened around hers. “It’s not stupid to believe in love.”
“I should have been smarter. I should have looked for the red flags that he was actually a grifter and just trying to get money because he totally blindsided me. I still don’t see anything. I still don’t understand why he did it, other than because he wanted money and he didn’t want me.”
“I know what it’s like not to be wanted and not to understand why.”
She squinted at him through her fingers. “You? No way. Anybody who likes dudes would hand you their panties.”
He smiled a little on one side of his mouth. “Not all of them. Go ahead. Finish telling me your lies about Francis.”
“This is too hard.”
“Then it’s okay. We’ll put it on hold for a while.”
She started talking again because she couldn’t stop. “And then, after all that happened, I didn’t know what to do. There was this police car hanging around outside my apartment, and they told me to get in. I thought they were going to take me to the police station to give my statement or whatever I was supposed to do to report a crime, but they drove me around and asked me a bunch of questions. Finally, at a stoplight, I opened the car door and got out of their car and called a rideshare. Typical useless civil servants, ya know? Show up too late afterward, ask a bunch of stupid questions, and then nothing happens.”
“That’s odd,” Augustine said, frowning. “Is that how your police investigate a crime?”
“I still don’t know what to do,” she said. “I still had one credit card from before I’d met Francis, so I went to where I work, took out five hundred dollars as a cash advance, and got on the plane to Paris, because what the hell. I had a gym bag in my locker with a change or two of clothes, and I had my passport in my purse because I’d wanted to show it off to my friends at work. Most of them had never seen one in real life.”
Augustine rubbed his thumb over her knuckles, and she clutched his hand more tightly.
“I didn’t realize that I’d have to pay the FlyBNB lady a lot of money because my credit card got declined, because now it’s over its limit. So, here I am, broke in Paris and trying not to be an idiot, but somehow, I’m the same old Dree. I wanted to be different, ya know? I wanted to be someone else. But I’m just as stupid as I’ve always been.”
He caressed the back of her hand with his thumb. “You’re not stupid. Don’t stop believing in love. When you do that, you get desperate, and you can’t stop yourself from doing foolish, self-destructive things.”
That sounded like personal experience.
She opened her fingers a little more and peered at him between them. “Do you want to talk about it?”
He chuckled and pulled back a little, looking down. “It was a long time ago.”
“Did someone hold your hand and tell you not to give up on love?”
He glanced at her from the corners of his eyes. “No.”
At the very least, no matter what else was going on in her life, Dree would trip over her own feet trying to be helpful. She was a sucker like that, too.
So, she took her hand off her snotty nose and bleary eyes, wiped it carefully on her shirt a couple of times to make sure it was dry, and held Augustine’s hand. She looked straight into his dark, fathomless eyes. “Don’t give up on love. You’re a great guy. You rescued me from a mob of creepers, and now you’re sitting here and listening to me blather on about how I screwed up my life. There’s someone out there waiting for a guy like you.”
He didn’t look away, but there was something in the slight bow of his lips and creases at the corners of his eyes that looked wounded. He said, “I don’t think anyone is coming for me.”
“You don’t know that.”
He shrugged and broke their eye contact. “It’s just a feeling, but I’ve had it for a long time. But we’re talking about you.”
“I’m kind of done talking. I’ve reached the end of this stupid, stupid tale. I got conned, and now I’m broke. I probably should be a prostitute, but I don’t think I’m smart enough. Guys would be like, ‘I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a blow job today,’ and I’d be like, ‘Okay, sure!’ Because I’m just that dumb.”
“You’re not dumb.”
“I’m hoping I am. If I’m dumb, I can get smarter.”
“You’ve had some bad breaks.”
She huffed a laugh. “Ya think?”
Augustine tugged his wallet out of his hip pocket again. He grasped all the cash inside and laid it on the counter. “This will get you started.”
Dree glanced at the stack of green and yellow bills. There was even more there than he’d tried to pay her. “Just put that money back in your wallet. I haven’t done anything to earn it.”
“You don’t have to.”
She had been raised not to take charity. Others needed it more. “Yes, I do.”
“I don’t need it. You do.”
“I’ll be fine. I always land on my feet.” She had no idea how she was going to do that.
Augustine said, “It’s nothing but pieces of paper.”
She snorted. “That sounds like someone who’s always had plenty of it. When you haven’t had enough, you know money is precious. It determines what you can eat and how safe the place is where you sleep. You’re rich, aren’t you?”
“I’m comfortable,” he admitted.
“Yeah, that’s something a rich person would say.”
“I was going to pay you for last night. Let’s pretend you didn’t say no.”
He was a nice guy, but Dree was getting a little pissed at him. “I am not a prostitute.”
“As you said, Jesus hung out with prostitutes.”
She rolled her eyes. “Does that make you Jesus Christ?”
Augustine laughed out loud at that, looking up at the stained ceiling. “Now, there’s something no one who knows me has ever accused me of. Some people have called me the very Devil in disguise or an incubus, but no one has ever confused me with the Savior.”
“There are some lines I’m not going to cross, Augustine.”
Yet.
She was going to get more desperate, she knew. When the end of the month came, even beside the fact that she needed money to eat and pay rent and buy a sleeping bag or something, Mandi would need a thousand dollars to cover Victor’s therapy costs again. That was her usual shortfall unless something made it worse. Dree wasn’t sure how much Vic was improving with language skills, but when he went to daily therapy, he was a whole heck of a lot less violent. When Mandi had tried to stop his therapy once, he’d nearly beaten the crap out of her even though he had been only eight at the time.
And then there was Christmas. She wasn’t sure how much Victor understood about Christmas, but her nieces and nephews from her other siblings did. Her brothers and sisters were going to need the gift cards she gave them as presents to make it through the very expensive month of December, too.
“I understand you’re not a prostitute,” Augustine said. “You’ve made that abundantly clear. I am entirely certain you’re not. It shall never cross my mind again.”
“Okay, then,” Dree muttered. “I’m glad we’ve got that settled.”
“But you need money.”
“I’ll figure it out. I’m resourceful. Maybe I’ll get a box and be one of those living statues in a park or something. People just give you money if you stand there and do that.”
“Have you ever done that before?” he asked her.
“That doesn’t matter. Seems like it would be on-the-job training, to be honest. Or maybe I’ll go to a bank and get a loan.”
“Do you have collateral?” he asked.
“No, but I’m good for it.”
“I’ve heard banks don’t have a sense of humor about that,” Augustine said.
Tears were stinging her eyes again as she realized that she had no options. “Or maybe I’ll dance on tables and give blow jobs like my friends in college did when they didn’t have enough money to eat.”
Augustine asked, “What did you do in college when you didn’t have enough money to eat?”
She looked down at her half-eaten croissant. “I didn’t eat.”
He sighed. “You’re driving me insane. I’m trying to help you, and you won’t let me. I’ve never had such a problem giving money away before.”
She chuckled and squeezed her eyes closed to make the tears go back in. “Sorry.”
He took her hand again. “I don’t want you to miss meals in Paris, of all places. I want you to see Paris in all its splendor. It’s your first trip. Let me help you.”
“I don’t need help. I’ll be all right,” she lied.
“I’m going to eat every meal while I’m here. I’m going to eat croissants like this every morning.”
Dree’s stomach growled.
“Let me assuage my guilt at having too much money because I assure you, I do,” he said.
Dree flipped her hand at him. “Other people need it more. Give it to charity.”
“There are too many strings attached if I do it that way. You’re a nice person. You’re giving your sister money, and you were taken advantage of by someone you loved.”
“So? Happens to people every day. I am so naïve. I was practically asking for someone to take advantage of me.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I probably will end up doing something I don’t want to. The world is a terrible place.”
He took both of her hands in his. “What if, just this one time, I paid you to spend four days with me, and you didn’t say no?”
“This is like some sort of an indecent proposal, isn’t it?”
He shrugged. “Call it what you like.”
She pulled her hands away. “I’m not a prostitute, and you just want to feel like Jesus.”
His laugh was dark and sent shivers down her spine, but she wasn’t scared at all. “I assure you, what I want from you would not be Christ-like. I’m going to have to do penance for a year when I’m through with you.”
A wiggle of desire formed in her stomach, and lower, at the thought of what he would do to her that would need confession and penance. She admitted, “I would do that for free.”
“Since you won’t just take my money as some sort of a formal arrangement, then I’m just asking you to stay with me for four days. My friends who I was here with left Paris last night. I’m stuck here for four more days with little to keep me occupied. We’ll check a few things off your bucket list on that napkin. The museums and restaurants, anyway. I’m not finding two other male strangers with whom to share you. That’s my line I will not cross. I’ll buy you anything you want and give you enough money to get back on your feet.”
She retorted, “I’m not a—”
“Yes, yes, I know. You may have mentioned it. If you think I am determined to be like Jesus and hang around people of ill repute, consider yourself a tax collector instead.”
She laughed at that. “Fine, if I’m going to do this, then I’ll do it right. I guess we already know what I am, so let’s haggle over price. How much are you going to pay me?”
He named a sum greater than Dree made in a year as a nurse and far more than Francis had been able to milk her for.
She stared at him with her mouth hanging open. “Are you serious? That’s way too much! I can’t take that! How about half?”
“Your negotiating skills need work,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“No, no. When you negotiate, you should start high and then reduce services when the other person wants a lower price.”
“I wouldn’t dare take even half of that!”
“That’s not quite it. Try again.”
“Not even a quarter or ten percent! There is nothing I could do that would make me worth that!”
His slow smile turned kind again. “I think you’re worth it.”
Then, he looked her up and down and a devilish twinkle lit in his eyes, completely ruining the sweet effect.
He said, “As a matter of fact, if you will do anything I want, anything at all, I’ll double my offer.”
Double it?
Dree had never even thought of having that much money in her life. She was pretty sure her parents’ entire ranch, their livestock, and five generations of her family’s labor weren’t worth that much.
She could get better therapy for Victor for years.
And even after helping Mandi and Victor, Dree could get a new, better apartment, furniture, clothes, and a car, replacing all the things that Francis had stolen from her.
And pay back her 401(k).
She was still aghast. “What would I have to do for that?” A thought came to her. “Butt stuff. It’s butt stuff, isn’t it? You want butt stuff.”
He raised one eyebrow and smiled a little wider.
“Oh, my God. You freaky rich people are all alike. You can’t be satisfied with what normal people like, and so you want butt stuff.”
“You seem to like that term, ‘butt stuff.’ You keep repeating it.”
“You do, don’t you?”
“And what if I do? I promise not to damage you.”
“How do I know you’ve even got that much money? You could be lying to me, and then I’ll still be broke and have a sore butt.”
“You seem fixated on anal sex. I suspect a secret desire for the forbidden. But here.” He turned his hand over and unlatched his watchband.
Thick calluses covered his palm and fingers like a farmhand, which Dree noticed even though she was still freaking out a little.
He took off his watch and handed it to her.
The watch was an analog type with a steel case, and it had a blue face and band. Under the silver hands, there were three little dials, showing the day of the week, the date, and the phase of the moon.
Dree squinted at it. “What, you don’t have an Apple Watch?”
“That’s a Patek Philippe Grand Complications, and it’s worth about ninety thousand dollars, American.”
Dree dropped it like it burned her fingers.
The watch clattered on the counter.
“Oh, my God. I didn’t break it. It’s fine. It’s fine!”
He laughed. “I would hope it could take a fall better than that.”
She gingerly poked at the watch, pushing it across the counter toward him. She finally grabbed a clean napkin and shoved it at him because she worried that her fingerprints would decrease its value. “No. Take it back. I don’t want it. I might hurt it.”
He laughed again, even leaning over. “It’s your insurance that I’ll pay you for services rendered.”
She did not touch that overpriced watch. “Well, then what’s your insurance that I won’t run off with it, and you’ll never get butt stuff?”
He picked up another croissant and buttered it. “Because I’ll pay you more than twice that amount if you stick around until Thursday.”
She considered it. “Okay, but you don’t have to give me your watch. I’m fine without it.”
“No,” he said. “You keep it until I pay up.”
She carefully buckled the leather strap around her wrist on the tightest hole, but it still slipped up her arm. “I’m afraid I’ll lose it.”
“If you do, I’ll still pay you.” He looked up at her and smiled. “You’re worth it.”
Dree didn’t want to argue because that kind of money would change her life and Mandi’s, too. She stuffed a croissant in her mouth so she wouldn’t say something stupid.
Augustine asked her, “Are we still lying to each other?”
She nodded and swallowed the hunk of pastry. “After these four days, we’re done. I have to go home or wherever and go on with my life. This is just an interlude, not real life.”
Real life was sewing up people in an ER and keeping them alive through the night.
Real life was working hard and putting money away in her savings account for a rainy day.
He said, “I seem to know quite a bit about you, despite the lying.”
“That was all lies,” Dree lied. “I’m really a person of ill repute who works for the IRS.”
Augustine chuckled again. “Fine. As you wish. After we’re done eating, pack your things. We’re going to my hotel.”
“Oh, I couldn’t,” she said.
He fixed his dark eyes on her. “Yes, you will, because you’ll do everything I tell you, or else it’s ‘butt stuff’ tonight.”