And she probably said something in return.
And then…oh whatever. Everything had vanished into this blur of awfulness where I felt weird and dirty and guilty and used in a way I just hadn’t before.
As if I’d done something bad.
And a little bit like everybody knew about it. Or at the very least darkly suspected.
By the time the Master let me go, with congratulations and good wishes and apparently increased hope for my future success, I was trembly and nauseous with pretending to be okay.
It was mainly shock. And newfound shame.
And a kind of hopeless fury that I’d trusted him and, in return, he’d turned something good into something icky.
Is that how he saw me? Someone who’d had sex with him in order to score a big donation?
God, I’d thought he liked me. He’d made me believe I was safe with him. But all the time he’d seen me as disposable. Someone to be used and dismissed and paid off and forgotten.
I sat down on the library steps and put my head in my hands, the gold and green of the quad smearing into the tears I definitely wasn’t crying.
Jet-setting fantasies aside, I’d known—I’d known right from the first moment I set eyes on him—that I’d probably never see him again. That we wouldn’t kiss or date or talk or do any of the things that most people counted as meaningful. That I wouldn’t be telling my grandkids, or probably Nik’s grandkids, about that enchanted evening long ago when I let a stranger fuck my throat until I came.
But that hadn’t mattered when what we’d done had been special to him in the same odd sort of way it had been special to me. That we’d both trusted and shared and taken and given.
Except now I knew it wasn’t like that: I’d been nothing to him all along.
Which was probably why the last thing he’d said had been Forgive me.
Barely out of my mouth and he was regretting me. Planning to get rid of me. Ensuring he’d never have to think of me again. Turning what we’d done into transaction.
It wasn’t as if I’d never been treated badly before—as the saying went, if you kissed a lot of princes, sooner or later you were bound to sleep with a frog—but it had never been like this. It just wasn’t something you thought to protect yourself against.
Not exactly the whole “having the billionaire you just sucked off donate a scary amount of money to your college’s endowment” because how in God’s name could you prepare for that? But discovering the distance between how you saw something—and saw yourself—and the way someone else did. And feeling cheapened by that distance.
Hurt.
So there I was, struck deep in some unexpected vulnerability, left bleeding by a blow I never saw coming. No pun intended.
It was my own fault. I should have never—
No, wait.
It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do anything wrong. He made it wrong. And I didn’t deserve to be sitting here feeling like fucking nothing.
And that was when anger made itself my champion. It made me feel strong instead of weak, righteous instead of used. And, through my drying tears, before I actually tried to take action, it looked a lot like courage.
Which was how I ended up on the Oxford Tube, heading for London. Convinced I was going to be able to stand in front of Caspian Hart, look him in the eye, and tell him with terrifying dignity exactly how not okay his behavior was. Genuinely believing that this was something I could do. That it wouldn’t be absurd and embarrassing and futile. That he deserved to feel as bad as I did. And that—most ridiculously of all—I had the power to make him.
Chapter 8
I shoved through the front door of Hart & Associates—which didn’t go as well as I might have hoped because it was revolving, and I had a hard enough time getting through those things when I was completely compos mentis—and then went plunging across the foyer. Everything was a haze of glass and steel and marble. Beautiful in a way, a godless cathedral, full of echoes and refracted light, but it was also the kind of space designed to make you feel shabby and small.
Which, if you asked me, was an architectural dick move.
I kept catching glimpses of myself in too many gleaming surfaces. Wildly out of place in Hart’s Temple of Mammon in scruffy jeans and a T-shirt, and my favorite jacket—the velvet one I’d worn to the dinner, with holes in the elbows and all the nap worn away, my rainbow pride bracelets disappearing under the fraying sleeve. I hadn’t even taken the time to engineer my hair so it was multidirectional and ridiculous. Basically, I looked like a rentboy who’d let himself go.
A voice called after me, “Can I help you?”
And I called back, “No,” as I jumped into the lift and hit the button. He would be right at the top because the top was the best. I’d seen Pretty Woman. I knew how this stuff worked.
