I rolled out of bed and felt her eyes on me as I crossed to the liquor cart, kicking aside bottles of French wine along the way.
“Maybe you would have liked the show,” I said, glancing over my shoulder. “Maybe you would have liked to join in.”
The girl huffed irritably and crossed her arms over her chest.
“Maybe I would have liked to gouge my eyes out with a shard of glass and joined a suicide pact with the first person I met on the street instead.”
I hid my grin as I poured a drink for her and me. “Are you looking at my butt?” I asked her as I reached for the Gunpowder gin.
“I’m looking at just about anything else.”
“I’ve been told it’s rather nice,” I said.
“What, by the woman who just left here in tears?” she replied.
I turned around with our drinks and moved toward her. She eyed me warily as I approached, like I was a dog she wasn’t sure bit or not.
“Do you want to know what I said to her?” I asked as I handed the girl her drink.
She sniffed it like I’d slipped in a vial of poison. I rolled my eyes when I saw her waiting for me to drink first. I indulged her by tipping the glass back and finishing half the martini in one go. She took a tentative sip, her full lips brushing against the edge of the glass.
“Said to who?” she asked, looking up at me.
I nodded toward the door behind her. “The woman who you said I reduced to tears with the power of my cock,” I said. “Do you want to know what I told her to earn my free ride? The first free ride, I mean.”
The girl glared up at me. “That’s not what I said.”
“Do you want to know or not?”
The girl cocked her hip and shrugged. “No, not particularly.”
I grinned as she avoided my eye.
“I told her an American tramp stole my wallet,” I said. “I told her a girl with dark, dark eyes assaulted me in an alleyway and I only just managed to fight her off before she took advantage of me.”
The girl rolled her eyes. “Are you always this full of shit?”
I stepped back in surprise. “You think I’m lying?” I asked, placing my hand innocently over my heart.
The girl eyed me over the lip of her martini glass. “I know you’re lying.”
I narrowed my eyes and sank my teeth into my lower lip. “What do you think I told her then?”
I watched as the girl considered this, her pinkies drumming along the stem of the glass. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “But it was something to make her come to you. Something that made her feel like it was her decision. Not yours. Like she was in charge or something.”
“Not bad at all, love!”
I tapped my finger on the tip of her delicate nose and chuckled when she swatted my hand away. There was a fiery defiance in her that I just adored. I wanted more of it.
“Were you jealous?” I asked, raising a curious eyebrow.
I watched her face closely for any sort of reaction. I grinned when I saw a slight widening of her pupils, there and gone like a flare sent up into the night.
“Can we go ahead and get to the part where you tell me what it is I need to do to get what I want in life, or however the fuck you put it?”
I moved a little closer to her and she backed away by an equal distance. “Do you swear when you’re nervous?” I asked her.
“I wasn’t fucking jealous.”
I grinned wickedly.
She exhaled loudly and dragged her fingers through her thick, dark hair. “I wasn’t jealous,” she repeated, making sure her tone was even and flat.
She was about as good of an actress at this point as she was a waitress. I watched her trying not to squirm uncomfortably.
“Thou dost protest too fucking much, me goddamn thinks.”
The girl’s fingers clenched around her glass as she shot daggers at me with her dark eyes. “Are you going to tell me or not?”
“Woah, woah, love, what’s the rush?” I asked, turning around and padding across my room to the liquor cart for another drink. “You just got here. Put down your jacket. I mean my jacket.”
I heard the girl scoff behind me. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew it.”
“Knew it was a cute ass? Didn’t I tell you that already?”
“I knew you were lying,” she said. “There’s nothing to learn, nothing to teach. It’s all just a big lie we all, the rich and poor alike, like to tell ourselves: that we can ‘move up’ in life, ‘climb the ladder’, live the ‘American Dream’. It’s all bullshit. Goddamn bullshit.”
I poured my gin slowly as I heard her pacing back and forth behind me.
“I mean, we all have to grow up at some point and realise that there are the haves and the have nots and that’s just the way it is. Some people have it and some people don’t. It’s all just luck at the end of the day. And there’s no way in life to change your luck.”
Her shouting travelled up to the peaked glass ceiling and echoed back down. I just listened as she got louder and louder and louder.
“Here’s the bottom line and this is a cold hard fact: you can be anyone you want to be in this god forsaken life, anyone but someone with a bigger-ass bank account.”
I turned around slowly and leaned against the liquor cart. I raised my drink to my lips and watched her pant and gasp for air, cheeks flushed, brow glistening in the warm glow of my lamps.
“Has anyone told you that you have an attitude problem?” I asked.
The girl threw her head back and shouted at the night’s stars.
“Feel better?” I asked when she’d let it all out.
“Fuck you.”
I watched as she put down her martini glass, tossed my jacket over the back of the couch, dumped my wallet onto the floor from her purse, and spun on her heel.
“I’m leaving,” she said.
Just as she grabbed the handle to my bedroom door, I said, “You’re right, you know.”
The girl stopped, hesitated. My eyes were waiting for her when she glanced over her shoulder at me, her dark gaze half concealed by the curtain of long hair. “What do you mean?”
I gestured about the room. “This, I mean. All this. I didn’t deserve any of it.”
The girl licked her lips and turned just a hair back toward me. I sighed as I swirled an olive around my martini.
“That really eats away at me sometimes,” I said, my voice soft. “People out there struggling and here I am, everything I ever want or need just falling into my lap.”
The girl chewed at her lip, her narrow fingers still half holding onto the handle.
“So you admit it was an act,” she said. “This whole ‘I can teach you to get what you want in the world’ thing.”
I shrugged, still not lifting my gaze to hers. “I saw you at The White Room and I wanted you. There. That’s the truth.”
“And the other woman?”
“A ploy to make you jealous,” I said. “I told her I was filthy rich. I told her who I was. Why else do you think she jumped at the chance of getting with me?”
I glanced up just enough to see the girl had turned to face me, her back fully to my bedroom door. Her hands were heavy at her sides, the defensive posture gone.