He raised an eyebrow. “You read those?”

“I’m trying to teach myself about, you know. Clothing and makeup and... things like that.” I shrugged. “I didn’t go looking for stuff about you.”

“I see,” he said, and sighed. “Oh, Regan. You shouldn’t be working at that club.”

I stiffened. “Why not?”

“You can do better,” he said. “You have so much potential. Don’t waste it serving drinks to rich assholes.”

What a condescending thing to say. I laughed sharply. It didn’t sound happy even to me. “I can do better? I really can’t. My father was a drunk who beat my mother, who refused to leave him. We never had any money. My childhood sucked. I’ve been scraping by for years, one crummy job after another, and now I’m finally making real money. I just opened my very first savings account. Don’t lecture me about better. This is the best my life has ever been. And you’re—nobody has ever told you ‘no.’ But I’ve spent my whole life being told ‘no’ over and over again.” I rubbed my eyes, covering my face with my hands. I shouldn’t have said any of that.

“You’ve been through a lot,” Carter said. He took a step toward me and stopped. “Look, I know that I can’t—really understand what you’ve been through. But you shouldn’t limit your options just because you’ve had a hard life.”

To my horror, my eyes filled with tears. I covered my face again, this time to keep Carter from noticing that I had started crying. “I’ll keep that in mind,” I choked out. I took a few deep breaths, calming myself, and managed to get the waterworks under control. I lowered my hands from my face. “That’s not the point. I’m still...” I’m still mad at you, I filled in silently, assertion and reminder. It was hard to stay angry when he kept looking at me like that.

I had to end this. I should have done it the night before, and I hadn’t, and look how that had turned out. I couldn’t keep going like this, thinking about him all the time, hungry for his presence when we weren’t together. It was time.

“Carter, look,” I said. “This has been really fun, okay, but it’s not—it isn’t real life. We have nothing in common, not really. I need to focus on working and making money and—taking care of myself. It would be really, really easy for me to get in over my head with you, and I can’t let that happen. I know you aren’t serious about this; I’m just—a notch on your bedpost, I guess, like all those starlets you go out with, and I’m not really, you know. It’s fine that you do that. But it’s not really for me.”

He stared at me blankly. “Are you... breaking up with me?”

“No,” I said. “I can’t break up with you. We aren’t—there isn’t anything. But I think we need to stop spending time together.”

“Because of the starlets,” he said. His voice had no intonation to it; it was completely flat and emotionless. “What starlets?”

I turned to my laptop, still open on the sofa. “Amber Reynolds,” I said. “Tina Lafayette. Jennifer Hutchins. Michaela Lawrence—”

He held up one hand to stop me. “That’s enough. Are you going to believe those bloggers? They’re vultures. I speak to someone for five minutes at a party, and suddenly I’m having a passionate affair with her.” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have to explain myself to you. It’s like you said. We aren’t. There isn’t anything.”

I deserved that, but it still stung. “The club,” I said, grasping at straws, desperate for a reason that he wouldn’t question, so I wouldn’t have to explain the truth to him: that I wasn’t good enough for him, and never would be. “You said you like watching. You’re there with the—the dancers, in the private rooms, and you—I mean, I don’t know what happens in there, but—”

“Are you really doing this?” he asked.

I ignored the interruption. “—but I think that you should, um, consider that the women you’re watching are people, with their own inner lives, and by perpetuating the exchange of female sexuality for money, you’re undermining the—the ability of women to meaningfully transform the accepted gendered behavioral binary.” I was babbling now, parroting things that Sadie had said to me without really understanding them. I hoped it was coherent enough that Carter wouldn’t see through my desperate verbal fumbling.

Carter folded his arms across his chest. “The gendered behavioral binary,” he repeated.

I nodded, deciding it was probably best if I didn’t say anything else.

“I suppose it makes sense you would think that,” he said. “I’m at the club a lot, after all. And I did tell you—” He stopped, and sighed. “I shouldn’t tell you this,” he said. “Please understand that if you breathe a word about it to anyone, you’ll be undoing several years of hard work on the part of many people.”

I swallowed. I didn’t know what he was going to tell me, but it sounded serious. “I understand.”

“I’m helping federal prosecutors build a case against Richard Hackett. He won’t meet with me anywhere except the club; he’s paranoid, thinks he’s being bugged. Well, he is, but he doesn’t have any proof of it.” He sighed again, and drew one hand over his face. “So that’s why I’m at the club all the time. Not, as you seem to think, because I enjoy exploiting women.”

“That’s not what I think,” I said, even though that was, in fact, pretty much what I had said to him. I decided that misdirection was the best tactic. “Who’s Richard Hackett?”

“You’ve met him. He’s the one who likes fingering the dancers,” Carter said.

His words made me blush, but I knew, then, who he was talking about. “You’re building a case?”

“Securities fraud,” he said. “Mainly insider trading.” He shook his head. “Men who have so much money that they can’t think about anything but making more.”

“But not you,” I said, almost a question. “You think about other things.”

Our eyes met. His gaze, so clear and direct, sent an electric current running down my spine. “I think about other things,” he agreed.