“You’ve got it, buddy,” I said. “Spill. You can buy me a beer to make up for it.”

He shook his head, his hands curled around his pint glass. “You know how it is. Everything’s great until it isn’t. Elizabeth, you know—you’ve met her.” I nodded. “Well, it’s not great. It’s over.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, and I genuinely was. Colin had been dating Elizabeth for several years, and the last I had heard, he was thinking about proposing to her. They had seemed well-matched. Happy.

“Yeah, well, you know,” he said. “Now it’s back on the dating carousel. Meet someone, fuck her, forget to call her. Rinse, repeat. It blows. You think you’ve met the right one, and it’s good and it’s the real thing, and then it turns out you were wrong.” He shook his head. “It fucking blows. I should have—I don’t know what I should have done differently. Appreciated her more. Realized what an incredible fucking thing I had going and held onto her with all my might.”

I groaned and rubbed my face with both hands. The universe, at times, lacked subtlety.

Okay, I said silently, to whatever higher power was listening. I get it. You win.

“What you need, my friend, is a wild night,” I told Colin, setting one hand on his shoulder. “Drink your troubles away. And lucky you, you’re here with Trevor, who—”

“Whose mission in life is to make sure everyone is as drunk as possible at all times,” Colin said. “You’re right.”

“And the women aren’t bad, either,” I said, gazing around the bar. “Our waitress is quite stunning, actually.” Watching her walk toward us, I realized that she was stunning: tall, slender, with wavy red hair spilling down her back. And somehow, despite the fact that she had brought me four drinks and smiled at me winningly each time, I hadn’t really seen her until that moment.

Sasha had ruined me for other women.

I didn’t stay out late that night. I didn’t drink to the point of insensibility, as I had originally planned. I chatted up a willowy blond sitting at the bar until she agreed to keep Colin company, and I left him leaning into her with a dazed look on his face, like he couldn’t believe his good luck.

And then I went home, alone and far too sober.

There was no helping it: I would have to accept my fate.

Sasha had me hooked. There was no helping it. Whatever weird chemistry there was between us, whatever magnetic draw, I would be a coward if I didn’t see it through to its natural conclusion. Maybe that conclusion would be misery, like Colin had found.

Maybe it would be joy.

15

Having decided there was no point in resisting, I succumbed completely. Over the next week, I spent the vast majority of my free time with Sasha. When I wasn’t at work, I was with her. We went out for ice cream, watched movies at my apartment, and even had dinner once with Yolanda and Will at a hole-in-the-wall burrito place near NYU. And the rest of the time we spent in bed. After sex, when we were relaxed and sweaty and full of endorphins, we talked for hours, sharing secrets, laughing about nothing in particular.

On Friday evening, when I asked her what she wanted to do that weekend, my blissful interlude came to an abrupt end.

“I’m working tomorrow night,” she said, rolling over in bed to face me. “I talked to Germaine. I can’t just keep pretending that I’m on permanent vacation.”

I still hated the thought of her going back to work at the club, but I swallowed my objections. She already knew that I disapproved, and scolding her about it wouldn’t make her change her mind. If I tried to control her, she would tell me to fuck off. Probably in exactly so many words.

So I said, “Let’s do something tomorrow morning, then. Something noteworthy. Soon you’ll be a nocturnal creature again, and I’ll have to settle for seeing you on your days off.” I slid one hand down her side, trying to show her that I wasn’t upset.

“It’s not that bad,” she said, her expression slightly guilty despite my best efforts to mask my displeasure. “I told Germaine I’m not going to be working seven days a week anymore. Probably five. I’m going to try to stick to five.”

“I’m fairly certain that’s a sign of workaholism,” I said.

She covered her face with both hands. “I know! Okay. I know. I can’t help it. We never had any money when I was growing up, and now I have enough money to help my mom and send my sister to college, and it’s hard to know when to stop. I think about all the things I could do for my family if I just had a little bit more money, and it’s like. Where do I draw the line?”

I drew her hands away from her face and kissed each of her palms, one and then the other. “Stop worrying about money. I told you I’d give you whatever you need.” I set my fingers against her lips, staving off whatever protest she was about to make. “I know you won’t take me up on it. But you don’t have to worry anymore. If something happens, if—who knows, if one of your brothers is paralyzed in a terrible accident and needs cutting-edge robotic technology in order to walk again, you’ve got a backup plan. You don’t have to do it alone anymore. You can lean on me if you need to.”

She pushed my hand away from her mouth and said, “You’re sweet.”

Her tone didn’t indicate sarcasm, but I was suspicious anyway. “Are you mocking me?”

“Of course not!” she said, frowning. “I mean it. You are sweet. But I’m never going to take your money, so you might as well give up on the idea.”

She had been perfectly willing to take my money when it was a business transaction, but I knew better than to bring that up. Business was business, and what we were doing had long since ceased to be business. If I was being honest with myself, it had stopped being business the very first time she spent the night in my bed, the day she signed the contract.

“We’ll revisit this topic at a later time,” I said. “Now, what would you like to do tomorrow? We could have lunch at some breathtakingly trendy restaurant, or—I don’t know, rent out the Empire State Building for a few hours and have sex on the observation deck—”

“I want to go to the Statue of Liberty,” she said.

I raised my eyebrows and ran one hand down the curve of her back, settling on her sweet ass. “Really? You know it’s full of tourists and teenagers from New Jersey.”