As we drove, I drummed my fingers against the steering wheel, feeling a surge of pent-up energy course through me. “Look, I don't care if you want to tell your friends about this,” I finally told her.
“What?” she asked, looking aghast.
“I know there are certain bragging rights that come along with sleeping with me,” I told her, speaking slowly, as though she were dumb. “I don't care if you want to tell them all about how good I was in bed or about what my place looks like. I don't care if you want to share those photos that you took last night. I do ask that you don't talk to the press about it. I'm not going to make you sign an NDA because you can't tell them anything that they don't already know. But you also can't talk about this to anyone at your office, for obvious reasons.”
She scoffed, and out the corner of my eye, I could see the way her hands clenched into fists against her thighs. “Sure,” she said, sounding bitter. “To be honest, there wasn't much to brag about.”
“Oh, come on,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I'm not going to insult your prowess in bed, and you don't need to insult mine. It's nothing personal. Hell, you're beautiful, and you're great in bed. I haven't come that hard in forever. You interest me in ways that most women never manage to.”
“But,” Lexi spat, looking angrily out the window.
“But,” I sighed. “Lexi, I just can't commit to anyone at the moment. I made that very clear before we slept together. I can't be your boyfriend. I'm sorry. We had a great night, but it can't happen again.”
“I'm not asking you to be my boyfriend,” Lexi said, sounding irritated. “A couple dates, or a few fucks, doesn't make you my boyfriend. I'm not asking you to commit to me or anything even remotely like that.”
“In my books, that's exactly what a couple dates mean,” I told her peevishly. “A couple dates is a commitment that I can't give. A couple dates, and you'd probably be expecting me to text you every morning when you woke up and every evening when you got done with work. A couple dates and you'd probably be expecting me to whisk you away to some romantic weekend retreat. A couple dates and you'd be telling your parents all about me. I know what a couple of dates means to a woman.”
Lexi snorted derisively, but she didn't respond.
We continued the drive back to her place in silence. I switched on the radio and then punched it off again when I could only find mid-morning talk shows on the air. I continued to drum my fingers against the edge of the steering wheel, not sure why I felt so upset. It didn't really matter what she thought. I was never going to see her again, unless our paths happened to cross again at Orinoco or Albright.
I pulled up to her apartment building and idled on the curb, waiting for her to get out. She took her sweet time doing so. Before she closed the door, she leaned down and stared at me. “You're kind of an asshole,” she said.
I rolled my eyes. “Sure, whatever,” I snapped in response. “Think whatever you want about me. Tell all your little friends whatever you want about me. I'm still not going to see you again.”
“A couple dates isn't commitment. A couple dates can just be two people enjoying one another's company and having good sex.”
“Okay,” I said heatedly, tempted to reach over and pull the door shut since she clearly wasn't about to close it. But part of me wanted to hear what she was going to say next.
She snorted. “You're probably just a coward. You're so afraid of having a woman find out that dating you isn't all that it's cracked up to be, that you don't even give her the chance. Because as soon as she found out how uninteresting you really are, she'd dump your ass. You're just trying to protect yourself against being dumped, aren't you?”
Her voice was taunting, and I felt anger surge through me. “You done, Dr. Phil?” I asked, trying to keep my own tone level so that she couldn't tell that she had hit a nerve with that one.
Finally, she slammed the door shut, harder than was strictly necessary, and stomped off. I watched her head up the steps and into her building, thinking over what she had said. It might be true, or it might not be. Either way, I wasn't really concerned.
It was the same as her comment about art and wine or about the house. Did it really matter if I showed interest in the arts just because I wanted to show off my wealth? Did it really matter if I was hardly ever at home in my beautiful house? I was supporting the local economy either way, and wasn't that more important than whatever my personal motives were?
So, too, with this. I showed women a good time for a night. When it was a woman like Lexi, I gave them a little taste of what the other side, the high-class culture, was like. Did it matter if I was dumping them after one night because I wasn't interested in anything more, or because I was scared they wouldn't be interested in anything more? I didn't think so.
Anyway, I wasn't about to change the way I lived just for some random woman who I'd met at work.
I put the car in drive and headed to the office to continue looking over the details of the Albright acquisition.
Chapter Seven
Lexi
I chewed on my fingernail as I slowly typed in my bank account password. I knew I didn't really want to see how much money, or how little money, remained in my account, but I also knew that I couldn't avoid looking any longer.
I glanced back towards the envelope at the side of my desk and swallowed hard.
Sure enough, my bank account was just as grim as I'd expected. I only had a hundred dollars remaining.
For a moment, I wondered how it had gotten to this. I had graduated from college with honors, and I'd netted a job shortly thereafter as an insurance analyst for Orinoco. But that had all been a few years
ago now, and in the past few years, everything had changed and gone to shit.
Well, not everything, I thought, glancing towards the living room with a small smile.