He kicks off his dark dress shoes, pulls out a case, and removes his contacts. Then he puts on the running shoes, dons thick-rimmed glasses, and as a finishing touch, rubs a pump of hair gel between his palms and rumples his hair. Like this, his khaki dress slacks could pass for cargo pants.
He turns to me. “What do you think?”
I think a lot of things.
I’m not sure what game he’s playing, but I’m already berating myself for coming along. I can’t afford to go to lunch with him. I can’t afford the meal. And—I do have my pride—I won’t let him pay. I definitely can’t afford to remember his biceps.
But despite my better judgment, that part of me that is swayed by classical standards of masculine appeal thinks he’s pretty freaking hot. I think I looked more than I should have when he took off his shirt, and I think he knows that.
I give him a critical once-over. “Good disguise,” I tell him. “But it needs a fake mustache.”
He cracks up.
“True story,” he says. “The only time I ever wore dress shirts before I started here was for events—interviews or products launches. Shit like that. Now I wear them all the time. People see the outfit and they think it’s me.” He shrugs. “This way, I get a little privacy.”
It would be so easy to let myself pretend I’m friends with Blake. He’s funny, and more down to earth than I expected. But it’s bad enough being attracted to him because of basic social programming. I can only imagine how much worse this would be if I legitimately liked him as an individual.
“That is awesome,” I say. “I can sell that story to some enterprising reporter for at least a hundred bucks.”
He gives me a patient smile. “Yes, but you won’t.”
“Because I’m going to be so blown away by your amazing charisma that I forget how much I need the money?” I wrinkle my nose to signify how likely this is.
“No. Because by the time lunch is over, you and I are going to be on the same page. Business-wise.”
“Oh, yes.” I frown at him. “That. What is this all about?”
He smiles enigmatically, but doesn’t say anything more until we’re settled into the half-empty top floor of a Vietnamese restaurant. We place our order and the waiter leaves us in peace.
Blake takes a paper napkin from the holder and unfolds it into a wisp of translucent whiteness, before rolling it up and setting it on the table between us. When he looks up, though, his eyes seem like flint—hard and impossible.
“So,” he says. “Are you going to trade me?”
I look over into his clear, blue eyes. I think he may actually be serious. There’s not a hint of a smile on his face. He picks up the napkin again and starts methodically ripping it to shreds.
“You’re going to have to be a lot more specific,” I tell him. “Because that could mean anything.”
“You were right the other day,” he says smoothly. “I’m clueless. I don’t know what it’s like to be you, or anyone like you, and I want to fix that. I offer a trade. I work your hours. I pay your rent. I live in your apartment.”
“It’s so cute that you think I live in an apartment,” I interject.
“You get my house, my car, my allowance. You take over my duties at Cyclone, too—to the extent that’s possible. We’ll have to talk about that. There are details to work out. But that’s the gist of it.”
He shrugs, like what he has set forth is no big deal, and I’m left to boggle at him. There are so many things wrong with this that I don’t even know where to start.
I pick apart the one thing that’s simple. “An allowance? Please don’t tell me you’re getting an allowance from your dad on top of everything else.”
“Ha. No.” He has amassed an arsenal of napkin shreds in front of him. “I thought about offering you my salary instead, but…that’s a dollar a year, so probably that wouldn’t work for you. I asked my accountant to figure out how much I usually spend instead.” He shoots me a look. “I’ll give you that and we’ll call it an allowance. It’s probably not as much as you think.”
I shake my head. “Is that how rich people think? ‘I will impress everyone by taking an extremely tiny salary to show how meaningless money is.’”
“It’s more like, ‘Wow, who wants to pay taxes on ordinary income? Let’s shift my compensation to capital gains tax at every possible opportunity.’”
Oh, thank God he said that. I had just been thinking we might have something in common. I wave my hand with more airiness than I feel. “Ah, tax evasion. As one does.”
He gives me a self-deprecating shrug. “Legal tax evasion. It’s the best kind.”
“You asked me to trade,” I say. “I’m just trying to understand your perspective. After all, you can’t be blowing all your billions on something as gauche as a functioning government.”
The tips of his ears turn slightly pink. “Billion.” He coughs. “Really. It’s just one billion. Not multiple billions.”
I choke. I’d been trying for over-the-top hyperbole. What comes out, though is, “And here I thought you were actually wealthy.”
“A billion point four, depending on how you count stock options that haven’t completely vested,” he mutters. “It’s not that much, not compared to my father.”
That number is so vast, it takes me a minute to get my mind around it. He’s worth ten figures. I’m worth…well, after I pay for this meal? One.
The balance of my checking account is less than a millionth of his rounding errors. We’re not even in the same solar system. I feel like this conversation is careening off a cliff into a universe where gravity and ordinary income tax do not apply.
“That’s good.” I feel almost light-headed. “As long as you’re only a billion-point-four-aire, this isn’t awkward at all. How much does a billion-point-four-aire spend anyway?”
“Probably not as much as you’re imagining. Fifteen thousand.”
“A semester?”
“A month.” He shrugs. “I told you. I’m not a huge spender.”
My mind goes totally blank, trying to imagine how someone who thinks he’s not a huge spender manages to spend fifteen thousand dollars a month. What does he do with all of that? Put gold nuggets on his cereal? Fund a small army? Oh, no, I imagine him saying. I’m not a huge spender. We only go through a kilo or two of weapons-grade plutonium every year—scarcely enough to destroy the city of San Francisco. You should see what the other megalomaniacal billionaires can do when they’re feeling tetchy!
“You could buy four thousand pounds of oatmeal every month,” I say instead. “Probably more if you buy in bulk.”
He gives me a puzzled look. “Why would I do that?”
“I’m just saying. That’s a lot of oatmeal.”
The waiter brings steaming bowls of pho and plates of greens and sprouts. I take the opportunity to strip basil leaves methodically into my soup. I can’t imagine what a billion dollars looks like. It’s too big a number. It’s like showing someone a teaspoon of sand and asking her to envision the Sahara.
But fifteen thousand? That is within my capacity to understand. Fifteen thousand times three months left in the semester means I could quit my job. For good. I wouldn’t have to work at all through graduation. It would mean being able to pay my way if friends invited me out. I can stop deleting those emails advertising prestigious but unpaid summer internships.
Forty-five thousand dollars means no more bitterness when my mom asks for money. I can just give it to her and feel good about it. I could pay off Dad’s medical debt instead of watching it bleed my parents dry, month after month. Hope flutters inside me on breathless anticipation.
I squash it dead.
Because forty-five thousand dollars is just too much money.
“I have a question,” I say. “Just a little one.”
He desultorily throws a bean sprout in his broth. “Go for it.”
“Most people don’t need to pay forty-five thousand dollars in order to work at a crapp
y job. Or to live in a crappy apartment. Most people do it for free.”
He stops in the midst of fishing out his sprout and puts down his chopsticks. “Yes,” he says, a little more quietly. “I could do that. But I don’t want to explain what I’m doing to my dad. That means I need to keep up with my duties at Cyclone. And that means I need someone smart enough to handle them. Someone who can think independently. Someone I can work with. That’s you.”
I know I’m smart. But Blake? We’ve exchanged a tiny handful of sentences. Out of all the people in the world, he picks me? I don’t believe that.
I consider him. “That fifteen thousand a month is post-tax for you,” I say. “I have to pay taxes on it. I want it adjusted up accordingly.”
He doesn’t blink. “Fair enough.”
“And you’ll earn stock options on the work I do, right? I should get them.”
This has him wrinkling his nose in contemplation. “That’s…a little harder to do as a straight transfer, but I can sign over an equivalent number of shares that I already own outright. But that isn’t all that much right now, though, not with me on partial hiatus. It’s worth maybe another ten or fifteen grand.”
Yep. That just about proves my point. I stand up, take out my wallet, and carefully, painfully, count out nine dollars. I set this next to my bowl.
“This is too much,” I say. “You’re too eager to agree. There’s something else going on here. It’s like those emails where some government official offers an obscene amount of money in exchange for transferring funds from their accounts in Burkina Faso to the United States. I don’t know what your scam is or how you’re running it, but when something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. I’m out.”
I set the money down and start toward the stairs.
“Tina.” I hear his chair scrape the floor behind me. “Wait. Tina.”
He takes hold of my wrist as I’m leaving, turning me to him.
I snatch my hand away. “Don’t touch me.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He looks at me; I look at him. For a second, the casual, smiling façade he usually wears is wiped away. There’s something wild about him, something that scares me more than the offer he just made. “I’m sorry,” he says again, and this time, I feel like he’s apologizing for something else entirely.
“What’s really going on here?”
He runs one hand through his hair. “I’m sorry,” he says for a fourth time. “It’s just… Look. I don’t know how to explain this to you. Maybe that sounded like a lot of money to you. But over the course of this conversation, random stock market fluctuations have changed my net worth by a lot more than sixty thousand dollars. We’re talking about a heartbeat’s amount of money for me. I don’t need money. I gave up—easily—several million dollars in compensation when I went to school. That’s how much I’ve already paid to get away.”
He almost shivers as he speaks, like he’s being blown by a wind I can’t feel.
It’s strange. For the first time since we sat down to lunch together, I believe him. I don’t know why he’s so desperate to get away—but I believe that he is. And that scares me, seduces me, and pisses me off, all at once.
“I understand where you’re coming from,” he says. “This is a little unusual. But my father always says that the person who can walk away from a deal is the one who is in control. That’s where you are. You’re in control. You tell me the terms you need to make this work.”
“All right,” I say slowly. “But that only answers half my question. Why can’t you let me walk away? Why me?”
“I need someone to come up with a script for our newest product launch,” he says. “And—I don’t know if you’ve ever watched Cyclone product launches?”
I shake my head. It’s not like I could afford their products anyway.
“You’ll see, then. They’re…personal. The launches. Whoever it is that I ask to help me will have access to our old scripts, complete with the change logs, and those will let you know a lot about me and my father.”
I think of that commercial—of Blake running away from his home, of his father sending him a sorry. I wonder if his entire life has been turned into publicity for products.
“There aren’t that many people I’m willing to let that close,” he says, “and most of them work at Cyclone and would tell my father. My options are limited.”
But you don’t even know me.
He takes a deep breath. “Also, if you’re going to write the launch script, you’ll need to get Cyclone prototypes. It’s not like you can write a launch for a product you’ve never held. And there’s only one way for a non-Cyclone employee to get a prototype. You’ll have to meet my dad. Which is bad enough in and of itself. But. Um. He’s pretty protective of our new tech, and that’s a huge understatement. It’s not like he just hands out prototypes at my request.” He glances down. “When you meet him, you’ll have to pretend to be my girlfriend.”
A wash of heat goes through me. For a second, I imagine what that would be like. And even that second’s imagination—of Blake touching me, holding me, kissing me—is too much.
“Whatever you’re imagining,” Blake says, “it won’t be like that. Just one afternoon. And Dad thinks PDA is gross, so no kissing even. Just holding hands. Nothing else; I promise.”
I swallow. “You still haven’t answered my question,” I say. “Why me? I doubt I’m the only person in the world who could pretend to be your girlfriend.”
Blake looks me over. It’s the kind of look that makes me think of lottery tickets and unicorns, of things that don’t happen in my world. I can feel his gaze like a caress.
“I’m shit at lying to my dad,” he says. “I can only pretend so far. It needs to be someone I have reasonable chemistry with.”
Reasonable chemistry. That’s what this is for him?
“As for the rest…Tina, when do you think we first ran into each other?”
I swallow. “In class? A few weeks ago?”
“Last September. In the library. You helped me find a book.” He looks over at me. “Like I said. I’ve been seeing you for longer than you’ve been seeing me.”
I don’t know if I believe him because I want to believe him, or because he’s so genuinely sincere that I can’t help myself. All I know is that if there is a chance in hell that this is legitimate, I can’t say no. I can’t afford to.
“If I do this,” I say slowly, “I’ll have to quit my job. I need a written guarantee that I’ll get the money you’ve promised me for the entire semester, even if you can’t hack it and quit after the first week.”
“Done. Anything else?”
This still feels incomplete. Dangerous. I bite my lip and consider.
“You offered me a trade,” I say next. “Not a purchase. You’re not hiring me. You just told me that the thing I want is worth millions to you.” I still don’t understand how that can be true, but I know that if I don’t insist on it now, it will never be recognized. “That means that what I put in has value.”
He nods.
“So we come into this thing equally. I’m not going to spend three months listening to you bitch about how pitiful my life is. The things I care about, the things I have to worry about—for the rest of this…thing, whatever it is, they’re as important as anything you have going on. I’m important, too.”
“Agreed,” he says. “You’re important.”
He’s standing close to me, his gaze so intent on mine that it almost feels like the next step is for him to lean down and brush his lips against mine. He hasn’t touched me since I told him not to, but I’m so physically aware of him right now that my skin prickles. It itches for what could come next.
I don’t buy lottery tickets. I can do math, and I know the only thing you’re purchasing is the right to scrape false hopes off a card with a nickel. You fool yourself into believing that the universe is on your side, that even though everything else is going down in flames, help will come like magic.
/>
Spending time with Blake is dangerous. It’s irresponsible. And I know that the more time I spend with him, the more I’ll want to believe in the impossible.
But this time, the irresponsible choice has a hell of a lot of dollar signs attached to it.
I let out a breath. If you’re ever forced to buy a lottery ticket, you have to set rules. You can only purchase one. You can’t tell yourself that you’ll spend anything you win on more. If you lose, you can’t say you’ll get one more, just one more. It’s the one more that will do you in every time—never the single ticket itself. And so before this starts, I know I need to make sure that I never let myself believe in one more.
“One last thing.” I swallow. “When this is over, it’s over. No strings. No entanglements. We’re not friends. We’re not Facebook friends. We’re not anything.”
I watch his eyes as I speak. They don’t flicker, not one bit. Not with disappointment, not with hope.
“Subject to reevaluation,” he says finally, “if—”
I can’t let myself leave that door open. Through it will come hope, fear, and worry. But there is no hope. None. “Subject to nothing.” I stare up at him and set my hands on my hips.
“What if—”
“I can’t afford ifs.” I look at him. “It’s that or I walk.”
For a while, he watches me. Then he rubs his forehead.
“Fine,” he says quietly. “You have your conditions. When this is done, it’s done.”
5.
BLAKE
The light next to my dad’s icon in the video chat app on my watch is green. This means he’s not on the phone or in another chat. It doesn’t mean he’s not busy. He’s always busy.
I tap to call him anyway.
And here’s the thing about my dad: If he can conceivably answer when I call, he will. Every time, no matter what time it is. Seven months ago, when I was trying to prove I was a bad ass, I entered a fifty-two-mile long race in Spain. I ended up dropping halfway through with a stress fracture. When I called my dad, he heard the word “fracture” and was on a jet as soon as he could get FAA clearance to take off.
Trade Me Page 5