Chapter 4: Olivia
This was actually happening.
My nerves were shot as Davis keyed into a suite at the Waldorf Astoria, a hotel so luxurious and so sickeningly elegant that I almost turned back at the entrance. This wasn’t a place for the kind of malfeasance I was about to commit. Misdeeds like this were better suited for places like my hostel. Cheap, scummy places where cheap, scummy people like me did cheap, scummy things to sweet boys like Davis Ridgeway.
I was a monster. A complete and utter monster.
It hadn’t been like this with Professor Paul. With Paul, I hadn’t hesitated to take anything and everything he offered me. Clothes, dinners, plane tickets. Even his credit card every once in a while. It was the nature of the arrangement, after all. He and I both knew what we were doing.
Conversely, Davis had no idea. And with Davis, I had been thisclose to blowing up the whole deal and telling him the truth until Charlie called, asking if I would have enough money for a new backpack come September.
I can still turn back.
I could. I could join him for a drink, maybe a quick make out session, and I could tell him to look me up next time he was in St. Louis. Or maybe he would invite me to Philadelphia; it was only a twenty-one-hour Greyhound, after all.
Stupid, Olivia.
The son of a billionaire wasn’t going to date a woman who had to travel by Greyhound. It was idiotic of me to even bother looking up the distance on Google Maps, to then go so far as to indulge in the fantasy. Nothing in my life had ever taken the form of a fantasy—not a single minute of it. It had been one low blow after another, again and again, like this relentless deluge of nightmare circumstances blasting through a dam. Meeting a man like this? It should have never been in the cards for me. This was one of those once in a lifetime kinds of fantasies—heavy emphasis on “once.”
This was now or never.
Maybe this should be never.
But Davis’s big hand on my lower back felt so inviting and reassuring that I allowed his touch to linger as we stood in the doorway. His thumb grazed the base of my spine and he took up a soft caress against the fabric of my dress. Once that happened, I was a goner.
Without a word, I stepped into the suite that Davis was sharing with his brother and friends. With that entrance, another wave of trepidation tore through me. My first mistake was to look around and take in how tasteful this place was. The walls were a mild gray, clearly meant to keep the environment as subdued as possible. There was a dark wood coffee table centered between two gray-white couches opposite a fireplace. It read cozy, more like a home than a five-star suite. Directly behind those sofas, a wall of windows led out to a full balcony, where the canal was glittering with the setting sun.
Nonchalantly, Davis shrugged off his jacket and draped it over the back of an armchair by the entrance. The move put several feet between us, and I was left standing alone by the door and staring at him.
Staring at him like that was my second mistake.
I watched as he cleared his throat and then pushed both of his hands into his pockets, his shoulders tightening as he glanced around the room. After a beat, he raised one hand and ran it through his hair, setting his dark blond locks askew. Never in my life had I ever made a man look so nervous—so completely and obviously anxious—and the gravity of what I was about to do began to sink in. If he ever found out, this would destroy him.
Maybe I could tell Kieran to keep his money. I could lie and say that Davis and I didn’t do it. Better yet, I could be honest and tell Kieran that I didn’t want the money even after sleeping with Davis. I would have done it for free, after all. Sure, I didn’t intend to sleep with anyone, especially not a guy like Davis, so soon after my asshole sugar daddy abandoned me in Europe. But maybe…
Maybe…
Fucking maybes.
“Do you want a drink?” Davis offered, gesturing to the side, surely at a cleverly hidden bar. “Or I could get room service.”
“I’m fine.” Alcohol somehow would have made this so much worse.
The uncertainty was visible on his face. I could see him scanning the room, looking for a reprieve from the discomfort that had set in between us. Eventually, he slumped his shoulders and said, “Hey, look, if you want to take off or still meet the guys out, we can go. We don’t have to—”
“Why do you do that?” I interjected, my tone coming out sharper than I intended. I regretted it when Davis blinked quickly with surprise.
“Do what?”
“Why do you pretend that I wouldn’t want to be here with you? Is it so unbelievable that I would want to be here?”
He blinked again, clearly on a fruitless search for words. “Okay, maybe I should be honest with you. When it comes to girls—sorry, to women—I have this…I’ve never actually…” He trailed off as he ran his hand through his hair again. “Do you want to be here?”
Yes and no. Under the current circumstances, no. I didn’t want to be here. But under any other circumstances—circumstances that didn’t involve my first transactional bout of fucking, yes. Absolutely yes. One thousand and one percent yes.
“Yes,” I said aloud, the word leaving my lips with the weight of a freefall off of the Empire State Building.
“Are you sure? Because you’ve been quiet since we got to the hotel. If you’ve changed your mind, we can just hang out.”
“Is that what you want?”
“No. I want to kiss you again, Olivia.” His expression relaxed as the admission floated there in the space between us, soaking up the discomfort that had steadily filled the room like a deadly fog.
Kiss me. He wanted to kiss me. It was so chaste and so pure that my heart pounded with indecision, weighing and measuring whether I would actually go through with this. I had already lied to him tonight. Just when I was about to come clean about what Kieran had offered me, I’d bought myself some time by telling him about Paul. He wasn’t disgusted by it, to my surprise. He was unflinchingly understanding, actually.
I looked away, trying not to linger on the hopeful look on his face. “Will you show me your room?” I asked him, only daring to make eye contact again once I had made the request.
Davis motioned for me to follow him through the main sitting area and towards a set of doors to the left. He opened the one furthest down the hallway and let me enter first.
A king-sized bed stood in the center of the elegant, white paneled room. Earlier tonight, the turndown service must have come in, because there was a pair of fresh white slippers on the floor and chocolates on Davis’s pillows. The gauzy, white curtains that led out to a balcony door separated us from the sounds of the evening below, and I knew that if I walked over there I would find myself with another unparalleled view of the Herengracht. I could see the faint shimmers of lights through the curtains, and the sound of laughter from passersby below eased the tension that had practically taken over my body.
It was a fairytale. An effervescent, once-in-a-lifetime fairytale.
Davis shut the door behind us, bringing me back to attention. When I turned around to face him, the look his on face must have mirrored my own apprehension.
“I don’t know why I’m so nervous.” He leaned against the door, pressing the blades of his broad shoulders against it.
For a moment, I stiffened with panic as I thought that Davis could read my thoughts. I quickly understood, however, that he was nervous to be here with me—and that we had both come to the same conclusion about how this night would end: We would fuck.
“Me too,” I admitted, offering him that last morsel of honesty as I slowly closed the gap between us.
We stood in front of each other, eyes locked on one another, as we both waited for the other to make the first move.
His hesitation must have come from a place of sheer apprehension about me—that ineffable quality about me that intimidated him, this man who had no reason to be intimidated by anybody. On the other hand, my hesitation drew from the last vestiges of my conscience—the part that didn’t want to hurt this person. But I had become a woman with a choice before her:
Choice number one: Forget the arrangement. Stay here in Amsterdam alone, desperate, and on the cusp of losing everything that she had clawed through hell and high water to get. A college education. A future for her and her brother—a better future for him than she ever thought imaginable.
Choice number two: Sleep with this overwhelmingly wonderful man, take the money, and accept that she’d never see him again regardless of what decision she made. Enjoy the short-lived fairytale and accept it for what it always would have been: fleeting fantasy.