When I look up from my laptop, I find him watching me as he reclines in his chair. His expression is serious, like we’re about to engage in a legal deliberation.
I swallow hard, reminding myself that somewhere underneath the exterior of this absurdly sexy, big, corporate titan is a sweet guy who once whispered in my ear, You’re so fucking beautiful while I came beneath him. His hand had clutched my breast so tightly that I could feel the pulse in his wrist against my skin as we climaxed together. That was the Davis I knew—not this person. And I liked the Davis I once knew—far more than I ever had the chance to admit to him.
“I never said I was coming,” I reminded him, wishing that my voice could summon and keep the resolve from the pep talk I gave myself this morning.
Davis’s eyebrow shoots up. “Since when are you in the business of turning down ten-thousand dollars?”
“Since I graduated with a bachelor’s degree, spent four years working in finance, and am now getting an MBA at Wharton, which has helped me to secure a highly prestigious internship that pays me very well for the summer,” I rattle off.
To my surprise, Davis releases a small, involuntary smile that he quickly hides by folding over his lips. That smile—is he proud of me? No, that couldn’t be it. He’s turned into such an asshole that he probably enjoys it when people sit around and recite their elitist resumes as if that’s remotely normal behavior.
“So you don’t need my measly ten thousand dollars, I take it,” he clarifies, sounding unfazed as he continues to recline, borderline uninterested. “That’s what I’m hearing.”
“In exchange for my dignity and at the risk of losing this internship? Absolutely not.”
Davis rises from his desk. He walks over to a set of mahogany bookcases that line the wall behind me, pulls a book off of it, and returns to his chair. He leaves the book face down on the top of his desk.
“One hundred fifteen thousand, four hundred sixty-four dollars,” he finally says, breaking the brief silence that has set in between us.
“What’s that?”
He pretends to flick lint off of his suit jacket before he casually says, “That’s the estimated cost of attendance for a year at Wharton. I looked it up last week.”
“And your point?”
“How are you paying for it?”
I frown, unsure where he’s going with this line of questioning. It’s surely the strangest seduction I’ve ever seen in my life. “How is my financial planning any of your business?”
“It’s not,” he admits, now loosening his tie as he speaks. “But let’s have some fun and do some estimating. How does that sound?”
“Not fun at all.”
Davis ignores me and holds up his hand with his thumb extended. “Undergrad student loans. I’ll guess and say you have at least thirty thousand dollars to go. How does that sound?”
I don’t justify it with a response—mostly because it’s actually closer to forty thousand.
He raises his index finger. “Now, you worked in finance before business school, which is good, but you didn’t have an MBA and you weren’t working in New York, so I can’t imagine anything earth-shattering was happening salary-wise.”
“Fuck you.”
“You already have,” he responds so quickly that I almost miss it. He raises another finger. “Plus, I know you’re responsible for your brother…Charlie, right? And he’s early in his college career…maybe a sophomore?”
My skeptical expression answers his question. “Your point?”
Davis wiggles his extended fingers. “You need the money, Olivia,” he states knowingly. “Deny it if you want. I know you don’t mind lying to me.”
I allow my eyes to narrow slightly, but only for a fraction of a second. I hate that he rattles me. I hate that he finds it so easy to make my fists clench. But more frustrating than that fact alone is how I know that this game of cat and mouse delights him more and more by the second.
“Fine. Money is tight, but it’s temporary. Nothing I can’t handle. I hate to break it to you, but you were right. Your ten-thousand-dollar offer is a drop in a bucket. Not life-changing enough for me to put myself through…that.”
“Would you feel the same way about ten thousand a week?” he counters, not missing a beat.
What little satisfaction I garnered from turning Davis down quickly fades. When I make eye contact with him, I quickly realize that he’s serious—again.
“What?” I practically blurt out, my voice breaking in the process.
“Ten thousand a week for the duration of your internship. You fuck me, I fuck you, you play out a few fantasies for me. Simple. Unfortunately, you squandered the first week by blowing me off. But there’s nine weeks to go—that comes to ninety thousand. Enough to cover your second year of Wharton, right?”
“Davis, I’m not a…” I trail off, knowing that I can’t get away with finishing that sentence—not after Amsterdam.
He gives me one of his annoying little grins before he picks up the book on his desk. “Have you read this?”
I look at the cover of the book that he’s holding up: Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern.
“Nope.”
“I’m not surprised. It’s a dense, mathy book written by two old white guys in 1944.”
“Have you read it?”