Chapter 12

“I let them argue.” I was hungry in the way you get from running on library air since ten, and the three hundred from that morning’s game had already landed, so I bought the sandwich I actually wanted instead of the one on sale.

I went down the line with a tray and took my time about it. The good bread, the chicken, and a coffee I did not need but wanted. Rachel was still mid-argument behind me, so I added a cookie and told myself it was for her.

It was not for her.

"You're not even listening," Rachel said, doubling back for me. She knocked her shoulder into mine. "Come or don't come. But if you don't come, I'm describing him to you at breakfast for a week. In detail. With the shoulders."

"If nothing comes up, I'll be there," I said. It is as close to yes as I ever get.

She nodded, entirely unbothered. She has known me long enough to translate. She said that if I couldn't make it, she and Chloe would film the whole thing in pieces and send it over, and I could watch him be beautiful at two in the morning like a normal person.

"No selling required," I said. "I'm already a fan."

Rachel stopped walking. "Excuse me?"

"Have been for a while."

"Since when? Since when, Eve."

I blinked at her, then went to get a drink. My throat had been doing something unnatural all morning and wanted water more than it wanted to explain itself.

The voice I use for the games is not my voice. It is low and level and faintly amused, built in a mirror over two years. It exists so that forty strangers on the internet will stop talking when I ask them to stop talking.

Three hundred dollars of that, hours of it, with a headset pressing my hair flat. By Sunday my throat feels like paper. I drank half the bottle standing at the fountain and went back to the table, and Rachel walked me through his entire filmography whether or not I asked, until I had to leave for class.

The afternoon lecture was ninety minutes on rhetoric. I took eleven pages of notes and understood maybe six of them. At four I went back to the library and gave Diane's project two more hours on half a roll I found at the bottom of my bag.

By six it had stopped being a document and started being an argument. Here is the talent. Here is why. Here is what happens in week one. Here is the small failure you will want to blame me for in week three, and the reason it will not be my fault.

I checked the file twice. I sent it at ten past seven with one line above the attachment, offering to walk her through it any way she liked.

Outside, the city had gone soft and orange. I stood on the library steps with my bag on my shoulder and opened the chat with Silas before I decided to.

Evening. How's Singapore?

The message sat there. I walked home and it sat there. I came in, dropped my bag on the bed, filled a glass from the tap, and it was still sitting there with a single grey mark beside it, which meant his phone was asleep or he was.

Saturday morning in Singapore. Seven o'clock there. He had spent Friday night somewhere without me and had not thought to say so.

That was a small, ugly fact, and it sat in my chest longer than I wanted to admit. This morning he had asked to hear my voice. He had asked twice, the way he does, like a man who would rather threaten than request.

Then he heard it and went quiet, and I had spent an hour deciding what the quiet meant.

I am good at this. Every client I ever had told me so. But clients do not require seduction. The host does not coax, or sweeten a sentence, or lean into the end of a word to be liked.

With him I had put the softness in on purpose. The small yielding note. It had worked on richer men than him and it had not worked on him at all, and the idea that he heard exactly what it was and was bored by it made me feel fifteen years old.

Then the phone buzzed in my hand. Just saw this.

I flipped onto my back and grinned at the ceiling like an idiot. Are you explaining yourself, because that's what that was. Then, fast, before he could retreat: Admit it. You've already fallen for me.

No, he wrote. Once. Plainly. Nothing after it.

I poked the underside of the bunk with one socked foot. A man who answers within a minute of waking is not unmoved, whatever he types.

Difficult was not impossible. It was going to take longer than I had planned, and planning was the only thing I had that reliably worked.

I'm going to wash up, I sent. Have a good day over there. Don't skip breakfast.

I showered and got into bed. The other three were still up, Rachel narrating the Cade situation to the ceiling fan, Chloe making her swear again. I was almost asleep when I opened Facebook one more time.

Felix had added me this morning, after the game. It was his idea — he made the case mid-session, something about cutting out the platform fee and paying me more directly, and I had said yes before I finished thinking it through.

I still wasn't sure that had been smart.

Eve? Is this you? Are you still in school?

Yes. NYU.

Small world, I'm in New York too. Then, a second later: well. Technically I'm abroad right now. But home is home. You live in the city?

Friendly is how you end up with a man who thinks three hundred dollars bought him part of your week.

I have to finish something, I typed. Talk later.

Sure. Go do your thing.