Augustine had been watching her quietly, almost without moving. When she finished talking, his thick, black eyelashes rose as his eyes widened slightly, and his lips parted. He was perfectly still for a moment, and then he shook his head just one time as he pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and thumbed the bills inside, counting.
Dree wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do at that point, so she didn’t do anything.Okay, whatever.
He removed a thick sheaf of bills from his wallet and placed them on the dresser beside where he was standing. Quite a lot of the currency seemed to be green, which meant they were one-hundred-euro notes, but at least two of them were yellow two-hundred-euro notes.
Weird.“What are you—”
He said, “I apologize. I didn’t understand the situation last night. That should cover my tab, right?”
Dree squinted at him. She had missed something. “Your—your tab?”
Augustine resumed tearing a pastry apart and slathering it with butter and jam. “For last night. I apologize for leaving without settling the bill, but all’s well that ends well.”
“Wait, thebill?”He thought—oh, there was nowayhe thought she was a— “Are youkiddingme?”
He thumbed through his wallet again and added another green euro note to the stack. “Is that enough? Extra charge for the monster, huh? It’s fine. I’ve paid that before.”
Dree yelled at him, “Auggie, I amnotaprostitute!”
He paused and swallowed the bite he was chewing. “I don’t understand.”
“I wasn’t telling youa sob storyto getmoneyout of you. I was being open and honest and vulnerable.” Anger swelled in her throat. “I am not a ‘temporarily inconvenienced millionaire’ who’s asking you for money. I’ve just been poor my whole life, and now I’m poor again. But that doesn’t mean I’m a wh—” She swallowed because she couldn’t quite say the horrible word. “A wh—A lady of the evening!”
“I apologize again,” Augustine said with one eyebrow arched high. “Should I take the money back?”
“Yes!Yes, you should take it back! I’mnota prostitute, and you shouldn’t try to pay me for what we did last night. I wouldnever—I would absolutelynever—”
And she stopped, blinking, and looked at the money lying on top of the dresser.
Augustine hadn’t moved to take it back yet.
When Dree was in nursing school, a lot of her friends had danced on tables a couple of times when they couldn’t quite make it to the end of the month on the pittance from student loans they lived on. They had joked about blowing guys for beer money, but she had thought they hadn’t actually done it.
Now she was less sure.
That was a lot of money up there. When she got back to Phoenix, she wouldn’t have enough money to make rent on the first of next month, and she didn’t have a bed in her bare apartment. She wasn’t sure Francis hadn’t broken her lease to get at her deposit, too. She might have nowhere to live when she got back. Francis had cleaned out all Dree’s bank accounts, even the one she shared with her sister, which was the most important one.
If Dree ended up bashing Francis’s head in with a fireplace poker or a branding iron, that would be why. Stealing money from her sister Mandi and Mandi’s kid was just frickin’ reprehensible.
And Holy Mary, Mother of God,Christmaswas coming. People in her familydependedon her cash Christmas presents to get them through because they’d used their food money to buy presents for their kids and other people. If she didn’t have that—
Her chest knotted.
Dree should take Augustine’s money.
She’d been stupid for protesting it. That cash he’d laid up there without a second thought could go a long way toward food for the next few days and then helping her start a new life.
He asked, “Should I take it back?”
Dree ran one hand up the side of her face, thinking about how much money was sitting over there. It looked like at least six hundred euros, which was somewhere north of seven hundred dollars, American.
She thought about what that money would mean to her sister.
But when Dree got back to Phoenix, she would still have her job. She could figure out some way to get a loan from somewhere, and then she could pick up extra shifts to make sure Mandi had enough money.
It just might be next month.
She finally said, “You should take it back. I’m not a prostitute, and I never meant anything I said that way. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Sex work is work.”
